How Things Have Changed

When I was a kid there were two things that rarely happened and when they did we were very excited. The first was going out to dinner. Going out to dinner was something that might have happened once a year.

We didn’t have a lot of places to go out to eat and children were rarely included in dinners out. Our “out to dinner” was a Swanson’s frozen dinner at home with a babysitter.

The second thing that rarely happened in my childhood was the delivery of a package. We didn’t “order” things. I can remember going to friend’s houses and spending hours looking at the giant Sears catalog. We never had one of those, or a Penny’s or any other catalogs.

The only exception was the FAO Schwartz catalog that came in October. We would pour through it circling both the live pony and the stuffed pony you peddled from the cart it pulled. They were roughly the same price so we thought if we circled both we might get one. We got none.

At Christmas sometimes a package would come from one of the vendors who sold things to my father. The printing company he used for Avon would send the largest tower the Harry and David Company sold. No wonder since Avon was the largest printing client in the country. By the time my father got home all the chocolates had been eaten out of the gift, but the pears were fully intact.

A package that arrived at our house was fair game for any child to open. There was no regard for an addressee. The ups man had barley turned his truck around in the driveway before we had ripped open any box and examined the contents in case there was a pony in there.

Given this history I find it amazing that now packages arrive at our house and sit unopened on the hall chest for days. Once in a while Russ will say, “what’s in that box.” I will shrug and say, “dunno.”

We order so frequently that we forget what we order and it rarely is something we need in an emergency. The box sitting in the front hall now has been there at least three days. I think it is vitamins, but I still have others so I have have been in no hurry to open it. My childhood self would have lost my mind at the thought of a delivered box going longer than ten minutes unopened.

My childhood self would also be shocked about how often we eat out. It is just not as exciting as it was when it only happened once a year. I guess if the only things that came in childhood packages were vitamins we might have given up on opening those too.