World Book Encyclopedia, The Merriam Webster Dictionary and The Thesaurus– versus Google, Kindle, Amazon Prime, Tik tok, Facebook, Instagram, and a myriad of search engines plus. Our days of licking our finger to turn the pages are virtually over. Although who still loves a hard cover over a battery operated read? Can you easily bring to mind memories of brown paper bags with pencil calculated totals of grocery store purchases? Anyone else struggle thru long division or angles and intersecting lines geometrically? How about looking up Ticonderoga and cutting out pictures from National Geographic Magazine for a cut and paste project on Africa? Oh, and who doesn’t remember carrying that erstwhile science project to school hoping it wouldn’t spill or rip. 

What happened to Ed Sullivan on Sunday night, Tom and Jerry Saturday mornings and yes the guilty pleasure of Luke and Laura’s General Hospital Wedding? Some days going at a slower pace with the absence of having to re-boot anything is high up on our “only if” list.

We lost internet Wi-fi connection over the week-end. We held our breath, unplugged and counted to a 60 second re-plug. When we step back and chronicle the speed at which life has reinvented communication it is mind boggling. Ironically we miss the days of waiting on line to buy tickets to a Grateful Dead Concert. The palpable, heart beating energy waiting to get good seats can’t be replaced by choose your seats on Ticketmaster on-line. When we look back our memory of Gail or Susan taking chewed bubble gum off of the bottom of their new pair of Keds is priceless. Of course we held their place in line, we still do, hashtag Sigh. We lovingly miss the days of languid walks home from school, stopping for a milkshake at Dairy Queen and running into our house to call our friends we just left. Euphoric recall sets in as we exhume memories of the smells of dinner, sharpening our pencils to do homework and making certain our favorite madras blouse was ironed to wear the next day because they were taking class pictures. “Can it be that it was all so simple then, or has time re-written every line?” Hit it Barbra with an A. So just for today, perhaps pay less attention to the frequency of sound with every e-mail or text coming in and explore some hand written behaviors. As we look forward to watching the Grammy’s tonight let’s slow down, take a Cher moment and “turn back time, find a way.”