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“Just Thinking"
Just the other day, I was in my favorite place, Bill’s Ace Hardware. I was standing in line and struck up a conversation with another customer, he looked about my age, maybe a few years older. Behind the counter were a couple of young cashiers, probably college-aged, chatting and laughing as they rang people up. The man turned to me and said, when did these kids start looking so young?
We both laughed, but the comment stuck with me.
A few days later, I was having lunch with some clients, also around my age. They live in Austin but were in the Bay Area visiting family and taking care of some business. Our conversation bounced all over the place, the housing market, homelessness, the economy, carefully steering clear of politics but circling around how much the country has changed over our lifetimes.
The gentleman told me he’d grown up in Houston, which he described as a mix between a small town and a big city. He remembered when the main road into town was a two-lane highway, now it is a five-lane super freeway. He told me that while in his thirties, he found himself sitting in gridlocked traffic at two o’clock in the morning and knew that Houston was getting to big, and it was time to get out of there. He relocated to Austin, which was a small city at that time, but has followed the same pattern of growth in the following years.
We traded stories about our youth, laughing at the freedoms that we had and what a simpler time it was. We agreed that it really was a special era to grow up in and that we wouldn’t want to be kids today.
These days kids seem to have a much shorter leash, encumbered by endless stimulation from on-demand screens, and a world overflowing with labels, warnings, and rules. There’s uncertainty in everything, from identity to safety to the simple act of saying the wrong thing.
I know, I know, here we go again, “back in my day,” a couple of old men telling stories about the way things used to be. But honestly, it got me thinking about all the things we lived through as kids, the bumps, the scrapes, the bruises and the close calls and how, as the saying goes, what didn’t kill us sure did make us stronger.
We learned patience at an early age, no internet, no cell phone, no microwave, no recordings, if you missed your show on TV, you waited a week to watch it again. We also learned patience and creativity through boredom, go outside and play, what now, play what, with who, figure it out. Knock, knock, know, hello Mrs. Brady can Greg come out and play? Greg go outside and play with Chuck, cool, what do you want to do, I don’t know, what do you want to do?
No helmets, no knee pads, no seat belts, riding in the back of trucks, steel sides and monkey bars and that big spinney thing that would either make you nauseous or hurl you into the wood chips. Drinking water from a hose, doing jumps on banana seat bikes with no shocks, 10 second rule, no sunscreen, no problem, use some baby oil, secondhand smoke, playing with fireworks, home made roller coasters, no brakes, no problem. Riding bikes miles away from home without phones or GPS and being expected back by dark. Taking the bus downtown just to hang out, keep a dime in your pocket incase you need to phone home.
It was a special time to grow up, before cell phones, before video games, before bike helmets, life was simple, unfiltered, and full of adventure, lucky that we survived.
Have a great Weekend.
Let me know what you think.
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