The Necessities of Tomorrow

The Necessities of Tomorrow

I once read that something that seemed impossible yesterday and has become a luxury today will be a necessity tomorrow. I live in tomorrow. 

 

My husband and I completed our undergraduate work at the University of South Florida in Tampa. It took a while. We were young. Tom paid for every penny of his college. My parents paid for my tuition. 

 

Tom’s studies were in zoology. I wanted to be a teacher. We had dreams.

 

Not all of our dreams matched up exactly.

 

For instance, I remember the day Tom took his box of punched cards to the computer lab. (Back then you wrote a computer program and punched cards accordingly for the computer to read.) He handed them over to the woman at the front desk. 

 

While we waited, Tom said, “One day we’re going to have a computer in our house.”

 

I looked at the large bank of metal cabinets behind the glass. The school computer took up the better part of a large wall. “Really?” I asked with absolutely no enthusiasm.

 

But Tom was right. 

 

I remember the day he bought our first computer. It was a Commodore 64. At first we used a tape player instead of a disc drive. Don’t ask me how. And we hooked the computer up to our television for a monitor. We soon had a floppy disc set-up. We bought a monitor and we were on a roll. 

 

My husband found a program for word processing in a magazine. He carefully typed it in and that’s how he completed his master’s thesis. I feel certain neither of us would have had the patience to type and retype our graduate work on an old typewriter. And, as it turned out, the cost of the computer with everything we needed was more cost effective than having someone type for us over and over. I tend to do a lot of revising.

 

By the time our children were in high school, the home computer was a luxury not all families owned but by the time they were in college, it had become a necessity. I suppose that is the way of the automobile for my parents and grandparents. Or the television.

 

What’s next? I don’t know. But I hope I have the mindset to embrace what is new yet hold onto the simple. 

 

Now where did I put that pencil? (There are simply a few things I will never replace.)