Dept. of Me, Me, Me!

[kaffy_r]

I've Been Thinking

I am old enough* that seeing an airplane go overhead was cause to run out of the house and look to the skies when I was growing up.
I am old enough that the first telephone number I remember was 884. 
I am old enough that I remember the excitement when they put a transmitter up that allowed us to get our second television station. In black and white.
I am old enough that I learned to type on a 1930s-era Remington.
I am old enough to remember bristol board, manila paper, paper with the wood chips still in it, and school tests printed in purple aniline dye by a spirit duplicator** 
I am old enough that my first comic book cost 8 cents. It went up to 12 cents when I was in fourth or fifth grade. 
I am old enough to remember Boer War veterans coming to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day.***
I am old enough to have listened to the funeral of John F. Kennedy piped through my school classroom****
I am old enough to have sent a telegram unselfconsciously. 


I am still young enough to relish all those things.


* .. and lived as a child in a rural enough area ... but it was not in a wilderness.
** or Ditto machine.
***  Hey, I was very young, and the two of them were very old. Very old. 
**** And I was in Canada. 

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

I still got a lot of Ditto handouts in high school (and this was in the late 1990s; I guess we had Xeroxes, too, but not enough of them to phase out the Ditto machines, and the schools were too broke to buy all new equipment). For a similar reason, I learned to type on a mechanical typerwriter (in middle school in the mid-90s), although I think they got rid of them in favor of a computer lab shortly thereafter. (I still hit the keys with a lot more force than computer keyboards require because of those old things :P)

[kaffy_r]

(I still hit the keys with a lot more force than computer keyboards require because of those old things :P)

Oh my goodness, yes! I still have that habit! It was hard for me to take unobtrusive notes when I was doing interviews over the phone and typing, because folks on the other end of the phone always knew I was typing. My Best Beloved says that I'm a little less noisy now, but even listening to my fingers on the laptop as I type this tells me I still have that old "manual typewriter" habit. Heh.