I spent my formative years pre-TV. In other words, radio. And on nice days or pleasant balmy evenings, sitting on the swing on the front porch talking to people walking by. Then the majik of TV came along, and for a while people gathered at each other's homes to watch one of two possible channels, either one extremely fuzzy and occasionally just fading away entirely. But people considered it a social gathering. Eventually most people could afford one, and they stopped taking their walks in the evening, and they stopped sitting on the swings on the front porch, and they stopped visiting each other, and they turned the out-of-doors to the criminals and gangs.

Simultaneously during the 50s and beyond, more and more people could afford cars and seeking refuge from crime, they invented the suburbs which meant that they had to have two cars, and if they had a teenager, three. Gradually crime followed them to the suburbs. And the most noticeable feature of suburban architecture became the two- then three-car garage with the welcoming door, sans porch, shoved off somewhere to one side or the other, becoming the un-welcoming door.

But as with all technology, there are positives and negatives associated with them. Credited for the end of the Vietnam War was the ability to eat dinner and watch live transmissions from the battlefields. But also we have become so accustomed to that that isn't happening now. People have become so desocialized and self-centered that they can only accept that this war can go on indefinitely so long as there is no immediate impact upon their own family unit. Let other people's loved ones go and die, so long as it's not their loved ones.

So in effect TV and all its wonders, and the necessity of multiple cars meant dramatic desocialization. The internet and advancement of technology is the icing on the cake. What will come along in the future to decorate that cake?

I do occasionally get letters or cards with personal notes in them, but invariably they are from people of my own age group. And I can sit on my porch in my swing and wave and chat to people walking by. But again, they are people in my own age group. And, I am proud to say, I also see young people riding their bikes on occasion through our senior mobile home park since thankfully, it is not a gated community.

Many women joined the workforce during WWII. Our biggest factory in town made pipe fittings for water and gas. They converted to making bullet and bomb castings during that time. But as soon as the men returned from war to claim their old jobs the women were let go.

My mother made the sand castings for these. Don't ask for details, I couldn't give them to you. All I can remember is that she had to cover her head with a cloth in much the same fashion as Aunt Jemima, and when she came home at night she spent a great deal of time in the basement since she was covered from head to toe with sand, and carefully rinsing her hair before gently washing it, otherwise the sand would cause her head to bleed. She even had sand in her eyelashes.

In May of 1945 she gave birth to my sister, so she stayed at home and took in extra money by doing laundry and ironing. I can remember her getting up at 2AM to light the fire under the water heater, return to bed until 4AM then up to do the laundry. If it was winter she would hang the clothes out on the line and let them freeze dry, bring them in stiff and stand up the bluejeans over the floor heater vents until they collapsed. She ironed everything, from socks to shorts, to handkerchiefs. If it were raining she would hang them in the basement to dry.

I was born in 1936, by the way.

We had a coal burning furnance in the basement, and my mother would break apart the ashes and shovel them into a container, and she and I would cart them up the stairs after they had cooled off, and dump them in a pile out in back of the house. This pile became the source of great pleasure for us neighborhood kids, because we played "King of the Mountain" on them. She also dumped all her table scraps on the same pile, so we had wonderful crops of tomatoes and potatoes as well sprouting up from that ash pile.

We must have been eating organicly during those years, because we used to go out in the garden and hand-pick tomatoe worms, and our sweet corn always had worms in them, which had to be cut out before we could eat it. We used to shake something on the silks of the corn to discourage the worms, what it was I can't remember, and I suppose that stopped alot of critter damage, really don't know.

I do know that we loved spiders and I was taught really early on never to bother them. I would spend hours sitting and watching them in their web doing what they do, and even helping them along by capturing ants and other small insects and throwing them into the web. I still find that nothing is quite as unique as a spider web in early morning dew, sun glistening from the drops of water collecting in the web and sparkling. Course, now that I live in the desert, that is indeed a rare if impossible occurance.

Edward Sherbeyn - The Grasshopper Mouse - Onychomys Torridus Books

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