My toys are over the hill

The generation gap is rearing its head in our household these days. It's not that we disagree on what is proper or fun. We just don't speak the same language. For example: I have heard about IPods for several years, but I still don't know exactly what they look like, and certainly don't know how to use one. I realize that they are designed to put a lot of stuff on one little contraption so that you don't have to carry that cumbersome little tape player.

O.K., that's where we part company. A little tape player that could play my favorite songs wherever I went would have been a tremendous thing for me several decades ago. Bing and I could have sung duets as I walked up the hill to school.

Somehow it doesn't seem that wonderful to a teenager who never knew the depravation of being without commercial music at any given moment. Yesterday we were in a conversation where someone was interrupted for about five minutes. When she was called away she said that she would be back to hear the rest of the story in a little while. The minute the listener returned, the young storyteller immediately started talking again as if there had not been any pause in their conversation.

I made a side remark to another adult at the table that, "I guess the needle was put back in the very same spot." A teenager overheard my remark and asked what I meant by that. I told her that the record kept on playing just as if it hadn't been stopped. The blank look on her face assured me that she had no idea what I was talking about. I added, "The older record players had a needle that you put in the grooves on the record to get the music started." More blank looks.

I reminded her of the shelf of records in our living room (which are never used) and explained further that these now could be put on a machine to play automatically, but earlier we had to manually put the needle in the slots to start them. I could see that I wasn't making headway so I tried comparing the record to a disc. Finally she began to realize what I was talking about.

But the idea that you had to get up and put on a new record each time you heard the song seemed very cumbersome to her.

I remembered my joy when I had saved enough money to buy a combination radio/record player, which could fit on my bedside table. I could rest in bed, in the dark, and listen to my favorite song and only have to reach a few feet to lift the needle up and play it again. That was really living! When we got a console record player with an automatic changer that could play as many as six records without attention from us, we felt we had reached the ultimate in convenience.

We now have advanced to a player that plays three discs which have up to twenty songs on each of them and the last one will continue playing until you turn it off or replace it. Why on earth would I need an IPod? When I am outside, the music I want to hear is from the birds and frogs. I don't want them drowned out by some rap music. Probably I would feel differently if the music was from the '40s, but I don't think so.

I still don't see the advantage of having hundreds of songs on the one little gadget when it seems that all they want to play is the same song, over and over.