Spent time with my family yesterday, talking with my aunt about what it was like to live in Charlestown back in the day. The stories she told were so amazing in that the world she described was so much different than today. Going down to the cellar to get coal or wood to heat the house or cook with; going outside to an outdoor potty, living with city rats closer than anyone would like or tolerate today. My paternal grandfather had a stroke and lived out his days in a VA hospital, leaving my aunt's mom to care for all of their kids. My dad's mom had died when he was five, and the children from that family were in the fold, too. My aunt remembers being told to go get her father from the local pub around the corner at suppertime. She recalled standing outside the big, heavy door with her little brother and waiting for it to open so she could call in "Is Bill Ropple in there?" There was a pool hall above the pub, and she'd climb the stairs and stick her head in and call out "Billy Ropple, it's time for supper!" and a lanky teenage kid would wrap up his game and come home for dinner. Old fashioned messaging without cell phones. My dad used to tell stories of characters in Charlestown such as a piano player named "No-nose McGinty" and various street cops that walked the beat.
A very organic, simple life where electronics didn't separate people. People experienced time and space without having to take a photo of it in order to give it meaning. You know you are getting old when the time you grew up seems like a different country -- I think of pay phones, shared home phones, old 45's and 8 track tapes, bright red shag carpet squares, rabbit ears, earth shoes, recycling commercials, school projects about environmental causes, lots of cigarette smoke, card catalogs, and STP stickers appearing on everything (free from the gas station.) Lite Brite was technically innovative. Beatles on the radio all.the.time. Yellow ochre, olive green, sunny yellow, and rust colored things. Rainbows and smiley faces. Having nothing to do on a Saturday except walk to the library for an armful of books, and then spend the afternoon reading in my extremely hot, non-air conditioned bedroom (which I still live in, but now MUST have an a/c in there to survive.)
Thinking of city life in the 30's and 40's, my auntie's memories are even more remote and exotic than my own. I wonder if the children of today will have any nostalgic memories of experiencing their worlds through
their senses -- touching things, building things, feeling things, doing things? Or will they remember hours upon hours of Instagram photos, Internet trawling, and game playing? Will those illusions, images and experiences, carry forward? Will it seem like an electronic blur to them? Will they always be spectators of the real world instead of participants? I have very rich memories of growing up in the 70's, with unstructured playing in my yard and discovering things -- a mouse in the shrubbery, an old fort in the swamp behind my house, bike riding (without a helmet), finding berry bushes near the train tracks. Making things from nothing because it was something to do. Interacting physically with the world because it was there and unknown, and there were no devices to consume our time and energy.
Most of our kids don't have much of that anymore. Experiences are structured and controlled by parents a lot of the time out of a need for safety. Team sports are great for kids to get them moving around and interacting, but again there are lots of well established rules. What if kids had to go outside and make up their own games? Find things to do on a hot summer day? Go make something? Leave their phone inside and just go? I think we'd have a much more creative work force in future generations.
Ok, I'll log off now and try to get some physical artwork done today as well as get to neglected domestic tasks. Adults are not immune to the seduction of the illusionary, digital swamp. We get stuck, too.
What will you make today?