holoblomo day 12: bearing witness

note: “holoblomo” stands for Horribly Local Blogging Month, my response to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) that happens every November. The NaNoWriMo challenge asks writers to compose 50,000 words in a month; I chose 10,000 as my goal. Enjoy.

So here we are.

I’ve always been fascinated by people who have lived in eras that have borne witness to incredible change. Whenever I would read the obituary of someone who lived from 1898 to 1998, I’d marvel at what these people must have seen and experienced. Imagine being a child at a time when women couldn’t vote, movies were new and silent, cars were still novel, and there was no radio, television, or airplanes... and then seeing the culture explode with promise, progress, and invention throughout your lifetime.

But lately I’ve come to realize that maybe I’m also one of those lucky ones, seeing great change unfold before me. When I was a child, computers run by punch cards filled entire rooms, telephones were still rented from Ma Bell, and if you wanted to watch any of the 13 channels that the dial offered, you had to physically be in front of the TV at the time your favorite show actually aired. Music was analog and available only via radio, record albums, and concerts.  People bought and used postage stamps. Credit cards were for rich people. Purses were tiny because they mostly just held cash, keys, lipstick and cigarettes. And even well into my adolescence, there was a staggering amount of racism, misogyny, and homophobia reflected as norms in the popular culture.

There has been more change than I ever realized there could be in the last 40 years, some of it not necessarily for the better (I miss being unreachable and Kodachrome), and some of it still has a long way to go. Granted, it’s not the kind of jet-packs-and-moving-sidewalks kind of change I anticipated. And goodness knows that social utopia is pretty much a forever away.

But yesterday, I went to the beautiful wedding of my friends Tom and David. And no one went whaaaat?

It’s not a hovercraft. But it’s still fantastic.

And that’s 4714 words. 

Yes indeed. Welcome to me.