I’ve got what?

I like rom coms, the older the better. Put me in front of The African Queen and I practically stop breathing. So it’s no surprise that I was watching the movie “You’ve Got Mail” the other day.

But what did surprise me with “You’ve Got Mail” was how old stuff seemed.  Not the story or the dialogue or even the clothes.  But the technology seemed ancient.  There was that old AOL dial-tone sound I’d forgotten all about.  People were talking about waiting (waiting???!!!) to be connected— And chat rooms! Who even remembers online chat rooms? And suddenly it struck me: in a few years we’ll be talking to a new generation of children who will need to be told not only that a record was something like a CD only bigger and that books used to be made of paper, but that, in the old days your phone, which you had to leave at home, didn’t connect you to the internet and wasn’t also a radio and a dozen other things.

Thomas Wolfe (the older one, not the New Journalism guy) wrote a novel with the title You Can’t Go Home Again.  When I was in my 20’s, I used to believe he was right about that because you outgrew home.  Now I still think he’s right, but for a different reason. I now believe you can’t go home again because it isn’t there anymore.  Home isn’t a place, it’s a place at a particular time with particular people. And over a certain period of time, 5, 10, 20 years, all of that is transformed. And it keeps happening faster.  Or at least that’s what it feels like for me.

Think about it. And try to imagine what someone who’s a child today will be saying about the “old days” to their own kids in 15 or 20 years. I think they’ll be saying something like this: “When I was a young girl life was a lot harder.  People even had to drive their cars themselves.  That’s right, believe it or not, cars weren’t driverless. No, you couldn’t nap and drive, not even for a few minutes. And that’s not all. To send a message we used email. It was so slow! What’s email? Well, I’ll try to explain.  We wrote them on a machine called a computer…”