New Orleans       Audiobooks are an interesting footnote to modern life.  On long drives or periods of boredom, free apps like the public library’s Libby can fill the time, hold your attention, and even teach you some things, if you’re lucky.  Predictably, a lot of what’s on offer is what is popular, since the job of a public library is trying to hold onto historic relevancy.  I’ve sort of solved the problem on my long flights and drives by going with the classics I’ve never read.  I’ve done Tolstoy’s War and Peace and am minutes away from finishing Anna Karenina.  Both have been surprisingly interesting, but I’ll talk about that another time.

These audiobooks entail commitments, 60 hours and more than 30 hours, so often it means renewing them off and on over a period of months, if others want to take a taste.  In between, I’ve done Proust’s Swan’s Way and am now working on The Guermantes Way, two of the epic volumes of his multi-book opus, Remembrance of Things Past.  Proust is a bit more of a slog, because he can go on and on and on about almost anything as even the casual reader knows having heard about his famous obsession with madeleine cookies.  His admiration of hawthorns in spring is even greater, but my personal theory now is that most readers only were able to endure a bit of the first book, refused to soldier on, and fixed on the madeleines to shine off that they read the rest.

All of this was on my mind when mi companera made a crack about my experiment with a Garmin watch, recommended by a colleague, and referred to it as my “Dick Tracy watch.”  I thought then and now, how many people would have a clue in Gen X’s, Z’s, and whatever what she might have been talking about?  I interrupted her work asked her to give me five minutes on similar subjects, so between us in that brief space, here are vivid memories unknown in modern days.

• Who knows what a clutch is anymore or four-on-the-floor?
• Do people still eat chip beef on toast or what was called less politely stuff-on-a-shingle?
• There are jokes about Jello salad, formerly a staple, but how many would respond if offered “congealed salad,” which is the same really, just like few these days would call a refrigerator an “icebox.”
• Are there schools that still offer electives such as typing, shop, and home economics?
• Who besides President Reagan would go wild for jellybeans now, or knows what a jawbreaker is and what it takes to lick and crew down through the layers?

Mi companera begged to be relieved from this assignment, claiming her five minutes were up, but then waxed eloquently about her memories of getting cream horns, three for a quarter, which I believe are still sold as a pastry.  She also remembered watermelon courts in the summer, where, if lucky, her folks would take them all to get a slice, served from the window and eaten on picnic tables.  She remembered the milkman allowing kids to jump in the back of the truck, while he made his deliveries, where they would grab pieces of ice with different flavors.  They always dreamed that someday he would leave chocolate milk, but it never happened.  Who even still knows what I’m talking about when I say milkmen making deliveries?  I asked her if she had a princess phone, which of course was part of her household, and then how long an extension cord she had gotten on the phone.  She thought it was 40 feet.  She could go all through the house and climb out of her bathroom window to the roof, still talking all the time.  There was a generation of super phone people, way before social media and influencers.

Enough, I guess.  I’m tired of talking about Trump, but some day, he’ll be in the rearview mirror, and maybe people then will say, “oh, you think that’s something, remember what Trump, was like.”