Marveling

I sometimes regard these “Golden Years” as a time for marveling. I don’t mean simply marveling at the fact that after all this time, I’m still here to marvel. I mean that sometimes at night when sleep is slow to come, I find myself marveling over all the changes that have occurred during my lifetime.

Transportation? I remember, as a kid, standing on the running board of our family car fastening in place the isinglass curtains because it was threatening rain, or watching my father with the hand crank trying to start the engine. Today I sit in my air conditioned auto with push-button-operated windows, thinking only of the traffic and gasoline prices.

I remember playing ball on the street as a kid when one of the boys stopped, pointed skyward and shouted excitedly, “Airplane! Airplane!” Today, I look up on a crisp fall morning and see the blue sky scarred with contrails crisscrossing in all directions.

Communications? I remember listening on the radio to the Pirates playing in St. Louis and Rosey Rosewell broadcasting the game from his studio in Pittsburgh. In the background, I could hear the clacking of the telegraph as the plays were relayed to him by wire. Today, thanks to television, I go “live” to the World Series, the Super Bowl, or the Olympics. I can picture my grandmother turning the hand crank on the telephone mounted on the kitchen wall. I compare that memory to the teenagers I see in the malls today, each equipped with a cell phone that seemingly puts them in touch with every other teenager in the world.

Medicine? I still have a scar from “a poultice of hot oatmeal” tied round my neck when I was a kid, a treatment for “swollen glands.” As I sit here today with a heart that must resemble Medusa’s head with its profusion of grafts from bypass surgery, I know I wouldn’t be here to be writing this if it weren’t for the miracles of modern medicine.

Photography: I got my first camera when I was six, a Kodak Baby Brownie. I had graduated to a 35 mm camera by high school, my first Single Lens Reflex when I started to work, and on to a Hasselblad. I was unhappy at leaving my darkroom behind when we moved to the retirement community at Sherwood Oaks. True, I now have a digital camera, but what would I do with all the slides and negatives I’d accumulated? Today, beside my computer, sits a flatbed scanner that can do almost everything my darkroom could and do it better. With that “darkroom in a box,” I can make prints from B&W or color negatives, color slides, photographs, whatever.

Word Processing? The first “mechanical” device I used was my sister’s primitive portable typewriter. What I lacked in technique I made up for in powerful strikeovers or paper-destroying erasures. By the time I’d finished college, I’d learned the keyboard, so when I began working after WWII, I was ready to attack my Remington standard with vigor, if not improved accuracy. Although I was hired as a writer-photographer I didn’t get to use a computer, a PC, until I retired. Now I have instant “erasures,” spell check, grammar check, etc.

This brief rundown only scratches the surface of the things I marvel at, but I stop at the mention of computers. I can’t even begin to imagine all the ways in which computers have affected my life. It’s too vast a Pandora’s Box to open when I’m lying there trying to get to sleep.

Jim Mooney is a resident of Sherwood Oaks Retirement Community.