My dad came to visit us this weekend from New Jersey. We had a nice visit and my dad told me something that made me think about how everything seems to have become much more disposable than it was in the past.
My dad was wearing a forest-green tee shirt on Sunday and he mentioned that he had bought it in the GDR (the German Democratic Republic) a few years before we moved to Canada. I was really amazed. We came to Canada in 1983. That tee shirt is over 30 years old! It doesn't show it a bit. It could be any shirt that one can buy in a department store. Or could it? Would your Zellers, Walmart or even your Sears purchase last that long? I highly doubt it. Things just aren't made to last any more.
This morning as I gave First Son his breakfast of Alpha Bits and milk, I took a good look at the spoon in my hand before I gave it to him. To the untrained eye, it would just look like any unassuming children's spoon. But I know that this spoon was my brother's when he was little. My mother saved it and gave it to me when I had children. The spoon is about 40 years old!
In my kitchen cupboard, I still have a red plastic sippy cup that my grandmother gave me for my children. They have outgrown it, but I am hanging on to it. It used to be my mom's, so it is over 50 years old.
To me, these things are pretty amazing, but it also makes me a bit melancholic. So many objects, like my son's spoon, are a part of our simple daily lives, yet they hold the stories of generations. I wonder if future generations will appreciate their simple endurance of time. They are like the stories our elders tell us, bits and pieces of the past.
I think that it is important to talk about my parents and grandparents to my children, as well as about my own childhood, but it saddens me in a way that they will never truly know how it was for us. Sometimes, on a cool summer morning like we had this morning, the freshness in the air reminds me of fresh cool mornings when I was in grade two. I remember arriving at school, looking forward to the day. Everything was cool and fresh, but there was excitement in the air because the end of the school year was only three or four weeks away. I wonder if my kids feel the same way about this morning.
First Son has taken to writing "novels" on the computer. (They are each a page or two long. lol) This morning he was typing after breakfast and he asked me if there were cars and airplanes in 1987. This made me laugh, but it also made me realize he knew nothing about what life was like when I was a child. I mean, he knows I came to Canada in 1983 on an airplane and he knows we had a car when I was little, but he can't put two and two together and see that that was my time, the time when I was a child. It's weird. Maybe it's just his age. He is only eight, after all.
I do talk to my children a lot about the past, for example when I tell my son that his uncle ate with the same spoon when he was little. I truly hope the values that are intended with comments like that will sink in, along with a little piece of myself and who am I. What we hold in our hearts is all that is left to us of the past.
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