"Everything Else Is Changing!"
By Tom Ehrich
I started listing the fixtures of life that are fading or gone.
Yesterday's familiarities and certainties, today's assumed continuities -- all changing. Not because some evil genie is at work.Things just change, and the pace of change is accelerating.
My point was that we know a lot about change. We know how to adapt and let things go. We know that standing still is a losing strategy. Unless we want our congregations' names added to this list, we need to embrace change.
At the same time, we need to go easy on ourselves. When I asked Facebook friends to add to my list, I received over four dozen responses right away. Within some notes was a tinge of pain at something once valued that has faded away.
The point isn't that yesterday's fixtures were wrong or that today's are necessarily better. Things just change, and any institution that wants to remain in touch with people's actual lives needs to change, too.
Here's the list:
"Onetime fixtures faded or gone"
- Pay phones
- Children singing songs in school, from kindergarten through eighth grade
- Civility
- Swimming holes
- Minimal lawsuits
- Recording contracts
- Tape recorders
- Film
- Video rental stores
- Land-line phones
- Corner drug store
- Local daily newspapers
- Network television
- Corner hardware stores
- Desktop computers
- Bank tellers
- Small private colleges
- Industrial jobs
- Home telephone lines
- Incandescent bulbs
- Hard copies of audio/video.
- Books.
- Paper maps.
- Address books.
- Phone books.
- Watches
- House calls by family physician
- Choices
- Ice man
- Typewriters
- Vinyl records
- CDs
- Ink and paper books
- VCRs
- Walkman
- Family time
- Nickel Cokes made with real sugar
- Letters from family & friends
- Handwritten diaries/journals
- Snail mail letters
- Dining rooms
- Dairy home deliveries
- Double feature at movie theaters
- Full service gas stations
- 8-track tapes
- Hand written notes that come in the actual mail
- Family Time
- Drive-in movie theaters
- Greasy, salty hamburgers
- Saying Grace
- Family dinner every night
- Family road trips in non-AC car on back roads
- Bartering goods and services
- Leaving windows open day/night
- Leaving cars and homes unlocked
- Cakes made from scratch
- Walking to school with friends
- Everyone learning in a bricks-and-mortar classroom
- Penny candy
- Wooden pencils as rimary writing instruments
- Front porch swings
- Front porches
- Cigarette lighters in cars
- Foil-covered TV tray dinners for the oven
- One brand dominance, such as Cat Chow
- General stores that take the items off the shelf for you and let you run a tab
- Soda counters
- Photo albums with photos manually placed
- Manual Rollodex
- Vinyl car seats
- Family summer cross country car vacations
- Rabbit ear antennae for TVs
- Homemade Halloween costumes
