I am in an outdoor public place watching several kids play on their smartphones. It is a pandemic era. They wear masks. They haven’t blinked in over an hour. Or moved. Just thumbing away. Zero movement. Someone better get these children some urinary catheters.
This is a hard time in history to be a kid.
I can’t get over how different they are compared to the way we were. When we were kids we were not half as “hip” as today’s children. These kids are smart. They have cutting-edge phones, earbuds, skinny jeans, light-up shoes, and unique body piercings. Compared to these modern children we were complete dorks.
Do you know what my uncool friends did for fun? Our mothers made us pick wild strawberries. That’s right. Strawberries. My mother would detect my boredom and say, “You know what we need? We need fresh strawberries.” And away we’d go.
These hip kids are going to laugh us right into the nursing home one day.
Certainly, video games existed during my youth, but my
people didn’t have them. And don’t get me wrong, I would have killed for a video game. But it was a pipe dream. Back then, if you had a video game console, this meant that you wore silk undies and a man named Wadsworth turned your bed down each night.
The first time I ever saw a video game was at Michael Ray’s house. His father was an importer, his mother was a competitive horse jumper and Junior League vice president.
The game was Pong. It was a blank television screen with a singular dot drifting from left to right between ping-pong paddles. This dot traveled about as fast as it took to complete law school. Every kid within three counties traveled hundreds of miles just to see this dot.
My father forbade me from playing such games. He once told me plainly, “Son, if you play…