"Things Our Grandchildren Will Never Know"

This essay was a joy to write, remembering long-ago days, places, and things. It is short – 413 words – so should not tax your patience. 

 

It is fitting to send this essay today, as my wife and I leave later this morning for my 65^th high school reunion in Easthampton, MA – then home to Williston Academy, now the Williston Northampton School.

 

Sydney M. Williams 

 

More Essays from Essex

“Things Our Grandchildren Will Never Know”

June 7, 2024

 

“…one way or another we forge ahead, 

picking up wisdom along the way…”

                                                                                                                Geoffrey Moore (1946-)

                                                                                                                The Infinite Staircase, 2020

 

Whether wisdom is garnered as generations advance over time, I leave to the more learned, people like Geoffrey Moore whose book was worth the $26.95 cost. What I do know is that technological advancements have been remarkable, at least since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. My paternal grandmother, born in November 1875, was 18 when the Duryea brothers introduced the first American-made gasoline-powered car. She was 93 in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin strolled on the moon – an event inconceivable to her as a child.

 

Nevertheless, the past is always present, a whiff of nostalgia for things we once knew – things that our grandchildren will only read about in books or see in museums:

                

                In our homes:                                                                                In our dress:

          Dial telephones                                                                    Galoshes                                   Suspenders                                                                          Fedoras

                                Cloth diapers                                                                         Suspenders        

                                Ice trays                                                                                             

                                Super 8 film                                                                                     

                                Clothes lines                                                                  In Our Cars:    

          TV aerials/rabbit ears                                               Road maps                                            Ash trays                                                                  Hand-cranked windows                                                                                                          Re-treaded tires            

                                                                                                                  Manual gear shifts                                                                                                                             Bench-like front seats 

                In Office Buildings:                                                                                    

                                Elevator attendants                                                                  

                                Typewriters/carbon paper

                                Adding Machines

                                Switchboards                                                                                                

                

Will our children and grandchildren ever make a call from a phone booth, dance to a jukebox, lace up ski boots, play tennis with a wooden racquet, listen to records on a victrola, or fly on a DC-3? Will they ever see one of these ads that were once ubiquitous on country roads?

 

“If you

Don’t know

Whose signs

These are

You can’t have 

Driven very far

Burma Shave”

 

The list is incomplete, as memory fails. I did not, as I could have, include the ice box or wood stove in my parents’ kitchen, or the hand-cranked phone in the hall. Some people keep the past.

 

Most of us – certainly I do – lack the imagination to foresee how the future will unfold. We – or at least I do – talk unintelligibly of artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, but most of us think, as Will Parker sang in Oklahoma, “They’ve gone about as fer as they can go.” Seven stories was tall for a building in 1906 Kansas City. And Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 160 stories, seems about as high as a building ought to be. But aren’t records made to be broken? Creative destruction is all around us, alive and well.