I was watching an old Steve McQueen movie today. Bullitt. 1968. As I watched Mr. McQueen muscle car his way around San Francisco, I was reminded of how different my life was growing up from what my children experience.There were no fax machines. In the movie, they had an old machine that hooked up to a phone and took forever and was huge and has this big spinning drum for getting copies.
There were no ATMs. As the two detectives in the movie search a woman's matching pink leather travel cases, they find traveler's checks. Traveler's checks? I had forgotten all about them. You didn't go visit another state without those. It was one more thing to add to your check list of things to do before you could leave on vacation.
All the women wore hats. Now, I don't really remember a time when the women all wore hats. I was too young. However, when I was little, women wore hats all the time when they went out and everyone dressed up to get on a plane. You wore your Sunday best. Now, you wear whatever you want.Apparently--and I'll have to compare my recent experience with planes with the plane shown in the film--there was enough aisle room for two people to walk past each other without scooting into a row of seats!!!! That is just too mind blowing for me to imagine. There was Stevie boy, inching his way closer to the bad guy through an entire plane load of passengers going the opposite direction. I think my jaw actually dropped when I saw that one.
And of course, being the good old days, anyone and everyone could just waltz around the airport and on to airplanes with their concealed weapons. Yikes! No X-ray machines, no security lines. Just masses of dressed up people filing into spacious planes potentially carrying guns.
I don't really know the point of this post. It's not like I want to go back to the days of traveler's checks and start wearing pill box hats with matching purses. It was just a huge reminder of how much life has changed in the last 40 years and how much I just take it for granted--and how much at a loss my kids would be if they got magically transported to 1968.
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P.S. On a completely unrelated note, I embarassed myself the other day by not realizing ALL DAY LONG that I was wearing my bra inside out. How is that possible?
