ART       GENEALOGY       LITERATURE       HOME
HISTORY       THE SOUTH       POTLUCK       ABOUT US

In The Olden Days of Atari...

"Oh, the hardships we endured..." That's the familiar refrain that we hear from our parents. Ironically, it goes to follow that that was in the "good old days," so called because it was wonderful growing up back then, when times were simple... My parents, like everyone else's, enjoy this peculiar nostalgia. They walked two miles to school in the snow (What? in the South?) They picked 200 pounds of cotton in a day (You couldn't buy it at the drug store?)

Lately, I've noticed some of my own stories starting to follow that same pattern. "In the olden days," I tell my nieces, "we didn't have cell phones. We had this big old black telephone that you dialed ~ actually dialed." The other day, when I heard a co-worker's childhood story, I had to laugh. It seems the torch has been passed...

"My kids don't know how lucky they are to have Gameboys®," she said. "When I was little, we had this game thing, 'Atari' ~ do you remember? You had to plug it into the TV, and ~ this will sound crazy, but this really is the way I had to play it: I had to get on my gloves and my coat and go in this other room where we had this TV. That room was cold because we didn't heat it, we didn't heat the whole house because it cost too much. And I would sit in there like that, in my coat and gloves and freeze, and play that game all day!"

Yes, without a doubt ~ the torch has been passed...

~ by D.K. Pritchett