I remember when the new century started and everyone was talking about how much change someone born in the early years of the old century would have seen. Their world went from steam ships to rocket ships, from horse and carts to luxury cars. Well, I think those of us born in the mid-century have seen some pretty massive changes too.

First of all, we were the original free-range children. I remember a group of us getting on our bikes and riding for miles. We had bags of food, knives, matches and can openers. We rode up into the forested hillsides and spent the day building a fire pit, cutting sticks to roast hotdogs, opening cans of pork and beans, all without adult supervision. We also walked down to the creek and spent days making the old swimming hole deeper by moving rocks to create a dam. Not all of us could swim, and some of us were quite young, but off we went, all alone. I also remember epic neighbourhood games of baseball in an empty field. We played for hours. We made up our own rules, regulated ourselves and had fun. When we played baseball in school, we all knew the basics of how to throw, catch and hit, which is not the case now. We also had massive games of kick-the-can, a game that seems to have disappeared. It was so much fun to hide in the shadows, trying to get close enough to kick the can and free those who had already been found. We drank out of hoses and creeks, we rode our bikes along the main roads, we built huge forts in the woods and in the snowbanks along the driveways, we were outside more than we were inside.

We were outside more than inside because there was not much to do inside. We had a black and white television that got two channels. I remember my dad on the roof moving the antenna to improve the picture quality. In the winter we got into our pyjamas and put on boots and winter coats to trudge next door to watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and other Christmas specials on our neighbour’s colour TV. I remember watching Mr. Dress-up when we came home for lunch. Who goes home for lunch now? Neighbourhood schools are too far away for most kids to do that, and there are rules about leaving the grounds. We were six and seven year olds, walking to and from school twice a day. There were older kids around, but no adults. At night we would play board games and eat popcorn Dad made on the stove. He would put it into a big brown paper bag to soak up the oil. He’d salt it and shake it and then roll down the top of the bag. It was delicious!

We went to high school in a bigger community and most of us took the bus. There were no late buses to take us home after basketball or volleyball practices. Some of our friends had cars so if we were lucky we’d get home that way but sometimes we hitchhiked home. We didn’t really think anything of it. After tournaments the team bus would stop by the side of the road to let people off. No one checked to see that we made it home safely. We just got off and walked home, in the dark, late at night, all alone.

Long distance phone calls were a big deal. I remember my dad shouting down the phone, timing every second because it was so expensive. Heck, regular phone calls were a big deal. We had a party line with the neighbour, the same one with the colour TV and if you were on too long she’d pick up and tell you to get off. We had one phone in our house and it was on the wall in the kitchen. Everyone heard everything. If you wanted privacy you would have to pull the receiver around the corner, which stretched the cord and made Dad mad.

Our graduating class was huge, Most of us girls went on to traditional female jobs – teachers, nurses, secretaries.  That’s what was expected of us. I think we had one lawyer, a couple of pharmacists and maybe an optometrist in the mix. Most of us got married a few years out of high school. Our weddings were relatively simple affairs. We rented the local union or church hall, decorated it with balloons and crepe paper banners and flowers and had the ladies’ auxiliary of one of the fraternal groups, or the church ladies, cater it. Most of the guests were family members and friends of our parents. The only theme to our wedding was the colour choice – blue and yellow. The weddings we had and the ones we went to were a far cry from the spectacles we go to today.

We didn’t have video games or cell phones. However, we still managed to find something to do and people still got hold of us to tell us what we needed to know. We had to get up to change the channel or adjust the volume on the TV. We didn’t have loads of expensive toys to stimulate our imaginations. We had to say please and thank you to adults and those adults didn’t think twice about bopping us if we were rude. If we got into trouble at school we got into trouble at home. We had to change out of our school clothes when we got home. We had daily chores. Now, I’m not going to tell you life was perfect. We knew of fathers who beat their wives and children. We drove in cars with drunk drivers. Kids with learning disabilities dropped out of school in Grade 8. We said and did things that today would be unthinkable. Society was guilty of almost every “ism’ there is – sexism, racism, ageism –  it was a different time. And 50 years from now will be another different time and children from this century’s mid-point will look back with nostalgia at their primitive video games and hand-held cell phones and their children will find it hard to believe they could have actually lived like that. However, they will believe them because there will probably be some TV show, or whatever the equivalent is, glorifying the rocking or cool or whatever 2050s.