"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

I use my hand can opener, the same kind my mother always used. I turn the wheel and the opener spins around the metal top. I used to use my electric opener, but tabbed cans have made it obsolete. With my first bicycle I never had to worry which speed to use. It went slowly up hill, quickly down hill and as fast as I could pedal on the flat roads. The tires were big and bulky as were the fenders, front and back. Back pedals were the brakes. I always wore Keds all summer. They were just plain old sneakers with narrow toes. They had laces, and I had to learn to tie bows. My mother patiently help me tie bow after bow until I could do it on my own. My first portable radio had two knobs. One turned it on and off and was also the volume. The other tuned in all the AM radio stations. My radio was brown leather and had been a Christmas present. I remember all those Christmas lights on the tree. When one went out, so did all the others. My father would use a new bulb to test all of them. Woe betide if two bulbs were out. My father's car had a clutch on the steering wheel. The car had real air conditioning in those days. We opened the windows. On really hot nights we'd sleep outside or my dad would turn on the nosy fan which made whirring sounds every time it turned. My dad trimmed his bushes with hand clippers and used a push mower on his lawn. I had to dial a number on the phone, but first I had to check to make sure Mrs. McGaffigan, our party line partner, wasn't using it. My mother had a wringer washing machine and had to feed the clothes to get all the water out. She'd then hang them out to dry on the back line. I still love the smell of sheets off the line. Our games were played on boards. We either turned the card or flicked the spinner to move. Our men were mostly wooden pieces. The TV had tubes, and nothing about it was remote. We sat close to the small flickering screen and turned the channels by hand. It didn't matter to us. We still thought the TV a wonder of modern technology. My mother used a hand whisk to whip cream. She'd spin those rotors with a ferocity which still seemed to take forever. Jiffy Pop was another marvel. It was no more rotating a pan over a burner to keep the kernels from burning. I loved to watch the Jiffy Pop aluminum top get bigger and bigger.

We all thought we lived in a marvelous age.