Thankful---part2

...
Another great convenience that has been a part of my life for some years now is the car, or rather a succession of cars. They are always old, and they always act up in ways befitting their age, but they are cars and they get me from here to there most of the time. We never had a car when I grew up, and I am still the only person in my immediate family to be a car owner. The trip to an uncle's funeral in a town thirty miles away, while wearing my Sunday best and riding on the back of a borrowed, temperamental moped driven by my father, is a memory that's guaranteed to last forever.

I remember the years that brought progress to my home as other people recall the dates of great, world-changing events. 1967-the refrigerator. 1972-the washing machine. A much-needed and long-overdue telephone-1978. How did we manage? We did what people everywhere have been doing since the beginning of time-we made do. Mother shopped almost daily for fresh food in neighborhood stores; leftovers and the few perishables on hand were kept on our hallway stairs where it was always cold, even in the middle of summer. And if some major event necessitated that one of my parents make a phone call, we took a walk to the post office where all four of us squeezed into one of three cubicles equipped with a telephone. A nod from the operator seated behind her desk signaled that we were connected.

Progress finally arrived in the form of a phone booth on our street, but somehow calling other people never really caught on in our family. It always remained a novelty, reserved for transmitting only the direst news. For everything else we had letters and postcards.

Times have changed, perhaps more so for me than for most others of my generation. I grew up at a time and in a place where farmers cut the grass with sickles and turned the resultant hay with wood-tined rakes; where people went to threshing parties and butchered their own pigs in the barnyard; where fields were planted with no-nonsense food like turnips, cabbage and potatoes, and fun for us kids was stealing fruit off other people's trees. It seems like ten lifetimes ago.

So long ago. Today my life is filled with gadgets large and small, and their existence has allowed me to focus on things other than keeping myself fed, bathed and in clean clothes. But always at the back of my mind are the uneasy memories of what it was like without, and I wouldn't dream of taking any of my gadgets for granted.