The difference between my childhood and that of my granddaughters is more a matter of alternate realities, than of simple time:
For them, televisions have always been in color; I didn't watch my first episode of Scooby-Doo until I was nearly ten, and that was only because we were on furlough in the USA.
My granddaughters don't remember a world without cell phones; until I was in boarding school, the closest telephone was at our neighbor's house. He kept a lock on the dial to discourage unauthorized use.
The girls each have an entire town of Barbies and friends; my first Barbie was a gift from my sister, when I was nine. I promptly renamed her Jean the Lone Rangerette and used an indelible marker to paint a mask on her face.
On the other hand, my granddaughters have never swung out on a vine over a banana patch nor had a pet tarantula.
Even our childhood foods are different. For my granddaughters, the jury is still out on natural peanut butter. For me, that's the only "real" kind - like what I would eat as a child. It was a family affair: Dad would bring the enormous bag of peanuts home, Mom toasted them, and then we kids would sit on the back porch, blowing away the chaff to leave little bare toasted peanuts, and then pouring them carefully into the hopper of the grinder. I was the littlest and therefore usually exempt from grinding duty.
All of this is of great fascination to the girls. On Earth Day, they love turning out all the lights, helping me set up candles, and playing card games in the dark. In this age of ever-present technology, it's as close as to my childhood as I can take them for an hour.
This past Earth Day, I was reminded that technology is more pervasive than ever. A die rolled off the table and under a bookshelf. The candle light didn't reach, and I commented, "If we had a flashlight, I could see it" - to which both girls immediately pointed to my iPhone and said, "Don't you have an app for that?"
It isn’t that I bear a grudge against technology. It's just that sometimes I miss the softer rhythms of life. Usually, all I hear is the manic whir of my personal hamster wheel.
The other day, I made myself a folded peanut butter sandwich. It was a moment of rebellion: work was piled up, there was no time to stop for lunch, but I could and would have an extra-stuffed peanut butter sandwich. As I finished each page of the medical report I was translating, I put the sheet of paper in a pile for the shredder and took a bite of my sandwich.
When the job was finally done, my foggy brain remembered - standard operating procedure: always shred medical reports as soon as I'm done with them. I turned the shredder on and began to feed it. The whine rose and fell as metal teeth chewed noisily.
All of a sudden, the whine got louder and a little desperate. Instead of "wah-wah-wah", it was more like "Wowarowa-wowarowa". The paper was through, but the poor shredder kept howling. I turned it off and peered into its teeth like a piranha dentist. Peanut butter. There was peanut butter on the teeth and in the gears. I looked back at the rest of the papers waiting to be shredded: a tell-tale blob of ground peanuts still clung to one of the pages. It seems I had laid my fat little sandwich on the stack of papers to be shredded, and it lost some of its stuffing.
This is a good time to thank everyone for their helpful suggestions on de-peanut-buttering my shredder. In the end, I simply called it a day. As I walked outside laughing, it occurred to me that my siblings and I would have seen great possibilities in that shredder. Imagine how many pounds of peanuts those little metal teeth could turn into paste, all without kid-powered grinding!
The shredder recovered. I did not; I was left hungry to hop off the hamster wheel more often and listen to the elemental sounds of life. I may even may pack a peanut butter sandwich for the road.
