~ I’m Living Now, But I Miss Then ~

In my head, I’m still thirty-something. My body knows different, but my head has to be reminded. Fortunately (I guess) there are reminders all around.
The TV shows are different. When I was a kid, television shows were basically rated G. They didn’t even have much cussing, let alone other questionable things. Bad guys were bad guys, but even they followed certain rules. If there were a few cuss words, usually the bad guys said them because they were, let’s face it, bad.
Nowadays, even the early prime time shows are sometimes rated R. Some are still rated PG-13, which was a rating that didn’t exist when I was a kid. The movie industry started using the PG-13 rating in 1984 (I googled it – another thing I couldn’t do as a kid). The first movie released with this designation was “Red Dawn”, which I watched because Patrick Swayze was in it. I was in college at the time so I didn’t have to worry about getting in the theater.
While we’re on the subject of acting, I also miss the way regular series TV shows had special guest stars each week who were big name stars – stars who were mainly on the “silver screen”. The kind who usually got really big paychecks.
TV back then also focused a little more on the action and a lot less on gruesome details. There were plenty of cop shows and detective shows, but a dead body was just a body that didn’t move itself. It could be “pulled from the river after a week” and it still was just a regular body that didn’t move, except that it was also soaking wet. If someone moved the dead body, it was just limp. Maybe a little bit of ketchup on the clothing if the person had supposedly been shot or stabbed. That was good enough for me. I got the idea without all the “realistic” detail.
Anyway, I get reminders in other parts of my life as well. I can remember when people started buying a lot of bottled water. I used to think that it was crazy to buy water when you could just get it from the tap. Naturally, I buy a lot of bottled water now. It’s very portable and makes a lot of sense since my guys can’t seem to keep track of a water jug.
I also used to think that it was insane to pay for groceries with a credit card. Why would you borrow money, which charged interest, when you could pay with a check and have it come directly out of your bank account with no extra charges? Gradually, debit cards came about, to take the place of checks, and now I pay for probably 95% of my purchases with a credit card.
Internet shopping is also a relatively new thing. (Of course, so is the internet.) I can remember getting catalogs in the mail and if I wanted to order from them, I filled out the order sheet, usually stapled in the center pages, figured the tax, and mailed in the order form with a check for the total amount of my purchase. It could take a couple weeks, but we waited. It didn’t seem that bad, back then. Now, as a whole, myself included, we have lost almost all of our ability to be patient.
Since Covid, we don’t even have to do our own shopping. We can send our shopping list in to the store, store employees go around picking up all the items, bagging them and sorting them by customer. Then the customer just drives up to an appropriate parking stall and an employee loads all the packages in the vehicle. Payment was made over the internet, so as soon as the employee closes the door, the customer can leave. It’s a whole new kind of one-stop shopping.
I haven’t even started on the subject of phones, but I think you get the idea. A lot of water has gone under this bridge, but it has gone so quickly.