The Electronic Age And Second Thoughts

Back in the early 1950s. living in a two bedroom spacious apartment on West 97 Street in Manhattan's Upper West Side with the whole block full of parking spots, I will tell you about two items that are way different from today. I used to listen to the WMCA Good Guys who played Elvis and Little Richard on an old and cracked Zenith plug in radio.We were not poor and our rent was $119/month and that old Zenith was the only "device" our family had and we were fine with it. We also spent hours talking to each other.

Last night our grown kids were out, my wife and I spent hours of time on the 5 laptops that run our businesses. Our cell phones were going and glitches and software problems abounded. One of our dental care providers had to be reviewed. When I was a child, the good doctor used to come up to our apartment from his own in the building with a big black bag. In it he had every shot and pill to cure  my sister and I. My Dad gave him
$5 and that was our health care. It must have worked because I have never been sick since then and I will be 59 in January. If you had to have surgery at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital or St. Luke's and you had to stay for awhile, since there were no credit cards to get us in debt, you paid maybe $600 cash for the stay at a race track window on the first floor. All I can say is that we are in a preposterous era today when you think of how complicated and tension filled everything we do is. We even had repairable sex and fabulous music for a long time until that changed.
Last night was Christmas Eve and I was home alone with my wife of 28 years. You know that we did not have much to say which is normal at this juncture in wedded bliss. So I went to bed with my Apple IPhone set to my Pandora App and playing my station Bob Dylan Only. When Tom Rush and Bob Seger started to wind down as I drifted off to memories of a packed McDougal Street and the magnificent Clearwater on a clean Hudson, the device went off. I woke up Christmas Day cradling my new Age Zenith in the Electronic Age and feeling edgy about what is to come.