A little reminder came this week, when a ball-point pen I
was fond of finally ran out of ink. It was great for writing checks (remember
those?) and writing in the check register, because it had a nice fine point on
it. But this particular pen, which you could buy zillions of just a few years
ago, is no longer in production. Sure, there are other pens, and I’ll get used
to one of them. But I have no choice. There isn’t THAT one.
In my audio tape recorder bag (isn’t it interesting how
people still talk about “tape,” when it basically went away a couple decades
ago?) I still have a little 2-by-3-inch white portable amplified speaker, sold
by Radio Shack about 25 years ago. It runs on a 9-volt battery. You can plug
weak audio into it and it makes it loud. It was indispensable in my work. But
they stopped making it, and I haven’t run across anything quite like it since.
I have to take good care of it. It only cost about 10 bucks, but it’s precious.
When the price of flat-screen HDTVs finally fell into the
reasonable range, I bought one (no choice, as the old TV died). I tried to set
it up with some other equipment, but couldn’t get a signal input. After about
45 minutes, I was convinced that either the thing was defective or that my
other devices weren’t compatible with it, and I prepared to put it back in the
box to return it to the store, when I finally saw something on the screen. It
was working. The only problem is, I have no clue what I did to make it
function. TVs used to turn on and off; you could easily change channels without
the machine scanning or seeking for you, and there were no menus, just separate
controls for different functions. I’m used to it now. But it took me a while to
stop missing the old TV.
Don’t get me started on rental cars. They don’t even leave
the manuals in them now, so you drive off thinking you know what you’re doing,
until...
It’s not just stuff. It’s places. A few years ago, my wife
and I visited the East Coast city where I was born and spent a few years as a
child. “For dinner tonight,” I said, “we’re going to the finest place in town!”
My parents and grandparents had gone there many times, so I knew the name and
looked it up in the phone book (remember those?) It wasn’t listed. I asked
people around town where it was. Nobody had even heard of it -- until we
visited a 90-year-old friend of my late mother’s who observed that the place
had closed down decades earlier. Well, that night we did go to a perfectly nice
place for dinner. It just wasn’t THAT place.
There is an age we reach when we finally give up and
realize that all the things we assume to be permanent, or to always function a
certain way, just aren’t or don’t. It
has all been upgraded or is under new management. What was that age for you, or
are you there yet? I’d like to be able to embrace change, but first I have to
shake its hand.
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