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Isn't Christmas here yet?
While many people complain that there aren't enough shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, another segment is thankful that the holiday will arrive so quickly. Not because they want Christmas to be over, but rather because they can't wait for anything. Our impatience can be seen everywhere, from road rage to our kitchen appliances. How many times have you cursed the slow driver in front of you for making you run behind, when actually left your house too late? How many times have you stood in front of the microwave complaining that the popcorn was taking too long?
The sad part is that today's children won't know the difference; they won't realize that life used to be run at a slower pace. While my kids are more adept at using the VCR than I am, they also have the luxury of a separate rewinding machine. Therefore, they can be rewinding the just-watched tape and watching a new tape at the same time. Of course, that is when they bother with the VCR. With the influx of DVD players, my youngest will grow up thinking you could always jump to the desired scene in a movie and not have to spend 20 minutes fast-forwarding and rewinding. He won't know that you couldn't always choose to watch a movie in either English, Spanish, Dutch or Luxemborguese. The word "rewind" is bound for extinction. While extinction is bad, other words have changed in meaning in our era of impatience. Growing up, loading meant putting dishes in the dishwasher, hauling suitcases to the vehicle or stuffing the washing machine. Now, my five-year-old thinks the word "loading" means sitting in front of a blank computer screen for five minutes, while "Disney dot com" slowly emerges on the screen, and urging it to hurry up.
Our growing desire to do and have things quicker is not limited to household appliances. If it wasn't for older vehicles still on the road, children wouldn't know that rolling a window up and down required more than a push of a button. Not only have automatic windows made us impatient, they're partially to blame for our nation's growing obesity. Who doesn't remember that car from your childhood which took 42 strenuous turns of the crank just to crack the window three inches? Actually, as a mom I'm in favor of automatic windows and the luxury of controlling them from the driver's seat., especially when small children like to open windows on 20 degree days or the noise level inside the vehicle would put a demolition crew to shame. One day as my oldest child pushed the recline button on the side of her car seat and reached to play with the cellular phone with the other, she asked an interesting question: Which came first, the car or the phone? Thinking it was a simple question, I used my my authoritative, I-know-everything-or-at-least-can-make-it-sound-like-it voice and said, "They became popular about the same time, although the phone had a little bit of a head start." "No, which came first, the car or the car phone?" The time had come to dig out old episodes of L.A. Law and Dallas, so she could see the original monstrosity of a cell phone at work. She'll never know the inconvenience of running out of gas and walking miles to find a pay phone. She'll never know that television programing used to end each evening with the playing of the National Anthem. She'll never know that stores used to close at some point at night and were never open on Sundays. Then again, she'll never have those buff arms from manually rolling up windows; she'll never know getting up on Saturday morning to watch cartoons because that's the only day they are on; and she'll never know that a bowl of popcorn used to take an unthinkable four minutes to pop.