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March 8, 2005
I'm getting old
A couple weeks back, my 1989 Jeep Cherokee experienced catastrophic engine failure. This, a stinking week after paying $1000 in repairs. I had a friend who knew a guy (I know, it sounds pretty shady) who had a line on some good used cars. He did, and I ended up with this cool 1984 Volvo DL for cheap. It's only got 147,000 miles on it which is pretty low for a Volvo and everything works great. I owned a 1982 Volvo DL when I was in college and really loved it. Oddly enough, driving around in this 20 year old relic has made me feel young again. Until ...
This morning, I was taking my 4 year old son to pre-school in his inaugural ride in my "new" car. As he was climbing into his car seat, he stopped and looked at the window crank (or whatever you call the fossils that open and close your car windows), and said, "What's that for daddy?" When I told him he promptly had to raise and lower the window several times. I then reminded him that daddy's car was really old, and that it was entirely possible that the support for the entire window could break and send the window shattering into the door. He stopped playing with it, and we were on our way.
It got me thinking, how many other things will James just take for granted ... cell phones, remote controls, TIVO. It reminds me of the line from Shawshank Redemption when the older prisoner with the pet crow gets released after a lifetime of imprisonment, and says something along the lines of, "the world up and got itself in a big hurry (horrendous paraphrase)." While this may seem like an odd quote - and a bit off point, it seems that for every generation there are certain status quos/standards that are just assumed. Expectations that place us at a fixed point in history and from which we we derive our identity. And the fact that someday, in the vein of "When I was a boy we walked to school in the snow, barefoot, uphill, etc," I'll say to James, "When I was a boy we rolled up our car windows MANUALLY," makes me laugh.
I've got a few more years to polish my story and make it sound tougher.
Posted by mark at March 8, 2005 1:54 PM Subscribe (FeedBurner)