The Future

The other day my nephew Petey brought his little family by for a visit.  During the conversation he looked at his baby and said, "When he's an adult the technology will be so far advanced that all of this will look primitive to him."  I didn't say it out loud, but I thought, "probably not".

My mother once told me that in anticipation of the rapidly evolving world she lived in,  she passed on a really good sheet sale.  She figured that in a few more years bed sizes would've changed, so what was the point of stocking up on sheets?  In her lifetime her family had gone from coal oil lamps to electricity, from outhouses to indoor plumbing, from horse and buggy to cars and trucks.  Don't even get me started about what they did for fun before video games.  (And believe me, my mom knew how to have fun.)  But the point is that we are naturally kind of bad at predicting the future.

The other day my son was getting some compliments on a shirt he was wearing.  We found it in the stuff mom saved.  It was a shirt that dad used to wear to cocktail parties in Hawaii in the 1960's.  Mom's theory was that there wasn't really that much you could do to clothes, so sooner or later, stuff would come back into fashion.  Watching what people wear these days just confirms that.  And I sound just like mom used to when I point it out.  It's funny because young people don't really get it.  It's just one of those things that old people say.  And it's also funny because mom would think it was funny that I finally got it.