Old Age......................

How do people feel about age and getting old. I find it fascinating. Seeing my kids get old as though from a distance. Then I look in the mirror and see the older version of me. I wonder where the years have gone. Childhood once seemed to last forever, you so wanted to grow up by the time you reached 10 and knew there was more out there. Our parents seemed old but looking back they were only in their 20s or 30s and for me thinking the war was ancient history, where to them it took their youth. Ten years is nothing. So me at 10 thinking it was before my lifetime meant it was like 1066 and the Norman invasion, just as remote and just as relevant.

I remember clearly telling my Dad to forget the dang war, it was all "before the war this, or before the war that............" They marked time by that dang war. How naive I was, of course they did, it was the major thing in their lives. When I think back my generation of post war babies saw so much change. I thought my parents generation did but really no, not as much as mine has. In my life remembering my Uncle Ray's first car and it being one that you cranked the engine from outside before driving it..........and the springs could not have been great if he had to wear a crash helmet haha.


My granddad leaning on the gate of 785 Dunstable Rd and taking car numbers. Maybe 3 or 4 an hour in those days. I would sit on the wall with him and just sit, nothing happening there..............
I left school just after my 15th birthday and worked at AC Delco, key punching. Punch cards for the computer all done by hand. I have talked about this before. The huge jump in computer science and technology during the passing years since then.

The air transport. Planes have gone from props started much like Rays car, to the war time planes like the Spitfire to the now abandoned supersonic jets and space travel. All within a lifetime.
I was talking to Liz yesterday via our computers, my laptop and her IPad. We remember when I first came to the States and we would have to book a call to England and wait for the operator to connect us. There was a huge cable that went under the sea. When the weather was bad it crackled and one could imagine the cable swaying on the ocean floor. When one person spoke the other had to wait until they were done before a reply as there was a delay as you often saw with foreign correspondents on TV. Now its all bounced off a satellite, now I can sit in my living room and talk face to face with Liz in England.
We have phones that we can do just about as much on them as the main frame of the old computers could do, all within the palm of my hand. Isn't technology great? we watch our movies on TV instead of at the theater although we can still do that if you can afford to do it.

When we first came to Michigan we got my first phone and it was on a "party line". That meant that our number was shared with two or more other house holds. That was a pain you never knew who was listening. My Parents did not ever have a phone until I left England so when I wanted to use one we would walk down to the village to do that.

When I lived in the village we would shop for groceries every day, we did not have a fridge so the milk was delivered daily, as was bread. The shops closed 1/2 day Thursday so they would open Saturday mornings now that women went outside the home to work. Everything shut on Sundays. Fridays were the day the ladies would give their lists for pick up or delivery on Saturday for the weekend. I loved helping mum do that when she worked at a grocery store. I would go after school and help sometimes.

Edna and I were talking the other day. Why did we get down on hands and knees and scrub the floors? Often they were concrete in the kitchen, at least our houses on Bidwell Hill were in the first days there. Ladies also scrubbed the front step. WHY? Did no one have a mop? I actually do not think they did, the only ones I recall were industrial.

Mum's house eventually got red Marley tile and that was polished with a red wax. Rub on, rub off. Elbow grease. The front step got a coat of red on it too. When Gerry and I were first married and lived in Bedford there was an Italian lady next door. Didn't speak English so we would just smile. She washing the front path to the road and me scrubbing my steps. Why? Why? Why? ..........it was not like we needed stuff to do. All my laundry was done in the bath tub upstairs. Backbreaking when pregnant. Especially as it had to be then taken downstairs to go outside and hang on the line to dry.

We had a coal fire in the front room and that came in very handy the first winter when first the gas company and then the electric company went on strike. I learned to cook on the coal fire. Nothing like toast done over the fire. Or a baked potato cooked in the ashes, soup cooked over the flame.

When I was still at home my Dad had a work shed. He would mend his own shoes, darn his own socks and I learned how to darn as well. We have become a throw away society now, nothing is mended it is trashed. We are wasteful now and polluters we see the Oceans floating with plastic garbage and the damage to the sea life. We have cloned and messed with our foods and now nothing is real or good anymore. We don't want blemished fruit and so things are sprayed with chemicals and the earth is poisoned. The natural minerals that we need to exist are depleted or dead from the poisons we replace them with, so we take pills.

Pills to combat what the food does to our bodies and what we ourselves have done. Because of the technology we sit in front of screens and ooh and ah over the beautiful things we see. There was a time when we would walk freely over the hills, fields and woodlands and see those things up close as well as get the exercise our bodies crave. Now we get fat and sick and our food does not nourish us any more. We have given up our freedom and replaced it with what?
We used to walk down to the shops every day and our kids got "fresh air". We would either bung them up the garden to get a breath of fresh air or leave them outside the shop as we did our errands.

Yes we can travel the world now by plane, or train or car and get to fabulous places a lot easier than ever before but............there is still a huge gap between the rich and the poor. Only a choice few can make to any extent, but it is at least something we can do if we have the means. People work more hours, women have taken over the jobs and yet still do not get paid as much as most men. They forget that although at one time men were considered the bread winner that is no longer so. Unfortunately I think. I do believe that family life is the less because the women work, but once the war was over and the men came home, the women did not want to give the freedom up again. They saw that there was so much more for them to be and do. Women's Liberation. A double edged sword.
The morals and the ability to have it all, and yet still have a family, that has not yet quite been reconciled as is seen in the troubled children in the world today.

I remember the first smallpox vaccines, most people of my generation have a round dimpled scar on the top of their arms. I don't mine was done by Dr Miller and I will never forget it. He had a green door to his surgery in the village that I became quite well acquainted with. I held on to the door nob as though my life depended on it. He broke a test tube, scrapped the skin off my arm and blew in the vaccine, scrapped it again to make it sink in I guess and I was now upon my knees still holding the door nob and he holding my by my arm. The good thing though was Polio was not yet a shot but some crap on a sugar cube that I did not mind one bit. We all knew about Polio and there were a couple of unfortunate children in the village. We knew not to go near stagnant water only moving streams and we certainly did not avoid those or the Blue Waters or chalk pits.

Electricity came to the village and the gas lights were replaced I was about 4 years old at a guess, old enough to remember but not old enough to realize the implication. Also when the telegraph poles were replaced by telephone poles and I would call them telegraph poles long after that was a thing of the past.
I am sure if I had time I could remember many more things but for now that's it folks that's all I got
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