Inventions in My Lifetime

You want me to name some of the inventions during my lifetime? My life has already been so long that I could name 300, if I only had a memory.

 

Let's see. The bicycle?  No, that was already around, though it was, of course, new to me when I began riding one. I remember the feeling of freedom occasioned by my first bicycle? Suddenly I was faster than my parents. Suddenly no one knew where I was. I could be anyplace. One hot summer day my older brother and a friend rode to Kokomo, but they overestimated their stamina and the power of the sun and found themselves exhausted and beet red at 8 in the evening, unable to pedal the remaining ten miles to home. Ready to forego their independence and freedom, they hoped someone would come hunting for them in a car. It all ended well, of course. But a bike is like that: it leads to adventure.

 

What other inventions? Radio? Oh, the days of radio.Bob & Ray. Arbogast. Fibber McGee and Molly. Fred Allen. They fill a big part of me even today. "Oh no, McGee!" Molly would exclaim. "Not the closet! Don't open the closet!" And yet he did, every week. And when McGee opened the door, out tumbled everything that had been stuffed in there. The sound-effects man played a one-minute riff on all his instruments to simulate for us the sounds of McGee's belongings hitting the floor. And as we listened we could see the whole thing in our minds. And then we imagined that someone would have to pick it all up and put it away again so they could do it all over again the next week, as they surely would.

 

No, bicycles and radio weren't invented in my lifetime. What about TV? I remember how proud I was that my family did not own a TV. Even in those days, through high school and college, I was a raving snob, and I knew that no good could come of TV, that it would lead to tears. It might make you laugh now, but soon it would have you laughing on the other side of your face.

 

So imagine my chagrin when I came home from college for spring break one year, probably around 1956, and found the new piece of furniture solidly settled in front of my father's reclining chair. That was the end. We were no longer elite. There was no longer any hope of converting my family into intellectuals who read only the New Yorker. Atlantic Monthly, and Harpers. Now we were just like every other family in town.

 

If I brought my thoughts all the way up to the present, I'd have to list the inventions of computers and cell phones and all their kin. They have indeed revolutionized the world in many ways. But I stick to my stubborn mantra: change is not necessarily progress. And progress is not necessarily change for the better. We're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But you really don't want me on my soapbox again.

 

A kitchen invention in my lifetime that I like is the food processor. An invention that I love is my KitchenAid mixer, with its meat grinder attachment for making sausage and my grain-grinding attachment for making my own flour. Now these are things worth the inventor's time and energy!

 

Copyright 2009 Ann Tudor

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com