Remember Non-Electric Toothbrushes?

Remember when no one used electric toothbrushes?

I do.

I am sure that someone can cite me an article that says that electric toothbrushes have been around since the Roman Empire.  But it was not until I was at least old enough to bear sole responsibility for brushing my teeth that I first heard of the electric toothbrush.

I never liked brushing my teeth.  It seemed like a lot of extra work, and at eight years old I could not be wasting time with needless personal hygiene.  My parents told me that my teeth would rot and fall out if I did not brush them regularly, but I debunked that myth whenever I could.

And then one day I saw a commercial for an electric toothbrush.  I could not believe my eyes.  A man was standing in front of the camera and was holding this electric toothbrush in front of his teeth.  His arm was not moving; the toothbrush was doing all the work.  This was the answer.

I persuaded my parents to splurge for a electric toothbrush by making up statistics and saying “please” many times in a row.  On the first night of Hanukkah I opened my gift and it was an electric toothbrush.  It was small, with the brush on one end and a Mickey Mouse figurine on the other end, satisfying the universal law that any appliance designed for children must have a superfluous plastic cartoon figurine welded to it.  The electric toothbrush my brother received had a Donald Duck figurine so that he would not use mine by accident.

I popped in a battery, and, for the first time in my life, raced up the stairs to the bathroom to brush my teeth.  I put the toothpaste on the brush, and held the brush to my teeth, said a quick prayer, and flipped on the device.

I don’t know what I was expecting.  Perhaps I thought the brush would clean my teeth without my so much as flexing a wrist.  The brush vibrated next to my teeth for a few moments, but it was not really brushing them.  I took the toothbrush away and saw that I had only gotten some white toothpaste lather on my front teeth.  “Ah,” I said to myself, “perhaps I have to move the brush around.”  I moved the vibrating brush around my teeth, but I still did not feel like the teeth were getting clean.  After another minute I was moving my arm in a brushing motion, and was basically brushing my teeth as I normally would but with a vibrating brush head.  After a few days I returned to my old brush, and the Mickey Mouse figurine sat idle on the counter with dried white toothpaste on his mouse ears.

Years later, just after a marathon cleaning session at the dentist’s, during which I heard the hygienist retching into the wastebasket several times, my dentist advised me to get an electric toothbrush.  I followed these instructions and duly parted with $80 or so for the recommended fancy state-of-the-art toothbrush.  It came in a large box, and had charging station instead of a space for a battery, and had nothing in place of the Mickey Mouse figurine.  I charged it up, put it up to the front of my teeth, said a prayer, and flipped on the device.

I guess I should have known what to expect.  It vibrated, and my teeth did not get clean, and I found myself applying the usual amount of torque from my elbow and shoulder.  And after a few days the electric toothbrush was lying idle on the counter, with dried white toothpaste collected all over the charging station.

And so every morning when I get up, and almost every night before I go to bed, there I stand, in front of my mirror, in a world of iPhones and Tivos, brushing my teeth with nothing but the sweat of my shoulder and elbow, and my ergonomically-handled, aerodynamically-headed, uniquely-bristled, plain ol’ non-electric toothbrush, that I picked up for $80 or so.

Thanks to Curtis Dozier for the topic.

Remember When People Shoveled Their Driveways With Shovels?

Remember when people shoveled their driveways with shovels?

I do.

The only thing that could damper the ecstasy of a snow day was having to shovel the driveway. “I don’t understand,” I would say while pulling on my boots. “Why can’t they just invent a heated driveway that melts the snow?”

“Boy, you kids today have it so tough,” my mother would say.  Shovel in Snow“When I was your age my father made me shovel the driveway with a dirt shovel.  He would say, ‘What do we need another shovel for?’  I hope this puts things in perspective for you while you’re out there.”

And out I would go into the sunlight blazing off the snow I had to clear.  Shoveling one shovel-full and then hoisting it over my back would quickly cause aches and pains in my young back.  I always imagined that if I could just find the right technique the job would get done in seconds.  So I would try putting the shovel down and plowing through, like the snow plow going down the street.  I marveled at my ingenuity and pictured myself alongside the likes of the inventors of the steam engine and the cotton gin.  Then the snow would build up and spill over the sides of the shovel and the driveway would look like a mess and my fantasy would be ruined.  Sometimes I would try to get away with this.

“Mom,” I would shout up the stairs as I walked inside, stomping the snow off my boots, “I’m done!  Is my oatmeal still warm?” But she would look out the window and see that I’d left a mess of the driveway, with my snow-plow imitation, and order me outside to clean it up.

I still shovel my driveway with a shovel today.  And by “today” I really mean today, as in this morning.  I still do my snow-plow imitation (complete with snow-plow noises), thinking I’ll save time and back pain.  But when the snow spills over the sides of the shovel and makes a mess, I don’t just walk inside and pretend I’m done.  I stay outside to finish the job.  Just a part of growing up.

After I’ve been out there over an hour, and ice has formed from the sweat in the flaps of my bomber hat, I start to hear voices – voices telling me that if I’d bought a snowblower during that end-of-winter sale last July, I would be inside by now, in my Snuggie, eating warm oatmeal in front of the television, watching the real housewives of various U.S. regions, instead of outside in the cold.  I should have listened, I say to myself.

And I look across the street to a driveway that still has an unblemished coverlet of snow on it, where my neighbor has been for over an hour, kneeling before his snowblower, trying to get it to work.

Remember Playing Hangman?

Remember playing hangman?

I do.

Sometime in the last century they stopped hanging people for real (at least in most States) and converted the activity into a word game. The game was played by two people. One person would think of a word and draw a row of blank spaces, one space for each letter of the word. Above the blanks would go a little picture of a gallows. The other player would guess one letter of the mystery word at a time. If a letter was part of the word, the first player would fill in the appropriate blank. If the letter was not part of the word, the first player would draw in the hanged man, one piece at a time. Guess wrong once and a straight line would come down from the gallows, representing the noose. Guess wrong again and a circle would be drawn for the head. Enough bad guesses and there would be a hanged stick figure on the page and the game would be lost.

I never understood why the hanged man was necessary. The game was just Wheel of Fortune but without the wheel and and without the fortune. But this was in the time before portable devices that held video games and media players. Kids just today just don’t understand – back then, if we wanted to goof off during class, we had to play hangman. I guess even back then our games had to have a violent component.

Most of my hangman memories are from Hebrew School. I don’t know why I would have chosen to play this inane word game instead of learning about Moses and Matzoh and how to light the Sabbath candles. There must have been a lot of peer pressure.

I just found on online site where you can play hangman. I wanted to see what it like, just one more time. The topic was “countries” and the word turned out to be Switzerland. I figured it out in five seconds and not one piece of the hanged man appeared. When I had guessed all the letters the stick body formed all at once and the gallows collapsed behind it, freeing the stick body. I wanted to gloat and cheer, to bask in the glow of victory over my opponent and over the classroom wall clock.

But I was alone. And the only time I had wasted wasted was my own.

Remember When We Did Not Have To Remember A Million Passwords?

Remember when we did not have to remember a million passwords?

I do.

The first piece of datum that I had to remember was probably my name.  I distinctly remember not knowing how to spell my last name.  I was in nursery school, and the task at hand was to draw a picture of your family members – evidently with arms coming of their heads – and sign it on the back.  The drawing was no problem but I had to ask my teacher how to spell my last name.  I would have been embarrassed were it not for that little “accident” the previous week.

In Kindergarten a phone number was added to the name.  It was only seven digits and I used it frequently over the ensuing years to get my parents to pick me up from people’s houses.  Add my birthday and the channels for Nickelodeon, MTV, and whatever channel showed “Growing Pains” and you’ve rounded my mental database for elementary school.

When I got to middle school a locker combination was added to the set.  I entered this number with such frequency that after a while I did not even see the numbers anymore, and entered the combination by feeling the clicks like a bat or one of those insects that sees through receptors in its knees.

Then in college everything changed.  I was given an email account and asked to choose a password and my life since then has been one giant coveyor belt of passwords.  A password for Windows accounts for home, and work, and for my co-workers when they are away from their desks.  Email passwords for the online account I use and the account to which I send all my online purchase receipts and emails from charities.  And…I think that’s…is that it?

No.  There’s all those websites that I join not because I need to apply for a “free” registration just to look at-I mean research-a few things.  Because there’s a word limit and there might be children reading this, I won’t list the websites here.  But trust me, there are a lot.

And these sites all give the same direction: Choose a password that contains at least one capital and lowercase letter, one number, one symbol, is more than eight characters long, and is not like any other password that you have used in the past.  In the beginning I used to be able to keep from the different passwords.  But after password number sixty-seven I started getting confused.  And I don’t remember the security questions either, because I always made the hint very cryptic to fool the team of hackers that I knew were gathered in a cave in Siberia, thousands of miles beneath the frozen tundra, wearing thick rimmed glasses and looking like showers were not an important part of their lives.  Looks like the joke is on me.

Perhaps some day I will surmount this obstacle.  Perhaps one day scientists will be able to increase intelligence by pumping fat into people’s brains.  And perhaps this technique will enable me to memorize thousands of passwords and the names of all the Kardashians.

But in the process, will I forget that who that boy was…that little boy standing in front of his house, who loved his family, who loved life, and who had arms coming out of his ears?