“Boredom is an insult to life.”
Today looks like winter. The still branches of the scrub pines are sun lit against the blue sky. Today is cold, 35°. I still have an empty dance card. I’m still in my cozies.
When I was a kid, time in winter was precious. After school, it got dark so early we played our hearts out until the street lights. Dinner was at the same time every night, usually around six, but it always felt later in the dark of the afternoon and early evening.
One Christmas I got the book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors. It had been on my list. I grabbed it, found a corner and started reading. My mother found my reading a bit disconcerting. She warned me if I didn’t take it slowly I’d finish the book. She was right.
I don’t remember bring bored when I was a kid. I always had a book so there was, in my mind, no downtime. Some nights I had homework. Thursday was the big night: spelling test on Friday. I studied by spelling all the words out loud over and over. My favorite homework was reading. That seemed a treat of sorts. Sometimes I had a worksheet to finish, usually an arithmetic worksheet. I finished it before dinner.
When I lived in Ghana, I had no TV or radio. I did have a cassette recorder and tapes. They had been Christmas presents from my parents my first Christmas in Ghana. I played the tapes just about every night. I had cards and a Password game. I had a book of origami folds. I had a Peace Corps book locker and the town had a library. I was never bored. I was never good at origami.
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January 2, 2024 at 4:31 pm
Hi Kat,
Today it also felt like winter here as well. Cloudy skies all day with a low temperature of 31° and a high of 50°.
One of my colleagues and I were discussing how some of these young pilots we are training could get around the sky without GPS, (Global Positioning Satellites). Imagine one of our enemies decides to explode an electromagnetic bomb in space and knock out all the electronics on earth. No GPS, no cable TV, not any instant news, no internet, nothing electronic works or works that’s digital. How would youngsters survive? We old cadgers would have to revert back to writing letters, or sending post cards, talking on an old fashioned telephone, if in fact that still was working. Writing with a pen or pencil would return along with the manual typewriters and carbon copy. I had to explain to my son what the letters, “CC”, means in an email.
Would we be back in a better world? Could your nieces and nephews survive? My kids as well as I would have a hard time living without our digital lifestyle.
January 2, 2024 at 5:25 pm
Hi Bob,
Some experts believe ham radios will still work so there would be communication probably just town to town and on. Printed maps will be of great value and even of greater value will be people who can read the maps, who can plan a trip. At least kids know keyboards and can adapt that to typewriters. The post office will flourish.
I don’t know how well my niece and nephews might adapt. My sisters and I would easily adapt. We lived it, the 50’s. I’d have to hunt down that old set of encyclopedias, the ones with the red binding.
January 2, 2024 at 11:43 pm
Unfortunately, your encyclopedias are all out of date. And, yes we would get along but would we be able to remember how we did it. 🙂
January 3, 2024 at 12:28 am
They were out of date when my mother bought them. Buying a book or two a week takes a while to get the set.