'I Am Always Remembering..."

I remember gas prices this low when I was a kid, and this was when didn't get out of the car; the attendant pumped the gas, cleaned your windshield and checked your oil. By the time I was old enough to pump the gas in the age of self-service, it was 79.9 cents a gallon. I can remember gasoline stations pasting $1 stickers next to the price per gallon window on the old analog gas pumps since when they were designed, no one thought gas would ever cost more than 99.9 cents a gallon!

When I was a kid, you were literally a "baller" if you had one of these beauties, and deservedly so since 77 cents could've bought you a Big Mac and fries.

I've used every one of these and a bunch of other physical media types like Zip disks and every iteration of CD and DVD. I bought my first personal computer in 1990 from Sears Roebuck & Co., it was a Apple II clone called a Laser 128 EX with dual 5" floppy disk drives. In my career I've used main frames, PCs and lots of specialty digital devices. I wrote programs in BASIC, COBOL, and FORTRAN and I still use DOS commands every day.

I was shocked as a kid to discover that most families only had one phone like this... We had 4 extensions in our home, a pink version in my parents' bedroom, a black one on the telephone table in the upstairs hallway, another black one in the kitchen on the breakfast room counter and a black wall phone just outside our rumpus room in the basement... Our phone number was Webster 5-1034 or usually given to others as "WE 5-1034," we kept that phone number from 1954 to 2024 when my late brother who inherited our family home sold it to our nephew after having moved in with me and my family during the pandemic.

I can remember 13 presidents in my lifetime so far... With most of them being reasonably sane with the exception of the current officeholder. I remember when I was a kid thinking we were extremely lucky to live in Detroit since whenever there was a presidential address it would be on all three television channels, but since Windsor, Ontario, Canada was right across the river we had a 4th channel, CBET-TV9 we could watch that wasn't showing the president's address.

It's quite sobering to realize how drastically the world has changed in the short time I've been alive and it's now a constant reminder that most of my life is now well behind me... I am old now, but I don't have many terrible regrets; I have managed to live many of my dreams, even if some became real only briefly. Really the hardest part of growing old for me has not been the arrival of aches and pains in my body (although I have them, now), but rather it's realizing that I have the dreams of men still young while the time left to live them is now short.

"I am always remembering...