Yesterday evening, I told Mr. W a story about a childhood eraser I had. It was a small flat eraser in the shape of a rotary dial phone. When I was in grade school, I showed the cute eraser to my cousin Jennifer, who’s a few years younger than me. She didn’t know what the eraser depicted. “It’s a phone,” I told her, incredulous. She said, “Nuh-uh. What’s that round thing in the middle?” “That’s where the dial is.” “There’re no buttons? Then how do you dial?” I had to explain to her how rotary phones work. You dial by turning the dial. Kids these days don’t know where the term “dialing the phone” comes from, because they’ve always pushed buttons. Today, they say they “punch in the numbers.” Just as the keyboards on computers now have an “enter” key, whereas the older keyboards had a “return” key. “Return” doesn’t make sense anymore because there’s no roller holding a piece of paper up that you have to return to the beginning left position to keep typing on your typewriter. And when the kids now say, “Ditto” to signal an agreement? They don’t know what that means. They have “xeroxes,” not “dittos.” They’ve never seen a teacher hand-crank a deep purple ink press original through a ditto machine to copy a worksheet to pass out to the class. (Mr. W interjected here that he used to love sniffing the chemicals on his dittos. But he grew up in the druggie age.)

Technology has never improved itself so exponentially as in our lifetime right now. In half a generation, we have nostalgia about more items than our parents had to reminisce about. My high school trig teacher, Mr. Brose, told us a story about how when he was in college, they had just come out with the scientific calculator (which was required basic equipment for our trig class). He remembers the early calculators that only had 5 or 9 digits on the display, and only did basic functions, and then they started coming out with more and more functions. “And then I turned to my buddy and made a crack, ‘In the future, they’re gonna come up with a calculator where you punch in some figures and you turn it over and they’ll GRAPH it for you on the back. HAHAHAHA!’ ” Now graphing calculators are a required basic of high school math classes.

Little boy to man on a cartoon: “Dad, tell me again about how when you were a kid, you had to walk all the way up to the TV to change the channel!”