I come from a generation whose ketchup came in glass bottles. And therein lies the fundamental difference between my generation and the current one.
Glass bottles. They were everywhere. They were the essence of life.
You walked into a restaurant, and there were glass condiment bottles sitting on tables. Usually, Heinz Ketchup. You had to bruise your palm to get the stuff out.
And when you couldn’t get the ketchup to move, you handed the bottle to your daddy and watched him invent new cuss words. This is what kept families together.
Glass packaging was the norm. We had no space-age plastic polymers. We had glass, that was all.
And glass, somehow, just made us happier. It unified us. It made us American. Glass bottles kept crime rates down, literacy rates up, and it made everyone sing the national anthem at ball games.
Which reminds me, I was at a ball game the other day when the national anthem was played. Everyone stood. Many placed hands over their hearts. But do you know
what? Very few people sang.
Actually, almost nobody sang.
All 42,000 silently listened to the singer on the field without opening their mouths. The singer was a recording artist from Nashville with three Grammys, two ESPYs, one Pulitzer, and whatever else.
The singer performed two minutes of vocal gymnastics so that it sounded like he was having a febrile seizure. And the boy in the seat next to me leaned over to his mom and said, “Which song is this again?”
You see, when I was a kid, everyone sang the “Star Spangled Banner.” That’s just how it was. We learned it in school. We SANG it in school. We knew all the words.
So you sang the anthem at games. You didn’t let anyone else sing it for you. Before ballgames, my grandfather would carefully balance his cigar on his beer, my father would remove his…