A friend and I were talking the other day about the kind of world in which our children are growing up. We were lamenting the fact that there were so many things about which these kids would not know. To mention just a few, did you ever spend a cold winter night on the farm, and off in the distance, when the night was dark and cool, you'd hear the whistle on the train, a long and lonely whistle that would trigger all kinds of wonderful dreams? You'd hear that lonesome wail as you snuggled deeper into the feather tick and you'd wonder where the train was going and what famous people might be on board. Well, that great sound is gone forever. It has been replaced by something that could be a bus horn or a truck, a big ugly puff of sound that just hasn't the appeal of the old train whistle. My friend mentioned too, that our kids have never seen a streetcar. That means they've never had the great fun of flipping trolleys. Boy, that used to be our favorite outdoor sport up on 124th St. at 8th Avenue. All you had to do was pull the guy wire that was attached to the post supporting the trolley wires, and off would pop the trolley. Sounds silly now, but it was great fun then.
Oh, there are a lot of things our kids will miss. Things like running boards where you could hang on while your Dad drove the car at 10 miles an hour. Rumble seats...where you stay even if you froze to death, the friendly, warm flicker of a coal oil lamp on your Grandpa's farm, wind-up Victrola's and Tiger Moth's, open cockpit airplanes where you could actually SEE the pilot and you would always wave, but he would never wave back.
Yes, these things our kids will never know. Somehow today I get the feeling that things are moving too fast...or am I just slowing up?
No comments:
Post a Comment