Quiet Change

My mother used to recall chasing the ice wagon when she was a girl. The neighborhood children would follow the route of the iceman (as in "The Iceman Cometh") and snatch small chips of ice off the back of the wagon; a real treat in the Arizona of her youth. The iceman would use large tongs to carry the large blocks to the iceboxes of the customers. [I never thought twice when my parents called our refrigerator "the icebox." It was a term left over from their childhood days. I find myself using it.]

Further evidence of their primitive lives can be seen in the fact that my father learned to swim in a large irrigation canal. He thought of it as a luxury although when the occasional dead dog floated past it might have lost some glamour. Both parents remembered sleeping outside during the summer. One of the techniques was to soak sheets, hang them on the clothes line, and then put your cot near the sheets so the breezes would be cooled.

A typewriter or a radio was about as high tech as things got.

I mention this to illustrate the great changes they saw in their lifetimes. Consider what you've seen in your own. We were still using slide rules when I went to high school. It was a notable event when color televisions and remote controls arrived and when the first neighbor bought a foreign car.

Change may not always come slowly but it usually arrives very quietly.