Old Times

I'm sitting at my desk reading about constitutional law, specifically about the 1st Amendment separation of church and state in public schools. All of a sudden, I heard a very familiar musical chime behind my piano jazz cd that was already playing. It was the ice cream truck. It's funny how a sound or smell will literally take me back to a certain time and memory.

When I was a kid, there weren't very many neighborhood children. In fact, there were none my age. I had to make up my own friend, her name was Kate. She always had blue jean overalls on and her hair was in braided pigtails. I would ride my bike over to "her house" and we'd wait for the ice cream truck to come by. Well, since there weren't very many children, it was unusual that I'd ever hear that quarky music. But in those rare instances, my brother, sister and I would run over to the truck and buy a Big Stick or those Mickey Mouse heads on a stick for fifty cents.

Now days, poor ice cream trucks don't seem to get good business. Everyone's so suspicious of strangers, and we're taught to fear everything. Back then, kids could ride their bikes around and buy ice cream off trucks without worry. I'm not that old, but I think it's funny that I could talk about "simpler times," as though everything 15 years ago was that simple.

I was sitting in the bookstore this weekend, and I saw a little girl with a laptop and a cellphone. I started laughing and told Danny how when I was young, I was in the library, not a bookstore. I'd have to pop in a quarter to use the payphone and call my mom to pick me up. Most likely, the line was busy because my brother or sister was using the phone, in which case I'd have to wait by the pay phone and call again and again.

My 11 year old cousin knows the ins and outs of the internet like the back of his hand. Again, it's very funny to my how I was the first one out of everyone I knew that got internet service. My friends would come over and ask me to show them how to use it. I tried to convince my dad to stop subscribing to the LA Times because it was now available online. For once, I'm glad he didn't listen to me. He told me sometimes it's better to hang onto the old things.