I love the beach. I’m thankful to live so close to it and at a latitude that affords me the ability to visit the waves almost all year long. Something about where land meets sea that coaxes thoughts out of you. I forget the pressures of everyday life and let the ever changing coastal scenery blot out visions of unpaid bills and home repairs yet undone. This evening was one of those evenings. As the sky and clouds melted into pinkish sunset hues… then crimson, a lot went on in my normally cluttered head.
As the light faded, I watched the surfers who happened to be bobbing on the water . Hoards of tanned, tattoo laden teen and twenty-somethings drop everything for the opportunity to “ride into a barrel.”
One surfer caught my attention in that he looked to be well into his fifties. I admire anyone old enough to receive AARP membership offers who can take on an activity that is typically reserved for the young set. It proves life can be full of activity and fun at just about any age if you happen to be relatively healthy and want it bad enough.
I always thought surfing looked fun, but never felt I was a strong enough swimmer to tackle a sport which requires you to withstand the repeated battering of ocean waves. I’m also sort of tallish and know that a low center of gravity is an asset in such a sport. Truth is, I can make excuses all I want. The bottom line is that my curiosity about surfing faded after some pretty rough spills from a boogie board that resulted in several mouthfuls of sand and shells and a bloody right arm. It was supposed be fun, but the act of removing sharp bits of salty ocean debris from places it didn’t belong tarnished the experience.
As my walk continued, I thought about the activities I did enjoy. Hiking, canoeing, biking, certainly nothing "extreme" that involved me jumping off or out of something, but enough to keep me active and (hopefully) healthy enough to avoid taking handfuls of small odd shaped pills each morning. For now I am in what they call “midlife.” That period firmly wedged between the drunken party-all-night exuberance of youth and the shuffleboard and early-bird specials of old age. It is a period of life with makings for many a crisis. I thought about my generation.. about being a kid in the 70’s, attending college in the 80’s. In many ways it was better than it is now.
My daughter will be turning nine this year. She’s growing up in a strange time. A time of paranoia and technology. Her iPod is everything. It must be no more than 18 inches from her at all times or she starts to have anxiety attacks and requests a Xanax. You can play about a half-million games on it. That’s not enough for her. She’s asking how to ‘jailbreak’ it so she can load third party games onto it. That would make it MUCH cooler. I started thinking about when I was nine…and then to the speeches my parents gave me about when they were nine. You know, those “When I was your age, I walked up hill to school, both ways, with no shoes, in the snow, and when I got home my daddy beat me, and I was thankful for it” speeches?
Oh yes, when I was nine….(I’m sure many of you reading this will chuckle, and understand.)
Video games hadn’t been invented yet. Sometime in the 70’s there was “Pong” and its butt kicking sequel “Breakout.” Back then, it was nothing short of super cool. My best friend had the console you hooked to the TV. Stuff like Pac-Man came years later. It was a circle that ate dots and everyone loved it.
There were no computers….heck calculators were still in their infancy and they weren’t “pocket” calculators either. Some were the size of an iPad and they boggled the mind by adding, subtracting, multiplying AND dividing.
No cable TV. We had a black and white “portable” TV. It was portable in that it didn’t take three people to move it, just two. When we turned it on, it needed to warm up before we could see the picture. To adjust it, we rotated a ring around the channel knob (yes, a knob). If the picture jumped, my sister just whacked it on the side. Sometimes that worked. The picture was often fuzzy, but sometimes we’d fix that by adding a bit of foil to the antenna or standing in a certain position while we touched the foil. Life was tough. Saturday morning cartoons had a moral. Fat Albert and Josie would sing it for us. Yep…life was a real chore.
We played games on a slab of cardboard called a “board.” We had chocolate colored shag carpet in the living room. I would actually lose things in it and our cat could actually hide IN it much like a lion hides in the tall grass of the Serengeti. And (this one is bad) we even had a wooden rake for it. My parents insisted we rake the carpet after being in the living room so the deep pile would all lie in one direction. Our house smelled of sandalwood incense and Santana and Iron Butterfly could always be heard on weekend nights in the family room.
When I was nine, my sister was six and NOT traveling in a car seat by then. If memory serves me correctly, she was about two when she could ride on the bench back seat of our AMC Javelin. I vaguely remember her car seat was a hulking tubular steel monster with a bit of foam on the hand rest that came down over her head like the one that secures you before you ride on a roller coaster. We were able to fight over the invisible line on the back seat of the car while we waited in line to get gas. On that day only odd numbered license plates could fuel up!
Today, a child needs to be about eighty pounds before being released from the embarrassing prison of a car seat. I remember my college sweetheart probably weighed about ninety pounds. Imagine dropping your daughter off at the college dorms for the first time and giving her the car seat in case she joins her friends on a road trip. That’s where we’re headed.
We played with (and occasionally ingested) nails, frogs and mud and we had no antibacterial hand cream to save us from marauding protozoans-gone-wild. I think I was selling fireworks to my friends at age 7. We left home in the morning and came back inside only to eat dinner…all without parental supervision. None of those child snatchers supposedly hiding in the bushes ever nabbed us. Must have been all those street-smarts we had. We rode big metal bikes with no helmets or pads. Heck, most of us didn’t even have brakes and some had no seats! You had to stand up to ride! Nobody seemed to have allergies to peanuts, gluten, dust, water or air. We got whacked with wooden spoons, belts and bare hands when we got out of line and we didn’t feel the need to hit everyone else because of it.
Yup. It was way cooler to be a kid back then. I’d trade all the technology if my daughter could live in the 70’s. The beach is pretty much the same though….
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