As we continue to navigate our new normal, let’s be thankful that we have the internet to communicate. I really can’t imagine this happening when I was in high school. My family had just subscribed to Cable TV when I was in 8th grade; Cable TV was the predecessor to Satellite TV and that was the predecessor to streaming services like Netflix. The only thing I watched on TV was MTV and BET. Back then, MTV actually played music videos and all I wanted to consume was music. It would still be another 15 years before my mother’s job as a medical transcriptionist would go online. My father was a chemist and even today, his job wouldn’t be online. All of my high school and even college jobs were in restaurants…I’ll save those stories for a future email. My family had an Atari but by high school, my brother and I had played all of the games we had...and forget about playing with your friends online. News would have been communicated by TV, radio, and telephone…or snail mail…back then we just called it “mail.”
When I was in grade school in 1978, there was a blizzard that shut down most of the Mid-West. My mother was unable to get to work at the hospital and school was closed for a month. I remember playing Monopoly for days at a time. I built forts with my brother out of pillows and blankets. Breakfast and lunch was whenever you ate it but we always sat down for dinner together as a family. We wore our pajamas all day but we brushed our teeth in the morning and at night. Once the storm passed, we returned to school and everything returned to normal. To this day, my mother will still bring up how we played Monopoly for days during the blizzard.
We’ll get through this and we’ll all have a shared experience to talk about in the future.
