Remembering the long-ago 1900s

My wife had been explaining how PE was when she was in school. Comparing it to today. Explaining to my daughter the differences.

And that is when the world came crashing down …

“Mom,” the little 8-year-old said in a dignified manner, “we don’t do it like you did in the 1900s.”

Ka-Blammo!

The 1900s.

At first I got a chuckle out of it. “Haha, honey. The kid just called you an old person from the … Hey! Wait a minute. I’m from the ‘1900s!’”

My daughter smiled. I don’t think she realized what she had done. How she had wrecked our worlds.

I mean, dang, the kid was right. We were from the 1900s. She was from the 2000s. A child of the future. We were old-timey pioneer folk from the distant past. “Ma, could you run outside and fetch a pail of water while I change the oil on the family cow?” I felt like I should be sitting in a straw hat talking about life during the dust bowl. “Yeah, sonny, it was literally a bowl, and it was made out of dust. We ate our cereal from it.”

“Quick! Look it up on your iPad. What’s the old coot talking about?”

The 1900s. He’s talking about the far away 1900s.

No, no, my wife and I reasoned. The 1900s refer to that period before the 1910s. Right? A mere decade. The 1900s shouldn’t lump together decades and decades of people like we do with the 1800s, or those deadbeats from the 1600s. (Heathens!) It shouldn’t separate generations like some kind of geriatric Berlin Wall. Right?

And yet, that’s exactly how it felt to hear it. To realize that as little kids we dreamed of listening to crystal clear music on things called CDs, and now even those are old-fashioned. Relics of the 1900s.

We’re product of another century. A whole other millennium. In my daughter’s eyes we 1900-ers must just be old-fashioned museum pieces.

Should I be in overalls on the front porch? Rocking my rocking chair? Drinking lemonade from a jelly jar? Playing checkers? Waving to tourists who come by to see the 1900s Neanderthal who talks about life before everything had a touchscreen? “You couldn’t program your banana back in the 1900s. You just had to eat it.”

Is this what my child is telling me?!? This futuristic child of the 2000s. Separated from me by a millennial demarcation line. Ouch!

Get used to it, people. We’re the old timey folks from the past. Nineteen-hundreds dinosaurs, and like the 1600-ers, our era didn’t know anything about PE either.

Brian Thompson took third place in the Florida Press Club’s 2014 Excellence in Journalism commentary category for papers with up to 40,000 circulation. First place went to the Tallahassee Democrat and second to the Palm Beach Daily News.

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