The Best Kept Secret Blog - The Good Old Days?

The other night my husband and his buddy R. got to reminiscing about "the good old days" over a couple of beers.

Were they talking about their way with women back in the day? Nope. Were they thinking of their glory days on the sports field? Not that either. How their careers soared when they were fresh out of university? Uh, uh. They were talking about computer technology.

It started with a story from R. about how he couldn't hook up his new computer. "I worked on it all day and finally had to hire someone who knew how these things work."

I wanted to ask why the heck he had wasted an entire day when he could have asked for help from the get-go but I figured it was related to that "I'd rather try to read the map and get more lost than ask for directions" gene that men possess.

My husband commiserated with him and mused, "Remember back in university when we knew everything you could possibly want to know about computers?"

"Yeah", said R. "We could program our Commodore 64's like there was no tomorrow."

"If only FORTRAN was still a popular programming language", my husband sighed.

As I listened to the two of them lamenting these good old days, I was struck by how, well, old they sounded. They could have been seniors in a nursing home. ("I remember when we drove a horse and buggy everywhere. Those were the days.")

It made me wonder about how easy it is for us to get stuck in a stage, to not keep up with the times.

It applies to lots of things. We get stuck with the same look we've worn for years. We get stuck in our ideas ("A proper family has one wife, one husband and one or more children. Anything else doesn't count.") And we get stuck in our attitudes about embracing new technology.

Now, I've got to admit that the older I get, the harder it is to learn new things. My 11 year old daughter knows more about programming the PVR and working our DVD player than I ever will. And frankly, it seems much easier to ask her to help me than to invest the time and figure it out for myself.

And some of you might be wondering why we should even concern ourselves with keeping up with certain things. Aren't there more important things in life than worrying about something as trivial as whether our haircut is "in" or not?

I left the guys to their beers and went to check my e-mail and book an upcoming trip to New York on the Internet.

I glanced at a picture I keep on my desk of my husband and I at our wedding in 1987. There I am, smiling bride with hair permed so curly, high and full that it always reminds me of that other bride - the Bride of Frankenstein.

Ahh. . .there's my handsome groom sporting the huge glasses with plastic frames that were de rigour back then and a moustache that I loved at the time but now looks like a caterpillar crawling across his upper lip. Thank goodness for laser eye surgery and razors.

Since my husband was occupied with his friend, I decided to find my daughter and ask her to show me how to program that PVR. Maybe it's worth keeping up after all.