By Sean Dietrich
I come from a generation whose ketchup came in glass bottles. And therein lies the fundamental difference between my generation and the current one.
Glass bottles. They were everywhere. They were the essence of life.
You walked into a restaurant, and there were glass condiment bottles sitting on tables. Usually, Heinz Ketchup. You had to bruise your palm to get the stuff out.
And when you couldn’t get the ketchup to move, you handed the bottle to your daddy and watched him invent new cuss words. This is what kept families together.
Glass packaging was the norm. We had no space-age plastic polymers. We had glass, that was all.
And glass, somehow, just made us happier. It unified us. It made us American. Glass bottles kept crime rates down, literacy rates up, and it made everyone sing the national anthem at ball games.
Which reminds me, I was at a ball game the other day when the national anthem was played. Everyone stood. Many placed hands over their hearts. But do you know what? Very few people sang.
Actually, almost nobody sang.
All 42,000 silently listened to the singer on the field without opening their mouths. The singer was a recording artist from Nashville with three Grammys, two ESPYs, one Pulitzer, and whatever else.
The singer performed two minutes of vocal gymnastics so that it sounded like he was having a febrile seizure. And the boy in the seat next to me leaned over to his mom and said, “Which song is this again?”
You see, when I was a kid, everyone sang the “Star Spangled Banner.” That’s just how it was. We learned it in school. We SANG it in school. We knew all the words.
So, you sang the anthem at games. You didn’t let anyone else sing it for you. Before ball games, my grandfather would carefully balance his cigar on his beer, my father would remove his seed cap, and tens of thousands would sing Francis Scott Key in unison.
And when the song ended, everyone applauded, and the Braves, inspired by fervent singing, dashed onto the field and ceremoniously got massacred.
Something else about my generation. We were not required to leave tips for every single financial transaction completed.
Sure, we tipped people. We tipped restaurant servers, barbers, bartenders, and professional dancers. But we did not tip at the supermarket self-checkout.
Know what else? There were no video ads at our gas stations. Yesterday I was pumping gas. There was a television in the pump, blaring 24-hour headline news at a volume loud enough to make your gums bleed. These videos were interspersed with noisy ads for everything from potato chips to marital aids.
Not just that, but other things were different, too. People still held the doors for each other. Children were actually pretty good conversationalists.
And we all focused better. Probably because we didn’t have cell phones competing for our attention every couple of nanoseconds. Without cell phones, we were able to perform unthinkable feats of concentration, such as—to pick an unthinkable feat at random—driving.
Music and movies were not streamed, they were shared, communal experiences. If you wanted to see a popular movie, such as, for example, The Muppet Movie, you attended a theater and sat in a roomful of B.O.
Likewise, nobody knew, or cared about gluten. We left our eggs sitting on the counter. Also, butter. And there was a working spittoon at the local hardware store. And nobody looked down on those who smoked.
Yes, we were ignorant about safety, I’ll admit it. We never wore bike helmets. Seatbelts were optional. Every boy above age 3 owned a pocketknife. There were ashtrays in our airplanes and hospital waiting rooms. Parents bought their children woodburning kits. Or worse: lawn darts.
But truthfully, I miss those days. I miss being told to go outside and play instead of being shoved in a corner and handed an iPad.
Our neighborhood streets were overrun with tiny bicycles. We had Saturday morning cartoons, typewriters, tin Folgers cans, and every child was familiar with BBs. Our churches didn’t use projection screens. And most males held the doors for anyone named Ma’am, Miss, or Mama.
The truth is, I miss a lot about the way things used to be. I miss dressing up when you caught an airline flight. I miss the days when Boy Scouts weren’t in the headlines, and a guy could still work on his car if he had a ratchet set. I miss a lot.
But mainly, I miss glass ketchup bottles.