FLASHBACK 1965-1981

"scooby dooby doo, where are you..."
i had the most amazing toys growing up. bicycles, skateboards, a mrs beasley doll, barbies, jump ropes, and hula hoops. all things designed to make me use my imagination or get outside. i rarely remember being inside, maybe if it was raining. jumping on bicycles and riding to the marina to see the great white sharks fishermen were bringing in. jumping rope down fisher drive or attempting, unsuccessfully, to double dutch on the playground. hop scotch, four square, tetherball. as kids, queenie and i were constantly moving. playing 45's on the record player and jumping up and down on the bed, singing at the top of our lungs, on a rainy day. we got in one fight, that i remember, and i'm fairly certain it was over who was gonna be ken when we played with the barbies. yuck! nobody wants to be ken. actually, i just made that up because,  i remember the fight, i just have no idea what it was about.
before we had barbies and record players, my grandma had the coolest toy ever....a stereoscope (the original viewmaster...remember those?). i remember her sitting with me and going thru all the pictures. she was amazing at making up stories to go along with each pic, something she also did with my daddy, when he was young. i have that very stereoscope to this day. one day i will get to go thru the pictures with my grandchildren...even before she had that stereoscope, her mother had a toy all little girls love. a doll. my great-grandma had scarlet fever as a young girl. she would look out her window and see this porcelain doll in the store window across the street. it had no clothes or hair. her sisters bought her the doll. they made her clothes. one of her sisters provided a lock of her own hair. i have that doll to this day. i have to hide her when people come over. she scares them. 
as a teenager, i was never home. before i could drive, i was walking all over lebanon. clear across town to hang out with my joyce court girls. if we were at home, we were watching music videos on mtv. jumping on the bed and singing at the top of our lungs. we had to walk over to the tv to change the channel. if we were lucky, the screen was 19 inches. 
my first video game, pong, was a ball of light that blipped between two bars. it was AWESOME...for about 5 minutes. 

FLASH FORWARD today
so every morning, i see jamie off with a kiss. i grab a cup of coffee. i turn on our big screen hdtv. i turn on my macbook. i check my iphone. i check facebook, twitter, and pinterest. maybe i play a game of scrabble. maybe i play a game of family feud (queenie, tbird, and i really need to go on the show. we are an amazing team. it doesn't matter who the other two teammates are, they won't contribute to our greatness). if i wanted, i could turn on the ps3 and kill some zombies (you need all the practice you can get to prepare for the zombie apocalypse). i turn on mtv. there are no music videos. i turn on the news (zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz)...
i quickly realize my grandchildren will never know a world without technology. they will probably have a robot that rides their bike for them. or jumps rope. or hula hoops. they will look at a music video kind of the way i look at silent movies: with a strange fascination. 45s on a record player? "what is this ancient disc?" they will say. shoot....does anyone even by cd's anymore? and saturday morning cartoons!!! DO NOT even get me started. my boys think they know cartoons (and in all fairness, nickelodeon used to have some ama~za~ing cartoons~ren and stimpy, anyone?), but even they didn't know the joy of schoolhouse rock between episodes of scooby doo, jabberjaws, and josie and the pussycats. this makes me sad.