Back to school

Yippie…all the neighbor kids are back in school. I have my workroom back and I returned to my normal routine -I hear silence and love it.

The kids and I made it through the summer torturing each other. They forced me to watch The Gilmore Girls, and I made them listen to books that I thought they needed to know. To Kill a Mockingbird was one of them and they loved it. 

I have been a teenager many, many years ago and I still remember the awkwardness. You are not a child anymore, yet not an adult either. The in between is tough for the ones experiencing it and for the ones who have to deal with it.

I know I drove my Grandmother crazy at times. I remember how much she hated my MONKEY MUSIC and I firmly believe that one more “WigWamBam” might have driven her over the edge for good; thankfully the cassette got eaten by the recorder and that was the end of it.

She hated it when I started to paint dark, black circles around my blue eyes and she couldn’t stand my clothes. “You look like a Hippie,” she said and shook her head in disapproval; I smiled and felt happy. That’s exactly how I wanted to look like for the rest of my life.

I had an easy life compared to the kids today. I feel sorry for them and treasure my childhood and my upbringing more than ever. What a great life we all had back then. I watch the kids today, and I can see and feel the overload of information they are getting.

A young life today is shared with everybody, there is hardly any privacy. Endless amounts of pictures are taken every day, everything they do is shared with an infinite amount of so called friends.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social media are pushing information down their throat, and so-called news hits them from every angle on an hourly basis. How do you explain to a teenager that they should fact check everything they read. Do they even have time to do that?

Even bullying doesn’t stop. At least we got a break when we went home, today they don’t get a break. The cell phones are always on, the connection with others never stops. It’s a 24/7 deal, there is no escape.

I spent hours and days in the library; had to read numerous articles in books and magazines to get the information I was looking for. Everything was handwritten when I was young, we filled notebooks with the result of our studies. “You will never forget something you wrote down,” they told us, and it seems they were right. Until this day I still remember a lot of it.

One evening I heard a song on the radio, and I sat there mesmerized. I had never heard it before and wanted to know the title and the singer. I hardly spoke any English back then and couldn’t understand the lyrics. I heard the word “Mathilda, ” and the next day I wrote to the radio station. I asked for their help to identify the song, gave them the time and the day when it was played. Two weeks later I got a letter.

It was Rod Stewart’s “Waltzing Mathilda” (Tom Traubert Blues) one of my all time favorite songs until this day. It took a few more weeks before I finally owned a recording. What a treasure it was.

Nowadays we have the world on standby, everything we want to know is just a mouse-click away. I wonder how the young generation will handle all the technology in the future. Will there still be time to enjoy being young, will there still be secrets and mysteries? Perhaps not, and I feel sorry for them.

I know they will be fine, just the way we were. You can’t miss what you don’t know.

Well, they are back in school. Now I have to explain to our dogs that they will be put on a diet for a few weeks and after that, I will finish watching “The Gilmore Girls” because now I just need to know.