My youngest brother was born when I was nineteen. I had always heard of that thing called the generation gap but it was driven home to me when he was about six or seven. The wife of another brother of mine babysat my children along with our youngest brother. One day when I was over there to pick up my daughters my sister-in-law had all the children picking up toys. She had several old Fisher Price toys she had found at a garage sale, including one of those old record players with the hard, miniature records. My brother picked up all the records, handed them to us and said, "Here's the cd's." It was difficult to explain to him that when we cracked up we weren't laughing at him, but at the generation gap that was between us.

Later that evening my brother, his wife and I all sat down and explained to our young sibling how different things were now than when we were growing up. It started because I was still there so had ordered a pizza for supper. We told him we got pizza once a year, on New Year's Eve. Our young sibling was so aghast at that thought that he actually stopped playing Nintendo and listened to us. That was another thing, we told him, there was no Nintendo. Now we had his full attention. Yeah, and that once a year pizza was accompanied with renting a vcr and watching movies. He wore a shocked expression as he said, "You had to rent a vcr to watch your movies!?!" Then we realized we also had to explain to him that we didn't own any movies either.

We reminisced further. When we had been his age we had lived in a little town high up in the rockies of Colorado. We had three stations we got on tv, unless there was a storm. Then we didn't get anything but fuzz. Our tv was black and white so we would sneak peaks through the neighbor's window to see on their color tv if the pink panther was really pink. The tv had knobs and you had to tune them like a radio dial. If the picture was fuzzy or the sound had static you had to play with the rabbit ears to try and clear things up. If that didn't work you were just plain out of luck.

There were other things that didn't come up in our discussion that night. We walked a distance to school that now would be considered too far. Now we would be riding the bus. If we didn't do our homework we failed our class. They didn't make special exceptions, especially if we were bright and just being lazy. If someone offended us we were told to get over it, we didn't sue. If we had it probably would have been thrown out for stupidity. Our parents spanked us. When we were disobedient, unruly or otherwise misbehaving we got spanked. I remember once complaining to my teacher at school about a spanking I had received. Her answer was that she hoped I had learned my lesson and didn't repeat my mistake. Nowadays if a child complains about being spanked for being naughty the government swoops down and takes all the child away from their parents, even when the parents are in the right.

Perhaps I have the title backwards. Perhaps it should be priviledges I had as a child that children today are deprived of. Because we had less tv, movies and video games we spent a lot more time outside. We rode bikes, ran around the trails of fields, picked apples in orchards, made mud pies and many other various activities. Because we lived a distance from school but still walked we made up games to play on the way to and from. We all sat at the table together and ate supper as a family since the only real distraction was the occasional ring of the telephone or knock on the door. It makes me wonder how our children will describe the hardships of their childhood to their sons and daughters. What will they change when they are parents themselves?