A few weeks ago, a middle school classmate posted an interesting query on Facebook: “Without revealing your actual age, what’s something you remember that, if you told a younger person, they wouldn’t understand?”
One quick reply was, “Video games only worked on channel 3.”
It got me thinking. I mean, almost everything I write in this column involves stuff that people born in the 21st century might not understand initially, because I tell stories about life in my family, including tales from my grandmother, Nana, who was born in the 19th century, and she shared remembrances she had heard as a child from long-lived people, some of whom had been around when Thomas Jefferson was still alive.
Of course, those memories are of stories told to me, and not of things that I, myself, recall. But even some of the common things I remember from my childhood might confuse my granddaughters.
For example:
If you’re the youngest in a large family, you might have taken a bath using the same water in which your sibling just bathed. You may have bathed once a week, even if you felt you didn’t need it.
Your mother sewed or ironed a patch on your jeans if you tore a hole in them.
You left a Christmas gift in the paper tube for the paper carrier. Ditto the mailman.
If you slobbered or sucked too hard on your soda straw, it collapsed.
Your mother saved bacon grease.
You’d walk around for days with pine resin on your hands from when you climbed that big tree on Saturday.
Here in the mountains, some of the most dramatic landscapes were covered with household trash, discarded appliances, and old cars.
Ambulances were just fancy painted station wagons.
You might pick up the phone to interrupt someone else’s conversation, if you had a party line.
You removed the string before cooking green beans.
Lots of homes had a ‘root cellar.’
People would stop at roadside springs in the mountains to collect a bottle or two of fresh water to take home to savor.
Some of your classmates may have attended churches that outlawed dancing.
Bathtubs had feet.
Some people ate dirt as a dietary supplement.
You had a metal barrel outside in which you burned your household trash. (Collecting and burning the trash was my assigned job each Saturday.)
You had to dig ditches across the driveway to keep the gravel from washing away. (Me? I would forget to do this when it was dry, so I was out in the rainstorm doing it. I still enjoy standing out in the rain.)
The most likely place some saw rattlesnakes was during the Sunday sermon.
You may have had siblings or uncles who trapped animals for food or pelts.
Somebody in the extended family had a tractor, and that person turned and tilled everyone’s garden in springtime. Once every few years he would also scrape the driveway.
Every family had a pry bar.
Most every daddy in the neighborhood was a veteran of The War.
People ate things like pigs knuckles or pigs brains. I am told my grandfather favored a well-cooked possum.
People hunted squirrels for meat. (Remember that recipe in the last edition?)
Most rooms in a house had one light bulb. Many rooms had just one electrical outlet.
Closets were tiny, but chifforobes were large.
If you moved, you borrowed your cousin’s farm truck to haul your belongings.
We all owned things made of paper mache.
Someone in the family mowed the cemetery.
You used a scythe or swing blade to cut down weeds.
You’d run the mower on gas you had siphoned from the car.
People you considered ancient and wrinkled were the age then, that you are now.
—Jonathan Austin