Then and Now

My weekly shopping trip sent me down memory lane today. I espied a bag of Tuscan Three Cheese Kettle Chips on the snack aisle. They had no such thing when I was a kid. The number of choices at the modern grocery store is stupefying. And I’m just talking about Safeway. Forget Draegers or some other high end places. I go there when I can’t make up my mind if I want Arborio or Calasparra rice.

OK DJ, what about memory lane? Don’t rush me! I was thinking about how much has changed. There are so many things in existence now, which we take for granted, that were unavailable in my childhood, e.g. computers, cell phones, boxer briefs. We didn’t have Tuscan Three Cheese chips but we did have Wise Cheez Waffles. The packaging was different but I’m sure the cheesy goodness is the same. I used to buy a big bag of them for a quarter, when I was flush. I recall once seeking refuge, with my loot, in the laundry room of an adjacent building in the apartment complex we lived in. I was the introspective type even then. I suppose that was the 1966 version of “taking space”. Either that or I was hiding from my mother so I could chow the whole bag down in one sitting. We also had Speed Racer, which I see they are making a feature film of now. I used to watch that back to back with Gigantor on one of the independent NYC channels, one of seven, including the networks, available to me on our one black and white TV. There was color TV back then, as well as power mowers and snow blowers, but my old man wasn’t going to waste his dough on that crap. I don’t blame him. He had two lawn mowers and snow shovelers consuming mass quantities of food in his house so expense controls were required.