I was born in the spring of 1965, in a two-story brick house on Maple Street in Dayton, Ohio, the kind of street where every mother knew every kid's bike by sight. We didn't have a name for what we were yet. Nobody called us "Generation X" until we were already grown and it was too late to argue about it.
We were the ones who ran the neighborhood until the streetlights came on. That was the rule — not a curfew app, not a phone check-in, just the porch light. When Mrs. Halloran's light flicked on two doors down, that meant it was 8:00 sharp and every kid within earshot knew to head home.
We played kickball in the middle of Maple Street with a manhole cover as home plate. We rode our bikes without helmets, arms out like airplanes, down Miller's Hill so fast the wind made our eyes water. I split my chin open once on the sidewalk in front of the Kowalski place and just wiped the blood on my t-shirt and kept riding. You got a scab, you got a story.
We didn't have cell phones, so when I wanted to talk to my best friend Donna, I rode my bike four blocks to her house and knocked. If she wasn't home, I waited on her front step or came back later. There was no text saying "omw." You just showed up, or you didn't, and either way it was fine — except the nights it wasn't. I remember waiting under the clock outside Wertz's drugstore for a boy who never showed, standing there forty minutes with no way to know if he was coming or already gone, no way to save face by texting an excuse, just the slow arithmetic of giving up.
Then came the arcade at the strip mall — Asteroids, Pac-Man, a whole glowing wall of machines that ate our quarters like something out of a science fiction movie. My older cousin got the first home computer I ever saw, an Apple II, and we sat in his basement for hours watching green text blink across a black screen like it was magic. A few years later somebody at church had a mobile phone the size of a brick, and everyone crowded around the parking lot to watch him make a call, like he'd landed a spaceship.
We learned cursive with a fountain pen, then typing on an IBM Selectric, then email, then smartphones, without anyone ever officially teaching us. We went from paper road maps folded wrong in the glove compartment to a voice telling us to turn left in five hundred feet. We didn't just watch the world change. We changed with it, one gadget at a time, and lately I've started to feel like I'm the last one who remembers both versions of it — like the whole world I grew up in is going to disappear the same year I do, and nobody will even know to miss it.
By the time I was sixty, my daughter Kayla had kids of her own, and I watched my grandson, seven years old, ask the television out loud to play a cartoon, and it just did. He never touched a dial in his life. I didn't say anything the first few times. But one Sunday in early June, while Kayla ran to the pharmacy, he found an old shoebox in my closet — cassette tapes, a Sony Walkman with dead batteries, a stack of photographs with white borders and dates stamped in orange ink on the back.
He held up a cassette like it was an artifact from a dig site. "What is this?"
I sat down on the edge of the bed and told him it was a mixtape I made in 1981, that I'd sat by the radio with my finger on the record button for two hours waiting for one song, and that if the DJ talked over the intro I had to start all over. He asked why I didn't just look it up. I told him there was nothing to look up. The song played once, and if you missed it, you missed it.
He turned the Walkman over in his hands, pressed the buttons, watched nothing happen because the batteries had corroded years ago. Then he asked me something that stopped me cold: "Were you sad you didn't have phones?"
I thought about it longer than the question deserved. I thought about knocking on Donna's door and not knowing if she'd answer. I thought about how much of my childhood was built out of not knowing, and how that not-knowing was its own kind of freedom.
"No," I told him. "We just did things differently. We had to actually go find out."
He didn't fully understand it, and I didn't expect him to. A few weeks later, on the Fourth of July, the whole family was out on my back deck for the fireworks over the reservoir. The other kids watched the show through their mothers' phone screens, filming it to look at later. My grandson came and sat next to me instead. He didn't say why.
The first burst went up gold over the water, and he tipped his head back to follow it with his own eyes, no glass between him and the sky. I felt his shoulder settle against my arm. Neither of us said anything until the finale, when the whole sky lit up white and the boom rattled the porch rail under our hands, and he laughed out loud and said, "Do it again."
