I’m Old. These Are the Things I Miss

It is, as they say, the little things.

My sister and I, being silly at my 70th birthday party. She agrees with me.

I just turned 70 years old last week. My dear husband of 47 years is not far behind me. We have seen a whole lot of new things in our lifetimes, and we have, for the most part, adapted well.

But we have spent the past four days trying to undo the damage that we suffered from one resourceful and convincing hacker. No details are needed, other than to tell you that one tiny, trusting “click” on a phone, and Mr. BadGuy gained access to our banking information. It’s a damn good thing that since the pandemic, we have kept a cache of cash hidden in our house. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to fill up the gas tank or buy more vodka.

All is mostly, kinda-sorta fixed-ish now, although it will no doubt take us an entire month to notify every “automatic payment” receiver of our new numbers and to change every single password to a “strong password” which will be impossible to write down accurately or remember.

We are old.

We are fed up.

This afternoon we were sitting with our feet up, ice packs on our necks, sipping Lemontinis. We began to reminisce about the “good old days” when life was manageable.

“Remember how exciting it was when phones started to be hung on the wall instead of sitting on the counter?” Paul asked. I answered, “Yes! And the extra-long cords that let you drag the receiver into a closet to talk to your friends without your little sister hearing!” In those simpler, more innocent days, it was impossible to lose one’s phone. We miss that.

We went on for a while, chuckling at what used to be our normality.

Because, you see, there is a lot about those low-tech days that still seems appealing to us. Don’t get us wrong: we are all in favor of enhanced MRIs and better cancer treatments.

But we miss the old days.

I miss money. Actual paper bills, kept in your wallet in order of worth. Money that could be used to pay for groceries without cards, pins, security codes or the danger of having your life savings wiped out by a guy Guam.

I miss mail. Real, honest-to-God mail that came in an envelope delivered by your friendly neighborhood mail person. Sure, some of it was useless, but at no point was that mail sent with the intent to steal our identities, sign us up for products we already have or will never use, or inform us that our Uncle was held captive in Jordan and needs $1,000 right now or he’ll be killed.

I miss television. I miss knowing, even as a ten-year-old, that Batman and Lost in Space were both on at 7:30 Tuesday evenings and that you had to choose one or the other, because it was impossible to watch both. I miss when TV was free. I miss the times when you walked up to the TV and turned to 4, 5 or 7, because that’s all there was. You didn’t need to spend a full hour before the nightly news trying to figure out which clicker is for ROKU and which is for DirectTV and which one of those was the place you could find local news anyway.

I very much miss NOT knowing everything about everybody on earth. I miss the days of passing an acquaintance at the store and saying, “Hi!” without knowing that she had eggs Benedict for breakfast with her wildly successful daughter, the lawyer. I miss the days when celebrities were mysterious.

I miss bringing a quarter to school every Thursday for “banking day,” when we’d use pencils to write down each weekly deposit and add up our totals, feeling safe and secure, knowing that at the tender age of 8, we had already amassed a fortune of almost $5.00.

I miss maps. The kind that you had to unfold and spread out and read carefully by the side of the road. I miss that kind of understanding of our towns, states, and roads. We had to think about where we were and where we wanted to be. I liked that, although I was not the best map reader. I liked it because it gave me a sense of control that GPS maps have stolen from me.

I miss talking to people who disagree with my views. These days it is too painful and too fraught to explain why we support the political views that we do. But when we were young, our after-dinner conversations most often focused on the news of the day, and we would discuss, argue, shake our heads, and eat our desserts all at the same time.

I miss normal weather, regular seasons, predictable planting dates, and white Christmases.

Yes. I am old. So is Paul.

We embrace much of what is new and wonderful (music on demand?! Online grocery deliveries when we are sick? Paperless billing?).

But we miss the days when the layers of tech complications hadn’t taken over our lives.

My only hope is that I won’t need to use “two-factor” authentication to post this little rant.