I was taking my son to his Mother’s house today and we were driving along through the Van Wert, Auglaize, Mercer county areas of Ohio. This, for those familiar is mostly just a bunch of fields. No big cities, no littering of fast food signs cluttering the horizon. Nothing but wide open fields, large wooded areas and farm houses. When you pass a car, you wave at them like you are neighbors, essentially you are; you share this world with them. So I am driving along, I have the music on for my son, he loves to sit and listen to me sing, I hope he gets over that when he finds out I am no good but at 6 I am the best singer he knows. In the middle of it all my mind started wandering back, back to when I was his age and a little bit older. Back before cassettes, CD’s, MP3 players. When you had that one radio station playing and the commercials didn’t bother you. Of course there were less of them back then, didn’t need a whole lot of ads to support the stations because it did not cost a small fortune to run them. I had some of his things in one of those plastic bags; you know the kind they put the groceries in nowadays. I tried to remember when those came about; it became popular to ask, “Would you like paper or plastic?” Many places don’t even have that choice anymore, plastic is all they have. But I remember when there was no choice, it was paper. They were great for gathering up all of the trash that could be burned and taking it out to the barrel that held the title of “The Burn Barrel”. The TV was on for an hour or so in the evenings to watch the news and maybe another program. On some nights it was on longer for Dukes of Hazzard, The A-Team or Knight Rider. VCR’s were very uncommon, video rental was unheard of, at least where I was. One of the networks would show a movie on a weekend and you got to stay up and have popcorn and pop. It was a treat. It took a bit of doing, there was no microwave ovens, and no microwave popcorn, you made it on the stove top, or if you were really lucky you had one of those air pop machines. The town I lived in at this time did not have any fast food places, so when you went into the large cities and you saw things like Arby’s and McDonalds you were in awe of them. Getting to stop there and eat was enough to talk about at school for the next week. Most houses had antennas, what was cable? The heat came from wood that was cut over the warm months. We thought nothing of walking 2 miles to our friends house, or biking all over creation, and yes that banana seat was cool. There were no drugs, but there was enough medicine around to get you better. You found out that anything worth doing was worth whatever it took to do it, whether it was a long wait or a hard task. Everything was a reward. Like the heat, the hard work you did in May made for a nice place to warm up in after a hard day building snow forts in January. The wait for the 8 track player to fast forward to the song you wanted was worth it, because it was all you knew, and the radio did not guarantee that you could hear your favorite whenever you wanted. I loved getting my favorite album in record format; it was a whole lot easier to skip songs. I suppose I could go on forever on these things and I probably will some day. The reason I even bring it up is because my son was upset about the 12 seconds he had to wait for something to get loaded on the computer. And I think about him and other children and wish we could just go back. I am still just trying to find that rewind button, not just the one for my own life, but the one for society as a whole. The one that would take us back to patience, understanding, gratitude and contentment. A time when we were not blinded into believing that our homes had to be 2,000+ square feet and filled with every luxury and convenience available to us. Where you did not have to have both parents working 10-12 hour days to be able to cover the expenses of all these things. There are still places like this. Not very many in this country, we have ruined our society. How do we fix it? How do we instill into our children what has been put into us without them having the same experiences and hardships? How can we relate a dead battery in an ipod being a crisis that needs immediate attention?