TURNING THE LIGHTS ON

It all started innocently enough.  The little guy in kindergarten was telling his grandma and grandpa all about the eggs they were hatching at school.  In this new age world his teacher was sending the kids videos of the hatching progress because, of course, Mother Nature wasn't keeping the action limited to the hours of 9:00 to 3:30 Monday to Friday.  As of suppertime last night the video showed they had two fluffy babies to their names.

This news led to Grandpa asking what was going to happen to the chicks when they were all hatched.  The grandson had thought that everyone in his class should get one to take home and it had to be explained to him that not everyone would want one.  Or know what to do with one.  He lives on a farm where he feeds the chickens and gathers eggs every day; it hadn't occurred to him that everyone else doesn't do the same thing.

This took us to the discussion of how few people know about these things.  If the food production and distributions systems were to suddenly disappear there wouldn't be many folks who would even know where to begin to feed themselves.  Of course from there we went straight into hearing Grandpa wax poetic about "the good old days".

Now, this is not a new subject for our supper table conversations.  When the kids were growing up there was many a night when we were all regaled with stories of him having to "walk to school, up hill, both ways, in a snow storm, riding his pet dinosaur because horses hadn't been invented yet."  And so on.  And so forth.

I give you this background to show that her father's age and experience is something that this little boy's mother is well aware of.  Or should be, at least.  But as we (Grandma and Grandpa) carried on with this topic of conversation she fell silent; amazed at the things we were saying.

I think it started out with how these chicks were being hatched under a light, using electricity.  Of course she knew that this was a job mother hens would have done naturally, it just hadn't occurred to her that there was no other way when her dad was young - they didn't have power until he was in his teens.  It wasn't that she didn't understand that there hadn't been a time when houses didn't have lights at the flick of a switch; the hard part to believe was that this had happened in her parents' life times.

For myself, I couldn't be sure.  I couldn't remember a time that the house I grew up in didn't have power but I knew my grandparents didn't have it when I was very young - I could remember them lighting coal oil lamps.  Out came the local history book: only to find that there really wasn't a specific mention of when the rural power grid came into being.  I was in on the planning and preparation of that book.  Why on earth hadn't we thought to give that very important achievement a notable segment in our history book?  Was it just a misstep of planning?  Or does it mirror our daughter's reaction - that electricity is such a constant in our lives that we forget it wasn't always there?

With both my parents unavailable for comment I called my sister who was pretty sure that by the time mom and dad were married there was power at the farm we grew up on - so that was 1946.  It is highly likely that we were ahead of other households because we lived along the main highway making it on the main route of the power grid as it was installed - the further you lived from the main line, the longer it would have taken to access power.  This was something that made sense to us old people but kind of amazed the 30 something gal whose experience of Sask Power as a business entity is to tell them when she moves so they will change the billing.

Later in the evening, after our daughter and her two non-stop energy sources had gone home, I got to thinking about our place in history.  My grandfather lived past his 100th birthday and I don't know how many times I've heard people note how he had been born in the days of horse and buggies but lived to see the moon landing, but it is almost as amazing that in a much shorter time span my generation has gone from lighting coal oil lamps to complaining about our Internet speed.  I wonder what the little guy in kindergarten will see in his lifetime?