Past and Future

So much changes from when a person is a child to when they are older. There's the obvious change for me, at least, to living near a beach - so much fun to spend summers on the beach - to now, when I live in a land-locked province. We do have lakes and then there's the Ottawa River. Some sections have been made into beaches. Unfortunately, they are not near the downtown. Yet, there's other, social changes. Remember standing up in the car when you were little? Life before seat belts. No one was afraid to die but my father, in the mid-sixties, had seat belts put in. He made us use them. In some way, I suspect to get us to stop horsing around in the back. We never got into an accident so we never had to see if they worked but at my age, I'm grateful he took the time to care. Related to summer, I wanted to go to the beach by myself when I was four. No way, my mother was adamant, not until you're in school. Six. Now, I just want to say, my mother wasn't an awful woman but there are a lot of people who may not agree with letting a six year old go on her own to the beach or anywhere not under adult supervision. But like I said, it was a different age. There was not much said about people who kill children, in fact, there weren't many people who did that kind of thing. Nobody thought some man in a car would bother me. And I never did get bothered. And then there's what you might call generation changes. The sixties when I grew up began to get fearful after drugs came around. People warned us that we would think we were birds and jump out a window if we took LSD and other such things. Come to think of it, it was all different after kids began taking drugs. The generation gap began but for kids my age, who were being told by teenagers not to trust anyone over thirty and people over thirty telling us not to trust teenagers, it was all very confusing. I think that's where kids began to think they had to do everything themselves. They had to learn all they could, not from their parents, but from their peers and life. So now we're in a very distrustful age, where hockey coaches molest children and nobody looks up to anyone except celebrities anymore. I think that's because celebrities don't mind saying that they're screwed up whereas 'respectable' people who molest kids will lie about who they really are. That being said, I'm glad I made it through to this time of life, just to see all the changes, especially the ones I never knew were coming. I don't know what young people will make of the future but I expect that it will be a complete surprise to them. Just like it is for me.