Washtubs to Wi-Fi
I’m only 50, but I used to watch my grandmother scrub laundry in a tub with a washboard and now I’m sending emails at Panera’s using Wi-Fi. In five decades, I’ve traveled through centuries when it comes to technology.
I grew up in Havana during the 1960s, but time had stopped there in the 1950s when Fidel Castro’s takeover fooled the populace into giving up its ideals for a better society. The clothing, the cars and the movies playing in our neighborhood were pre-1960s if they were made in Hollywood.
New foreign films came from nations behind the Iron Curtain, Europe and Asia. I got to see more Czech romantic comedies, Bulgarian cartoons and Japanese samurai films that any other child might have tolerated outside of Cuba. The cartoons were clunky and the Czech comedies fluffy, but the Akira Kurosawa epics with Toshiro Mifune in kimono and sword are still great. (Many years later, I happened to find a movie poster from Yojimbo, my favorite Mifune movie, in Spanish–just the way I had originally seen the movie. I couldn’t pass up a poster in Spanish for a Japanese movie I now own with English subtitles.)
It was ironic that, during the first years after arriving in the United States, I was laughed at in class because I had never heard of Topo Gigio. I hadn’t been living here when the puppet mouse was on the Ed Sullivan Show, but I had seen comedies by Jacques Tati and masterpieces by Kurosawa by the time I was nine. There are TV shows that my husband watched as a boy that I had no idea existed. Kevin tells me how he used to watch Combat!, Andy’s Gang and Circus Boy when he was a boy in New York. They’re all still mysteries to me.
In 50 years, I’ve lived part of my life without a telephone in the house; helped my grandparents shuck corn; eaten a chicken that pecked in our yard before I watched my grandmother de-feather it and cook it; used a privy and taken a ride in a beautiful 1958 Chevrolet Impala convertible that my mother’s half-brother had bought new. I’ve worn handmade clothes and hand-crocheted socks, taken a bath with castile soap, brushed with baking soda because there was no toothpaste and helped the older folks cook on a coal stove. I spent my first nine years in another century, even while kids in other nations were living in the 1960s with the British Invasion, Mercury capsules orbiting the Earth and, yes, Topo Gigio.
Today, our 12-year-olds have email, a laptop, cell phones and mp3 players that pack endless music into appliances as small as my thumb. Time has traveled at warp speed since I was a child. I think nothing of complaining about my laptop’s RAM, the speed of my broadband connection or how long it takes to reheat my coffee in the microwave. Seconds are suddenly too long to wait.
Our oldest son used to say that I had grown up in the “boony days,” his expression for the boondocks of time before his first real memories in the 1990s. To any child, his or her parents always belong to an inexorably distant time, but my son was partly right about my living in a past that was beyond the experiences of my classmates in parochial school during the late 1960s.
From the washtub to Wi-Fi, I’ve had to adjust to life with one foot in a past lacking in necessities and another firmly in a present when technology zooms at quantum speed. To my one-year-old grandson, I’ll probably be a dinosaur as soon as he begins developing his view of the world. I’ll have to tell him how his grandma had a grandma who actually used a washboard.
