Things are different in Texas now. When I was a kid, I had to go inside to make a call. Now I often have to go outside to make one. They call that progress?
When I was growing up, we had one phone on the wall, and we all ran to answer it just to find out who was calling. Now we each have our own phone, and we know who is calling before we decide not to answer.
We used to stay in the car to fill up and go inside to eat. Now it is the other way around. We get out to fill up and get our food through the drive-through.
Children once drank water from the hose or an outdoor faucet, and now they run straight inside from this classic summer experience to get bottled water.
Only one in five of us lives in the country anymore, although many city folks try to keep a small farm or ranch for weekends.
The small farmer is disappearing, replaced by huge commercial farms where the tractors never sleep. Even today’s small farmers probably use GPS and long-range weather forecasts—something their grandfathers would have considered blasphemy. As one old farmer I knew used to say: “Don’t watch the weather, son; watch the animals. They’ll tell you what’s coming.”
Gasoline once cost 35 cents a gallon, and someone else pumped it, washed the windshield, and vacuumed the car. Air and water were free. Now it is a dollar for air. A dollar for good Texas air! I never expected to pay for a sip of water, much less for air. That is something that never would have occurred to me.
Sundays were quiet back then. Everything was closed. Everything except movie theaters and a few restaurants was closed so people could go to church. They were called blue laws. Those are gone. They have been replaced by blue-light specials.
Most food was cooked and eaten at home. Eating out was rare. Now many people I know eat out for almost every meal.
Dinner was at noon. The evening meal was called supper.
One television per house. Now there are televisions in every room. Sometimes two in one room, competing with each other. We had three channels. Now there are 300 and nothing on.
Today’s teenagers are happier surfing the internet than cruising around town.
Having too many windows open means something completely different today.
We have more drugstore cowboys than real ones. And cattle are rounded up with helicopters instead of horses.
Cowboy trucks used to be battered four-wheel-drive vehicles built for off-road use. Now urban cowboys have shiny four-wheel-drives whose enormous tires have barely touched anything but pavement.
Yes, things are different now. But there is one part of progress I embrace with open arms: air conditioning, which was perfected right here in Houston. In the old days, we just sweated all the time. Now we are cool almost everywhere we want to be. And even the word “cool” is still cool. It has never gone out of style.
And yes, I like that movie theaters show more than one film a week. I like the democratization of information and the amazing number of choices available in the world. I am grateful for advances in medicine and efforts to gradually overcome many “isms”—racism, sexism, ageism, ethnocentrism. Unfortunately, rampant narcissism is healthier than ever, as common as ocotillo in Terlingua and the spines on a horned toad.
