February 25, 2010
I was just writing about some interesting dreams I’ve been having… and I realized how much fun I was having, writing about them.
I really do need to get back to writing (creative, fun writing – something other than all the pretty serious blogging I’ve been doing lately on my various blogs and in my journal!). I always loved those stories in the series “Stories From Grandma’s Attic”(by Arleta Richardson). But I always thought that I don’t have old-timey-enough memories that would interest young people…
But of course I am a grandma myself now, and when I was growing up we actually did live in what we considered a very modern world – albeit one devoid of personal/ desk-top computers, video games, even hand-held calculators! Not to mention cell phones, or even phones unattached to their settings (but at least we never lost them around the house nor ended up with dead buttons … and, oh my goodness, those calls on eight-party-lines could sure be interesting, lol…) … and of course we had no digital cameras … or even digital clocks or watches! And we had cars you could fix yourself, easily, in the back yard (lol… we still have cars pretty much like that … Big Red and Little Red, both 1990!). And black and white TV with only one, or at most, two channels, much of the airtime being dedicated to “talking heads” … but the programs we did have were funny! Beverley Hillbillies, Hogan’s Heroes… of course today many of them would be seen as “un-PC” but then life was “simpler” in many ways…. Perhaps with chores… and a more “homogeneous” society… we just didn’t have time… or reason… to think about such things (yes, I know, not necessarily a really “good” thing, but…)
LOL! Look at me go on! All those memories could take me in a million writing directions – some just fun story-telling, others interesting historical/ philosophical directions. Ha! Maybe I’d write so much quasi-history that I’d become famous and get an “honorary” PhD in history! Without having to go back to university, lol…. Or maybe I’d get so into history that I’d just go back to university, after all, and get a PhD in history to me with my research for my writing! After all, my Grandpa always said I’d be the first PhD in the family… and the Dean of History at UBC did urge me to stay at the University and pursue a PhD in history, instead of going teaching. LOL … I’ve always had that lingering on the edge of my mind… just won’t go away and leave me be!
Oh, and we had one speed town bikes – and now they are selling them again at the bike store for $600 plus! My parents bought me a hand-me-down (several generations by the look of it!) balloon-tire, heavy, strong, woman’s bike very much like those pricey new bikes – and they paid, I believe, $5 for it (which would have been fairly pricey even so, at the time, on our family budget!). Wonder what happened to it? Those old bikes surely didn’t just break down or rust away – though they bought me a brand new leather seat for it (very hard and uncomfortable), and one of the neighbor dogs loved the smell of it, and chewed it to pieces! So then I got a much more comfortable modern soft plastic seat. LOL – that’s how we replaced things – by replacing the broken parts. Of course the “throw-away” mentality was already coming in, but our parents grew up in the “dirty 30s depression” and during World War 2, and our grandparents had started their lives in a previous century, many of them as immigrants and/or homesteaders, and they also lived through the depression and both World Wars, so they were all still attached to values of thriftiness and – well! “environmentalism,” even before it was invented!
Ha! It is already 5:38 am (I started at 5:05), and I have done my 20 – actually 30 – minutes of daily writing without even thinking about it. Now I’ll have to type it up… sometimes I do wish for a really light, portable laptop, just for writing… but I suspect that, even then, I’d still be using pen and paper a lot… yep, I’m a pen-and-paper-mama, brought up in a pen-and-paper generation (and ha! manual typewriters! I remember when electric typewriters came out; it was a major technological breakthrough!)
I definitely think – and remember – better with a pen. It slows me down enough, I think, to bring in more complex, detailed memories… and deeper reflection, too. That may be why a lot of old-time writing, when we read it today, seems too “heavy” … but what a shame that we’ve seemingly lost the ability to remember and think deeply… Sometimes I think that “Readers Digest Condensed Books” and all manner of other dumbed-down literature, is a great curse and shame to our modern generations… and that a great majority of on-line drivel falls into the same category (including, no doubt, plenty of my own writing, oh dear!).
On the other hand, though, some of the modern blogs are, I think, an attempt to delve deeper once again… and perhaps at the same time try to attract a readership that often seems incapable of sitting down and focusing for more than a very few minutes at a time on anything that isn’t moving fast and furiously (accompanied by pictures/ graphics of course, which assumes that people no longer have the ability to “imaginate” their own mind pictures to accompany the prose…)… anything that doesn’t race across the surface of the mind, rather than stopping to delve deeply and seriously…
(You can read more on this line of thought at My Church Journey under the topic “Has the world really changed that much?”)
