I am a Living Time Machine

by TerryWalstrom 47 Replies latest jw friends

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  Tallon

  
  
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  Luo bou to

  We lived on the main road in a suberb about 5 miles to the city centre front and back door were never locked never try doing that today
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  compound complex

  I sure do miss phone booths. It just isn't the same with a cell phone.

  Clark Kent
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  TD

  I'm not 70, but I remember the Moon landing. We all watched at the home of a neighbor, who had a new color television (Wow!)

  Thanks for the walk down memory lane, Terry. That was a very different time and it's surprisingly hard to explain today.
  

  On the bright side, the world seems smaller today then it did as an adolescent in the 60's.
  

  It is easier to learn a foreign language today than it has ever been. Apps for your phone, easy access to foreign language broadcasts, and enterprising young people, who offer free lessons to get you started, and then for a modest fee, will continue to teach you.

  I have friends in Britain, Germany and even Bulgaria I would never have met in the world I grew up in. Cactus is a popular hobby in Europe (Don't ask me why) and I send them gift boxes of seedlings and hard-to-find hybrids. My German friends visit every August and we have a ball.

  I go through family albums and scrapbooks and look at relatives from previous generations who were old, bent-over and used up way before their time. They led hard lives and the idea of taking care of themselves via diet and exercise would have been regarded as frivolous at best. Real men were too tough to care and inevitably paid the price for their bravado. I'm wearing the same pant size I wore in high school and feel guilty if I don't get to run at least four miles in the morning.

  The 50's and 60's were a fertile environment for JW's and kindred groups. Fear, isolation and provincialism are to toxic faiths what air, water and sunlight are to plants. One of the satisfactions of growing older is seeing that slowly change.
  

  I'm not trying to be a contrarian here. (Sorry if that's how it sounds.) I guess what I'm trying to say is age a state of mind.

  Prost!
  
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  MissFit

  I enjoyed the trip! I am a little behind you as I was born in the 60's, but I can relate.

  I was a free-range child: we left the house and did not report back until supper time or dark, which ever came first.

  I still remember my sisters and I riding our bikes to the beach, (at least a 30 minute bike ride)and staying all day without my mom checking on us.

  I look back and shake my head. I was 13, my sisters were 10 & 11. But boy did we have a blast!
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  TerryWalstrom

  I do wonder...

  What if an electromagnetic pulse fried all the technology everyone relies upon?
  
  Books are on paper; so are letters (which hardly a soul uses to notate or message with) and documents.
  
  Would civilization panic? Sure!
  Would a 70-year-old man have a built-in advantage?
  Hmmm...maybe subconsciously.
  Just maybe...
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  BluesBrother

  Count me in on your reminiscing Terry . We have lived through great times and shared our time space with such characters and artists as Churchill, Einstein, JFK, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, The Beatles and more recently Tim Berners Lee - World changers in their own way.

  When we were young horses pulling trader's carts were a common site, only wealthy families owned a car (around my way anyway)

  Some things are much better, health care and living standards .. but we have lost a lot. I am glad to have lived when I did rather than be born today
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  HappyDad

  Terry, that was great! I will turn 70 in 5 days and I identify with this so much.
  
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  TerryWalstrom

  Hardly a day passes wherein I overhear a comment from a stray conversation within earshot in which the speaker is clueless about anything which existed before their date of birth.
  An age of technology and information proliferation has not made younger folks smarter or better informed, in my experience. It has made them smug.
  Their own narrow, short lifetime is the be-all and end-all of significance.
  
  I was spoiled by overlapping generations of great-grandmother, grandmother, mother; each with a grasp of what came before them. Thank goodness they spoke about it and gave me a sense of my place in time and space!
  
  
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  John_Mann

  Idk if you are a time machine or a time capsule. :)