Tag: nostalgia

Remember Using Paper Maps?

Remember using paper maps to get places?

Map Reproduction Courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library

I do.

Today people have talking computers suctioned to their car windshields to guide them to places they’ve never been.  But when I was a kid we had only paper maps to scream at when we got lost.  And each other.

The maps were a sagging bulge in the pouch at the back of the passenger seat of my father’s Renault, and covered our general traveling region: upstate New York, New England, and other places that put ketchup and mustard on hamburgers unless you asked otherwise.

I don’t think a single map, once unfolded, has ever been folded back again.  It is the law of entropy.  No matter how many diagrams and colored tags I used, I could never get the map folded up sharp and neat like it had been on the rack at the rest area store by the Roy Rodgers and the machine that flattened pennies.  The best I could do was crumple the map into something approaching a rectangle, and squeeze like I had to nail a sforzando on an accordion.

And that was just putting the map away.  Reaching for the map was even more dangerous.  It often ripped.  Once we were negotiating around the Boston Museum of Science, and my father needed me to navigate instead of watching my breath condense on the window.  But the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had become a stack of paper that I flipped through like I was counting money.  Then a pigeon flew away with one of the sheets, and we could not find our motel again.

Before long trips I would spread the map or map pieces before me, and trace our intended path, imagining our car following the same red-lined trajectory as the plane in the Indiana Jones movies.  Sometimes my father would whistle the Indiana Jones music while I did this.  When we got lost, the whistling ceased.

“But where is the dang exit?” he would ask rhetorically on the shoulder of Interstate 95, the skies darkening, and motel vacancies vanishing by the second.  “The number is right next to the highway on this page, but all I see is another sign for corn.”  I wanted to help him at these times, but the only things I knew how to do with a map was trace my finger along it.

The best was the time my grandparents took my brother and I to Disney World.  My grandfather was following a set of directions that he’d written down on a piece of paper, and my grandmother was reading them back to him as he drove.  “It says take Exit 16 A-B,” my grandmother said.

“What’s A-B?  I never heard of an exit that ended in A-B.”

“Well you wrote it.  Don’t blame me.”

We passed Exit 16 A, and then we passed Exit 16 B.  But no Exit “A-B.”  The next exit was Exit 17.  So we had to get turned around in a swamp, asking an alligator for directions that were not remembered because we all thought someone else was listening.  I thought I could hear the fireworks at the Magic Kingdom over the Yiddish being screamed two feet away from my ear.  Eventually we pulled over, and after more careful examination my grandfather concluded that the directions were supposed to say Exit 16 A or B.  “Exit A or B,” he kept saying as we pulled into our lodgings, dreams of long lines and expensive souvenirs already dancing in my head.

Today these dramas are played out with sterile soft-spoken machines that says things like, “Turn right,” and “Recalculating; Drive…three…blocks…then…turn left.”  The computer should say, “Recalculating; Pull over…and…bang your head against the…driver’s side…window.”  That would add some of the old excitement that made family trips memorable.  Screaming at a machine is just not the same.

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Remember Action Figures?

Remember action figures?

Image by Kup-is-dion via Wikia

I do.

Like all my childhood desires for material things, my yearning for action figures began at another kid’s house.  One Sunday afternoon, my parents consulted the magic directory of boys my age who lived nearby, and conveyed me to a house I’d never before seen.  And as I entered the boy’s den, it was as if I had discovered an underground city of gold.

In this room were these little plastic figures.  Properly known as “Masters of the Universe,” I referred to them by the name of their fearless leader, He-Man.

The display was intoxicating.  It seemed like there were hundreds of figures standing up to greet me.  My new best friend let me touch them, pick them up, and pretend that they were mine for a few seconds before he took them away, wiping each one down with a sanitized cloth.

As I held He-Man aloft and gazed into his noble face, the first thing I learned was that the figure made me feel powerful and special and convinced that I had to own one.  The second thing I learned about action figures was that it was very dangerous to get the web of skin between thumb and forefinger near He-Man’s rotator cuff or hip.

For the rest of that school year, the only thing that I believed would brighten my little world was to own a He-Man figure.  “He wants these things called Masters of the Universe,” my mother told my grandmother as my birthday approached.  “Just ask for those at the store.”

But instead of the He-Man figure I wanted, my grandmother got me a button shirt that my mother made me wear whenever we went to my grandmother’s house.  “I looked all over,” my grandmother said, “going from store to store, but no one had ever heard of the ‘Masters of the Human Race.’  Where are you supposed to find these things?”

Eventually my prayers were answered, and He-Man and a few of his friends had taken the place of my real friends and family.  But He-Man needed a place to hang out.  The hero of Eternia could not very well lie around on my bedroom floor like in some flophouse.  Fortunately, the Mattel company had conveniently solved He-Man’s housing problem by producing a replica of Castle Grayskull, where He-Man went to see the Sorceress, usually after a long wait in the reception area and a $25 co-pay.

All I wanted was that Castle Grayskull.  As the holiday season approached I told my parents and everyone I knew that I wanted Castle Grayskull.  I pined away at school, my coloring uncolored before me, imagining how Castle Grayskull would look in my room.  I pictured how I would wake up every morning, and open its gates, and greet He-Man and his entourage.  When I frolicked on the splintered and nail-exposed wood of the playground, I pretended that I was He-Man patrolling the ramparts of the Castle Grayskull that would no doubt soon be mine.  And as I laid my weary mop-head to sleep at night, I could see the outline of the great toy sanctuary in the shadows that danced on my cartoon wallpaper.

But my Castle Grayskull never came.  I received other toys, toys that time forgot, but my He-Man figures remained nomads on my bedroom floor, and eventually had to opt for a Velcro-sneaker shoebox with a sign out front that said “Interdimensional War Vet – Please Help.”  Years later, as I was concluding my therapy, I found out what happened.

“I spoke to the mother of that boy you used to see,” my mother said.  “You know, the one with all those He-Man things.  And she said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t buy that stupid Castle Grayskull.  It’s $30 for a plastic piece of junk.’  So I got you something else instead.  I hope that was all right.”

Sometimes I wonder if my life would be any different if I had gotten Castle Grayskull instead of the corduroy shirt with the cat face on the pocket.  I found a semi-used Castle Grayskull on eBay, and the small product image sent a shimmer of the power down my spine.  But I couldn’t bring myself to enter a bid.  For He-Man, and for me, you can’t go home again.

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Remember Lunchboxes?

Remember lunchboxes?

I do.

My first lunch box had a Pac-Man theme and was made of metal.  Inside I carried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a thermos, and little power pellets that I’d chew on when I wanted to eat the bullies at school instead of running away from them.  Then the edges of the lunchbox rusted and would cut gashes in classmates who brushed up against me.

The following year I tapped He-Man, the most powerful man in the universe, to represent my lunch. If I needed the edge for a coloring assignment, or a group of other kids who were hogging the swings, I would hold the lunchbox up to the sky and a lightning bolt would strike me, and I would shout “I have the power” and get sent to the nurse’s office.

In second grade I had a Transformers lunchbox.  A few twists and turns of the lunchbox would transform it into a robot that would sit on my desk and do absolutely nothing.

In third grade I bought a lunchbox based on The Wuzzles, a Disney cartoon named after creatures that were a cross of two different animals. One was a cross between a lion and a bumblebee, another a cross between a bear and a butterfly. Yet another was a cross between a cow and a pig, and caused dietary problems for many viewers. On the way home from the store, I stole frequent glances at the face of my Wuzzles lunchbox, and could not wait to show it off at school.

The night before the first day of school, however, it occurred to me that, unlike He-Man and Transformers, The Wuzzles was not considered exclusively a “boy’s show,” and that some classmates might feel entitled to argue that a Wuzzles lunchbox was a “girl’s” lunchbox. I prepared a brief arguing that the lunchbox was gender-neutral, and placed in my lunchbox, sandwiched in between my sandwich and cookies shaped like Keebler Elves.

The next morning I sat on the school bus with my lunchbox face down on my lap. A few times I peeked at the face of my lunchbox to see if it had changed to G.I. Joe, but the Wuzzles just peeked right back at me. And for a moment their vibrant cheery blended-species faces filled my heart with gladness.

My teacher made us put our lunchboxes in the back of the classroom.  Lined up from the left were the Thundercats and Go Bots luncboxes, and from the right were the Barbie and My Little Pony lunchboxes. And front and center was my Wuzzles lunchbox, colorful and proud.

I kept looking around the classroom at the other students, to see if anyone had figured out that the Wuzzles lunchbox belonged to me.  A group of boys seated together pointed at the lunchboxes, whispered, and laughed.  Convinced they were talking about my Wuzzles lunchbox, I leaned out of my chair to get a better listen, so far that I fell out onto the floor, and said “I meant to do that” as I stood up and brushed off my new jeans.

At lunchtime I grabbed my lunchbox in the melee of students, tucked it under my arm with the face against my body, and shuffled along in the boys line to the cafetorium, a cross between a cafeteria and an auditorium.

I ate with my lunchbox face down.  I was sure that everyone was looking at me, and with envy I saw how freely they displayed their lunchboxes to the world.

When lunch was over I picked up my lunchbox and pressed the face against my torso as I had done walking in.  And that was my routine.

I wish there was some kind of dramatic denouement to this story, a moment where my lunchbox was revealed and I realized that it did not matter what was on my lunchbox, and some kid wearing a Voltron shirt started a slow clap, and everyone learned a valuable lesson that I would later write about in a college application.  But there wasn’t.  I don’t know if anyone cared or even noticed.  They never asked, and I never told.

In the fourth grade I started brown bagging my lunch. The Wuzzles lunchbox was thrown in the basement with my other lunchboxes, and eventually became part of the Earth’s crust.

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Remember Typewriters?

Remember typewriters?

Image courtesy J. Mayer via Technabob via Creative Commons
Sculpture by Jeremy Mayer (jeremymayer.com), Image via Technabob (technabob.com)

I do.

The final assignment for my seventh grade English class was a research paper on William Shakespeare.  We were given months to work on it, and the night before it was due I thought I should probably start my research or at least take a look at the assignment sheet.  Aside from the usual admonitions about structure, sources, and spelling, there was a direction I had never seen: “All papers must be typed!  No exceptions!!”  And underneath that was something I had seen before:  “No extensions will be given!  No exceptions!!”

Typed?  I had seen typewriters in movies.  All of my papers up until then had been handwritten, and it was still the time where only extremely nerdy families had computers.  This typing requirement put a ripple in my usual last-minute drill.  I found my mother in the kitchen consolidating boxes of cereal and asked her if we had a typewriter.

“I think there’s one in the basement.  Who knows if it still works.  Why do you ask?”

“I have to type a research paper on William Shakespeare.”

“And dare I ask when this paper is due?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Of course.  Well, I think I last saw it in the basement under a bunch of your old lunch boxes.  When are you going to throw those things out?”

“Um, never.”

Underneath the moldy and dusty lunch boxes was a moldy and dusty plastic covering under which lay a somewhat less moldy and dusty typewriter.  It was large and black like a Rolls Royce and at first I thought the carriage return was a hood ornament.

With the help of a neighbor I hauled it up to my room and removed the covering.  I was afraid to touch it, and as I plugged it in I felt a little like Dr. Frankenstein.

The machine whirred and I pressed one of the keys.  The resulting sound was a like a gunshot, a short staccato pop and I checked the opposite wall for holes.  I hit a few more keys, and figured if I could get used to the sound of Hungry Hungry Hippos I could get used to this. After a few minutes of working on my paper I realized something was wrong and had to visit my mother again.

“Mom, where does the paper come out?” I asked.

“It doesn’t,” she said.  “You have to load typewriter paper.  What have you been typing on all this time?”

“Um, never mind.”

 I loaded in paper from my spiral notebook but the mangled edges looked like the work of a fifth grader, so I had to persuade my mother to drive me to the office supply store for some typewriter paper.

Typing on typewriter paper was a lot more effective.  Then I accidentally spelled “Stratford-upon-Avon” with a “Q” and discovered that the correction tape was missing, and again we were off to the office supply store.  Using a typewriter apparently required a full tank of gas.

Not five minutes after our return the ink dried up.  I could see letters being embossed on the paper, and considered filling the indentations with pen.  Luckily my mother still had her coat on and again we went to the office supply store.

But alas, the ribbon was not in stock.  “We really don’t carry stuff for typewriters anymore,” the manager said.  “But we’d be happy to order it for you.  When’s your paper due?”

We tried another store but the manager there just laughed at me.  It was getting late.  Stores would be closing and I did not know what I was going to do.  I needed this time to be thinking about making the Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on Shakespeare sound like my own words, not having my mother drive me all over Long Island looking for typrewriter ribbon.  Writing with a quill would have been easier than this.

Somehow my father had gotten wind of my dilemma and took me to the working typewriter at his office.  I typed my paper while my father sat in the waiting room reading a book titled You’re Almost There: Parenting Through Adolescence.  It was close to midnight when I finished, and from my father’s face I gathered that we would be not going for ice cream.  My parents bought me a word processor the following year, and we traded in the typewriter for an Acura.

I just read that the last typewriter factory in the world, located in Mumbai, India, is closing its doors forever.  I am sure that a lot of people are lamenting this, people who grew up with typewriters, got used to thinking with rapidfire gunshots coming with every depression of their fingertips, people who got a thrill from hearing the ‘ding’ that told them to hit the carriage return, people who enjoyed the challenge of knowing which stores stocked their particular ribbon and correction tape.  People who are not me.

Image credits: Sculpture by Jeremy Mayer, Image via Technabob

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Remember When It Was Fun To Go To the Movies?

This was the title of one of my earliest posts, but that post did not express what I truly felt in my heart on this subject. A more proper treatment follows. 

Remember when it was fun to go to the movies?

Image courtesy of Creative Commons

I do.

Going to the movies as a kid was one of my more cherished experiences during the Reagan Administration.  On a Friday night or Saturday afternoon, my father would ask my brother and I, “How would you boys like to see” and he would name a movie that he thought we would want to see and that he felt would be appropriate for children our age. Until I went away to college, this meant it had to be a cartoon or about a talking animal.

I distinctly remember my father handing the ticket cashier a $20 bill for an adult and two children, and getting back enough change to buy us candy. Twizzlers were my go to movie-food. I would make sure to open it before the coming-attractions so that the deafening Twizzler-wrapper noise would not disturb my fellow viewers. Then I would take each Twizzler, bite off both ends, and blow through it like a straw.

One of my earliest movie memories was when my father took my brother and I to see a popular holiday season movie called Gremlins.  The commercials that had probably influenced my father’s choice of film had showed these cute little primate-looking things.  Except at some point the movie became less about cute little primate-looking things and more about old women sent on an electric chair speeding up several flights of stairs and jettisoned through a window to certain death.  My father was more horrified than the characters in the movie.  He asked my brother and I if we wanted to leave, but we shook our heads, eyes never leaving the screen so that we wouldn’t miss any of the mayhem.

My wife and I recently went to the movies for the first time in years.  There were so many teenagers I thought the Garmin had accidentally sent us to the high school.  I said to my wife, “So this is where people go when they are not old enough to go to bars.”  She replied that my social commentary would sound a lot better while waiting on line for tickets.

While I was waiting for tickets I looked up at the prices, and realized I was going to have to hit the ATM that was conveniently located fifteen paces away in the theater lobby. While punching in my PIN I reminisced about the days when a movie ticket cost only $7.50. After we got the tickets I wanted popcorn, and had to hit the ATM again.  Thank goodness it was a week I got paid.

We sprinted to Screen # 47 and did not miss a single moment of the half-hour of coming attractions and commercials.  I looked around for the remote control and finally understood what was meant by the term “captive audience.”

Half the seats the theater were occupied by teenagers, and each teenager’s hands were occupied by a small glowing screen. I thought that perhaps the small screens were a visual aid for a generation so accustomed to viewing small screens that the big screen exceeded the viewing range.  But upon closer inspection of the Justin Bieber seated next to me, I saw that the little screens were just smart phones that were being used in the way that everyone uses them: tune in globally, tune out locally.  If there was ever really a fire in the crowded theater, at least I would be able to see where I was going.

As the movie started, I noticed that the younger members of the audience would get up and leave, and then come back, and then leave, and then come back.  These antsy adolescents were either part of a cult that drank a lot of water before a movie, or were hanging out in groups and treating public space like their den.

About a half-hour into the movie, a latercomer took a seat behind me.  He spent what seemed like ten minutes taking off his very large and crinkly coat, and made so much noise that I missed the framing of the protagonist’s major conflict.

Then someone in the back right corner decided it was time for potato chips or some other snack that comes in a deafening bag.  Two characters in the film started and ended a romance before the character in the back of the theater was done opening the bag, which the good folks at Dolby were nice enough to pipe through in surround sound.

During the final battle scene, two people a few rows back got into an argument over the federal budget.  And then someone shouted into a cell phone, loudly, “Just meet us outside! The movie’s almost over!” I started to get up and say something, but the soles of my shoes were stuck in congealed soda that a fellow film-goer had wanted to share with the floor.

When I got home I called up my father. I told him about my experience at the movies, about the cell phones, the coming in and out, the talking, the eating, the glowing screens. “Dad, it’s just not like it used to be,” I said, and thought that he would feel my pain and join in condemnation.  But he just laughed and said, “At last, my son, you are a man.”

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Remember Playing Board Games?

Remember playing board games?

I do.

When I was a child we did not have HBO or video games or a computer, so if I wanted to have fun I had to either set something on fire or play a board game.

Candy Land was where I matched my wits against other members of my family.  The object was to advance your piece along the path until you reached the gum drop castle or you got up and quit in a huff because it looked like your little brother was going to get there first.  There was a stack of cards, each with the picture of another sweet food like a candy cane, peanut brittle, or an ice cream bar, and whichever card you pulled, that was the space on the board you advanced to.  The ice cream bar space was the closest to the end, so one time I fixed the cards so that I would pick the card with the ice cream bar.  My plan was foolproof.  But it was not momproof.  My mother made me go first and I ended up pulling the card for soy chips, automatically losing the game.

When I got a little older my father taught me how to play chess.  I had thought he said “chest” and that the felt on the bottom of the pieces would be used to stick the pieces to our chests.  I was disappointed when the pieces stayed on the board, but my disappointment turned to glee when I beat my father my very first time playing.  I bragged about it for the next twenty years until my father told me in an email that he let me win.

In the late 1980s my family succumbed to a massive TV ad campaign for Mouse Trap.  The point of Mouse Trap was to go around a board collecting pieces of cheese and assembling plastic pieces into a complex mechanism where at the end someone would turn a crank and set the little plastic pieces in motion that culminated in a plastic cage that looked like a small overturned laundry basket falling down on the little mouse-pieces, “trapping” them.  The game would have been great if the mechanism worked.  But it only worked on the commercial.  In real life you had prod each component of the game until it did what it was supposed to do.  Only a mouse that was already dead or had given up on life would have gotten caught in Mouse Trap.

There was Monopoly, where my strategy was to collect the cheap properties and jack up the rents like a slum lord.  And Trivial Pursuit, where I always answered the questions in the form of a question, like Jeopardy, until someone flicked a small plastic wedge at my eye.  And the Game of Life, which required so little strategy that it must have been designed by a Calvinist.

Scrabble was a game changer.  I would comb the dictionary for obscure words that were short and contained the letter “e” to use on my opponents.  The word “en” was my favorite, even though it was a prefix.  Nobody called me out on it, and I was reigning champion until someone told the authorities that I was forming words diagonally.

The board games for adults are very different.  There is a lot more dependence on TV trivia or awkward topics or devices that make noise.  One time I was at a party where I was forced into playing a game that had a digital timer that started beeping loudly if you took too much time to think of movies starring Kevin Bacon.  The noise was so irritating that when everyone else got up to look at a YouTube video of a stranger falling down the stairs, I tossed the device out the fifth-story window into the alley below.  I played dumb when they asked what happened to it, but I don’t think they believed me.

I was visiting my ancestral home last weekend, and during the time of the visit where my mother sends me to the basement to throw out more of my “junk” I came across Candy Land.  I wanted to take out the board, fix the order of the cards, and challenge my brother to a rematch.  But I knew it would not be the same as I remembered.  I was too mature to play games.  So I put the box down, covered it with old issues of Highlights, and told my mother that I’d thrown it out.

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Remember When Video Games Did Not Feature Flying Body Parts?

Remember when video games did not feature flying body parts?

I do.

I grew up in the days before federal law protected a child’s right to play video games, and my parents decreed that it was more important that I learn to read and write and look at people when I talk to them instead of living vicariously through jump-kicking digital characters. So I had to live vicariously through my friends’ vicarious living, pressing my face up against the windows of their basements, bedrooms, and dens.

The earliest games featured geometric shapes.  There was one where a yellow circle moved along straight lines and right angles, gobbling up white dots and flashing ghosts.  Another game involved a triangle that moved along the bottom of a screen and shot white dots straight up at falling squares.  Yet another featured two rectangles that moved vertically along the left and right sides of the screen, bouncing a small circle between them, and for every miss, the rectangle had to chug a beer.

Around the time my braces forced me to take all my pizza with a fork and knife, there was a great leap forward in the detail of video games. Instead of circles and triangles there were mushrooms and shells and plumbers leaping between free-floating platforms.  There was a robot that tucked into a ball and a little green knight that wielded a sword and candle.

Around the time my voice was cracking and I started taking showers everyday without being reminded, there was a popular game with a little blue hedgehog that sprinted through hill and dale in search of rotating gold coins. One time my friend showed me how to break into the games codes or something so that you make coins appear as if my magic, like some magic coin-making machine. I kept asking him to make more coins until he had his parents call my parents to come pick me up.

There were also video games where that featured one person beating up another person.  It was a lot like school, except instead of the victim having his parents call the assistant principal, he just flickered and vanished. The sound effects were another feature. “What are those horrible noises?” my friend’s mother yelled from the kitchen. “What horrible noises?” he answered, swinging a lamppost at a group of digital insurance salesmen.

A few years after I graduated college I went to see my brother, who at 12 had run away from home with a Super Nintendo tucked under his arm.  Now an adult, he was playing a so-called “first-person” video game, where you saw the world through the character’s eyes, felt what the character felt, lived what the character lived, and shot anything that moved.

But when he shot someone they would not just disappear or fall down or be consumed in a cartoonish blaze of fire.  Instead, their bodies disaggregated.  Heads, arms, and legs went flying in different directions.  Blood and brain matter were splattered against the wall.  Later on the stains would still be there. Eventually a team of digital forensic criminologists would show up and take samples of carpet fibers.

I tried to play.  The control pad was not like the two-button or four-button flat ones I was used to.  Instead, the controller was a bulky spaceship with buttons on the face, buttons on the sides and corners, trigger buttons underneath, and two joysticks for your thumbs that doubled as buttons.  And the game was now in three dimensions.  In addition to the traditional up-down-left-right, you could jump, crouch, and do Pilates.

My inexperience showed.  I have a hard enough time dealing with the z-axis in real life; in a video game I was dead meat. “How do you run with your head up?” I asked my brother, who shook his head and looked around to make sure none of his friends were around.  He changed the controller settings to accommodate a left-hander who read short stories, but I was not any better.  I died before I could splatter anyone’s brains or even kick them in the throat.

Too embarrassed to continue, I relinquished the controller, and walked away…head down.  The world of video games had side-scrolled without me.

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Remember When Wishing Someone a Happy Birthday Was Not Done Digitally?

Remember when wishing someone a happy birthday was not done digitally?

I do.

When I was a child, happy birthdays were wished in person, by a group of peers surrounding the birthday boy or girl, wearing cone-shaped hats with an elastic chinstrap stapled to the sides, and singing the song “Happy Birthday” while a parent tried not to drop the blazing cake on anyone’s head. When my closest friend at the time – closest meaning his house was closer than any other kid’s – turned five, I was positive that the instant he blew out the candles he would grow a few inches before my very eyes. I was disappointed to see that he stayed the same size and still refused to let me sign-out his He-Man figurines.

In elementary school the procedure was the same except that it was done during class time. These were the days before peanut allergies, and the procedure was similar except that a parent of the birthday boy or girl had to take time off of work to bring in a cake so that class time could be spent wearing the cone-shaped hats and singing the song. If your birthday fell on the weekend or during the summer you were out of luck.

In high school, though, the male students adopted an odd procedure for wishing other male students a happy birthday. Instead of wearing hats, or singing songs, or eating cake, or even just saying “Happy Birthday,” the birthday wishes came in the form of birthday punches.

My seventeenth birthday is etched in my memory. It was third period math class, and I was trying to decide how many lines of notebook paper I wanted my integral symbol to occupy, when a classmate in the next row said, “Hey Kaplowitz, I heard that today’s your birthday.”

“Oh really? No one told me.”

“Very funny.” And he came over and punched me seventeen times in the upper arm, hard. “And one more for good luck,” and he punched me again. Then another classmate got me. Then another. I tried to turn away but they had no problem going to the other arm. “Happy Birthday,” each would say before laying in. They were all lined up. It was like being mugged.

By fifth period my arms were throbbing and I couldn’t hold them up. I staggered into English class like an old boxer and the words going through my head were, “Please, please no more.” But they were there in the back of the classroom, like a gang, throwing their fists softly into open palms, waiting for me. “Hey guys, it’s Kaplowitz’s birthday today!” said the ringleader, the same one who first got me in math class. I cited an old rule from the Court of Chancery that permits only one series of birthday punches per person per birthday. “Wow, you’d make a good lawyer,” he says, and then starts punching me in the arm. He doesn’t get through them all because I start falling to the floor and our teacher starts passing out copies of A Separate Peace.

My arms eventually healed, which was fortunate because wishing someone a happy birthday today requires typing. But not much more than that. You enter a username and password on a social networking website, and the website reminds you of your friends’ birthdays. Click on their name, type “Happy Birthday” in the field, press return, and you’re done, your birthday wish slotted atop all the birthday wishes that came before. For a while I tried to add variety to my birthday wish by adding “Hope you have an awesome day,” but then one day I did that with two people who had the same birthday, and I got caught and it was awkward. At least I didn’t punch them.

The other day was the birthday of a good friend that I had not seen in a while. I could have posted a “Happy Birthday” on his profile page, but it felt so impersonal. I wanted to do something really special. So I texted him instead.

Happy birthday to my wife, who tolerates all this blogging, and who I think is expecting more than a text.

Thanks to Adam Foley for the topic.

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Remember Y2K?

Remember Y2K?

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

I do.

In the late nineties, as the year 2000 approached and everyone prepared to trade in their cars for flying machines, we started hearing about something called “Y2K.” At first I thought this was a knock-off of the singing group Boyz II Men, but it was in fact a computer bug, and meant that the disk space that computer engineers had saved for pictures of people’s pets was going to be needed to express the year in four digits instead of two.

Yes, the looming end-of-millennium disaster, the moment where humanity would finally face judgment for its wickedness and fanny packs, was not an asteroid, or Godzilla, or aliens, but the inability of computers to express the year in more than two digits. How exciting. Engineering hadn’t failed us – Hollywood had. I had to picture the disaster myself: At the moment the year changed from 1999 to 2000, and people everywhere were trying to pop champagne without breaking any rare vases, computers would think it was the year 1900 and instantly turn into ticker tape machines.

It is hard to exaggerate the hysteria that surrounded the Y2K bug. I will try anyway.

Planes were going to fall out of the sky.  Bank records would be deleted.  Toilets would overflow. My biggest worry was that report cards would be lost, including the 90 I got in English junior year, mainly on the strength of my essay on Lady Macbeth’s shoe collection.

The government and corporations began spending billions of dollars on Y2K compliance, and I started spending my weekends going through all my old homework assignments and adding “19” to every date. There were some who criticized the prevention, saying we were going too far. One critic said that the Y2K bug would cause nothing more than a few blank TV screens. When people heard that they doubled their efforts. We all went around telling everyone that there was no way we were going to be flying when midnight struck. For months I did nothing but make preparations to not be in an airplane at the stroke of midnight.

As New Year’s Eve approached, I decided I would not take any chances by going to some booze fest in a major metropolitan area. So instead I went to a booze fest in the country, at the home of a friend of mine that, he assured me, was not in the way of any flight path. It was a fun party and only a few people threw up – obviously from Y2K jitters. We were all worried about our digital infrastructure as well as our coats, which had no doubt been tossed onto a bed along with many other similar-looking coats.

Soon it was time to prepare for the new year and the awkward election between kissing, shaking hands, or waving. The ball in Times Square began its descent. Dick Clark began the final countdown. The 1980s band Europe sang “The Final Countdown.” In those last seconds I braced against the inevitable, took one last look at the world as I knew it, and took the last brownie, confident that no one would say anything at such a moment.

The ball hit the ground, and…nothing. No planes fell out of the sky. No bank accounts were deleted. One toilet overflowed, but I don’t think that had anything to do with computers. The world’s digital infrastructure was fine, and I was going to have to pay back my student loans after all.  “Auld Lang Syne” was just as depressing as ever.

No major problems were recorded, and the critics said this was proof that Y2K was a hoax all along. “You see?” they said, “We were right. You spent billions on Y2K compliance, and nothing happened.”  And the people who spent those billions said, “Exactly.”

The Y2K bug is thankfully, along with paying for news and music, part of the past. Now we can live in simple peace and harmony and await the “Y10K” bug in 9999. Maybe by then I’ll have found my coat.

Posted on by Mark Kaplowitz 0

Remember Wearing Fanny Packs?

Remember wearing fanny packs?

I do.

Fanny packs were manufactured pouches of canvas or leather that buckled around the waist and let people live out their fantasy of being marsupials. My fanny pack was turquoise and yellow, and it ensured that my wallet was accessible and that girls were not.  My mother wrote my name in it with black magic marker so that it would not get mixed up with some other kid’s turquoise and yellow fanny pack.

My fanny pack’s greatest journey was on a three-day class trip to Washington, D.C. For months I sold candy bars, saved my allowance, and begged my parents to write a check just so that I could wear my fanny pack to the top of the Washington Monument. I remember being more excited about having my Go-Bots camera and Bronx Zoo wallet at my fingertips than I was about visiting America’s greatest souvenir shops.

I think I will describe fanny packs to my children the way my parents described bell bottom pants to me: everyone wore them. All the kids on that class trip had fanny packs. I won’t go so far as to say that you were not cool without a fanny pack, but it certainly took you a lot longer to get your $10 out for an “authentic” copy of the Declaration of Independence without one.

We were at the Air and Space Museum, looking at the “Spirit of ’76” and wondering whether they served peanuts on it, when a friend of mine tapped me on the shoulder. “Look, Mark,” he said, pointing, “that’s kid’s wearing your fanny pack.” And, lo and behold, there was another kid with a turquoise and yellow fanny pack. He was walking away and I followed him into one of the simulators in the Flight Simulator Zone, where you could say “Folks, this is your captain speaking,” into a microphone and then see how creatively you could explain that the plane was not going to take off for eleven hours. It was dark in the simulator and I could not tell turquoise from other shades of blue. And when I emerged, he was gone. For the rest of that trip I kept an eye out for my fanny pack doppelgänger. I thought I saw him by the Lincoln Memorial, but it was just my own reflection in the Reflecting Pool. I never saw him again, and when I returned from the trip I retired my fanny pack.

I hear that fanny packs are back. They’ve added features like cup holders and USB ports, and it is rumored that Lady Gaga wears a fanny pack made of pastrami. I’ve even considered getting a new fanny pack just to hold all my rewards cards.  I saw the perfect fanny pack in a catalog and got very excited. It was black, and leather, and had a designer’s insignia emblazoned on the front. I took the picture to show my wife what I wanted for my birthday. But when she looked at it, she looked at me, and, without a word, slowly shook her head.

Posted on by Mark Kaplowitz 0