Those Good Old Days

It's strange to think that when I have kids there will be things from my childhood-even my young adulthood-that will be completely phased out of our society. In my lifetime, our family has gone from having a record player and a cassette player for our chief sources of music to each one of us having iPods holding the contents of our entire record/cassette collection and much, much more. I actually heard myself saying to a young girl at the library that I work at over the summer: (we were listening to a book-on-CD, and she was complaining how long it took to jump through the CD to find the place we left off) and I said "I remember when you had to fast forward and rewind cassette tapes, that took forever.”

Then I laughed to myself…I sounded just like my mom telling us about 8-track tapes. The difference? My mom and I are 30 years apart. That girl (Jackson, is her name) and I are 11 years apart. That’s a pretty mind-blowing acceleration in the advancing in everyday technology.

I got to thinking about that when I was searching my memory for the first interaction with technology…because the first thing that came to mind was this: I remember when a little cluster of green, brown and peach colored pixels (with two black dots for eyes and a red dot for a mouth) on the screen kept me and my family occupied for hours.

I’m talking, of course, about Nintendo’s “Legend of Zelda” the first installment of a series of games that has spanned over twenty years and Nintendo game systems. Now, I’m not a serious gamer by any means…an occasional game-binger is a more appropriate title…I get in moods, usually over the summer, where I’ll play through games in a week or two. But it isn’t a family affair like it was when I was little.

In fact, I didn’t really play very much when I was that young, but I remember sitting in the living room of my aunt and uncle’s house (probably late 1991), with the two of them and my mom and dad all trying to get through the dungeons…and, as any Zelda follower will tell you, the original NES game is still the hardest one.

It was a family affair, not regulated merely to the ‘kids’ or the ‘geeks’ and it wasn’t considered wasting a night playing video games or sitting on the couch getting fat, either. It was a toy, meant to be played with when you were done with work, or on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

And it was challenging. It seems completely alien to us to think of not having an internet access point within a couple of feet wherever we go, but there was no looking up of game maps online, and no cheats to be found in the 8-bit game cartridge. So, my uncle was the cartographer, who drew each dungeon map out in a little notepad (for the next time he played through the game) and made notes on hidden passages, heart containers, etc.

Talking about the good old days…it’s something I find myself doing more and more with the kids I see everyday at work. It’s something I think every kid promises themselves they won’t ever do…but I’m realizing more and more that when our parents did it to us, they weren’t actually trying to annoy us or bore us to tears talking about Five and Dime stores and typewriters, they were trying to keep their memory of those things alive, both in themselves and in their children.