Journal Entry

Before PlayStation: Those were the days

A few weeks ago, I was able to spend some unexpected quality time with my pre-teen. We were driving, and I was listening to Jon Bon Jovi on my favorite ‘80s radio station. “Who’s that singing?” asked my 12-year-old daughter. “Why that’s Bon Jovi. I had all of his cassettes when I was your age,” I answered. “Cassettes? What are those?” she responded.

I stopped tapping my hands on the wheel. Could it really be? As I thought about it, I realized that she has grown up in the age of CDs and DVDs and has never known a life with cassette tapes.

This generation doesn’t know what the world was like before PlayStation. When I was young, I remember playing with my Strawberry Shortcake doll. I loved that doll. I carried it with me until it no longer smelled like strawberries and was replaced by my blue stuffed Care Bear. My mom spent hours sewing a Holly Hobby bedspread and curtains that looked just like the ones everyone was buying in the store.

A couple of years later, I went to see E.T. at the movie theater. Every girl in my class at school had an E.T. doll, and every boy had a crush on Drew Barrymore.

On summer evenings, every kid in the neighborhood would come out to play a game of Nerf football in the big empty field beside our house. We’d play until it got too dark to see the ball or we were eaten by mosquitoes.

When the Rubik’s cube first arrived on the scene, I spent hours trying to master the art of completing the puzzle. Every student in school carried the cube in the hopes of beating the competition during lunch.

We watched television on our large clunky TV sets, and action figures for the Dukes of Hazard, the Incredible Hulk and the Smurfs were found in almost every child’s toy box.

When I was too old for toys, the advent of the walkman was priceless, because it meant we could carry our music with us for the first time. It didn’t matter that the ear sets were gigantic ear muffs. We thought they were “groovy to the max.”

There were arcade games, of course, and anyone who was anyone spent afternoons at the arcade at the mall playing Pacman, Space Invaders, and Donkey Kong.

Atari showed up on the scene not long after that, and I think that was the beginning of the electronic era.

Who could have imagined the invention of Playstation, Xbox, or Wii? Who would have thought we would be able to chat and play games online with friends? Who could have foreseen an entire new language developed just for texting?

I have found my pre-teen daughter does not really have an appreciation for my old toys. She’s just happy if I promise not sing one of Jon Bon Jovi’s songs when her friends are in the car with us.