Bernhardt column: Different, yet alike

I spent a good deal of time with my nineteen-year-old daughter during the recent holidays, and I enjoyed our moments together.

She did take the occasion at lunch the other day to remind me that I am nearly three times her age. I knew that, but hearing it vocally caused the words to burn into my ego a little.

Nearly three times her age!

It also caused me to reflect on the wide differences in our respective generations, and just how different our lives really are. Or are they?

I’ve watched many innovations emerge during my time on this earth, things that she merely takes for granted. I speak often of them, and though she at least tries to look interested when I reminisce, I can tell a lot of my experiences are lost on her.

That’s probably normal. Most of my parent’s experiences were lost on me too.

For example, she has never known a time when TV wasn’t in color. For that matter, she has never known a time when you couldn’t record a show and watch it later.

I, on the other hand, walked 20 miles barefoot through a blinding blizzard to watch my first color TV show. It was “Flipper” on NBC, and the thrill of watching the NBC peacock spread its colorful wings for the first time still sends chills up my spine.

She lives in an age when a cell phone is practically a part of her body. I lived in an age when you had one phone in a central location of your home, and you were probably on a “party” line.

For those of you under fifty, a party line was a telephone line you shared with several other residences. Having a private line was considered a luxury.

It was quite common to pick up your phone to make a call and hear your neighbor already on the line. You simply hung up the phone and waited until later to make your call.

Inconvenient? Yes, but they could also provide some interesting listening if you happened to pick up your handset while your neighbor was on the line spreading a juicy piece of gossip.

My daughter doesn’t remember a time when water wasn’t bottled. It spewed from a garden hose on a hot summer’s day.

She has no conception of a movie theater with only one screen. Shopping to her has always meant going to a mall or a visit to a website.

Adding a song to my music library involved a trip in my parent’s car to a music store. For her, the same process involves only a click on a computer screen.

Computers in my youth were large elaborate devices that filled a whole room. No one except large companies actually owned one. To her, they are everyday conveniences that open the door to a world of knowledge — or allow you to tweet a message to hundreds of followers.

Tweeting, by the way, was something that only birds did in my world.

Eating out is normal to her. It’s the home cooked meal that’s the rarity. In the dark ages of my youth, your parents prepared full meals – including vegetables - daily. Especially vegetables. You ate out maybe once a month, and it was most often at a place called a fish camp.

She’s also never known a summer day without air conditioning. When I was her age, an attic or box fan gave you all the heat relief you were going to get. Cars came equipped with a “460” air conditioner. You rolled down all four windows and went 60 miles an hour.

On the other side of the coin, she thankfully also can’t remember a time when we didn’t buckle our seatbelts when we ride in a car. Seat belts weren’t widely used before the early 80s and far too many people still don’t use them today.

I can not only remember when we didn’t buckle up, but I would make myself a bed in the back window of our family car on trips to the beach, virtually begging to become a human projectile. And children my age can also recall taking trips in the back of an open pickup truck.

She’s also fortunately never known the threat of polio and many other crippling diseases that were common in my day. Modern advances in medical science have seen to that.

And all her life, her friends came from different racial and social backgrounds. She’s never known a time when you couldn’t be friends with someone just because they were the wrong color, or came from a different culture.

So I suppose it all balances out in the end. Your life and your child’s life are probably quite different in many ways. Maybe they’ve missed many pleasures we took for granted, but they’ve also missed some things that they can well live without.

Still, we’re very much alike. We’re both able to share the simple things all generations have known; a mountain sunset, a roaring fire in the fireplace on a winter’s day, a rainbow after a storm, and the surrounding love of good family and friends.

Maybe we aren’t so different after all.

Kent Bernhardt lives in Salisbury.