5/13/73
It’s Sunday, after church.
My mom and I are in the back of my uncle’s car, heading to the fancy cafeteria that the family visits on Mother’s Day so that:
Grandma won’t have to cook and
we can celebrate her publicly as our Center Of Attention (which is always her second favorite gift, right after “cash in a plain, white envelope”).
My mother has a car, but she’s left it at home because:
it is too small for four people and
there’s a national energy crisis going on: gasoline is being rationed and we’re all supposed to carpool as much as possible.
and I can’t help with all the driving, as
I do not yet own a car and
I’m only 6.
The weather’s lovely, there’s little traffic, and church let out a little early so that everyone could make it to their own cafeterias, then get back home at a decent hour.
As we were head over the Interstate Viaduct (a REALLY fancy name for our local bridge over the Kansas River) my uncle turns to his wife in the passenger seat.
“Honey?” he asks her, “What time is it?”
“OH!” my mother says from the back seat, hurriedly trying to free the face of her watch from the tight sleeves of her Sunday clothes, “I think it’s about - maybe two o’clock?”
“…no, no, no, no - I’m asking HER.” My uncle turns to his wife again, “Can YOU tell us?”
My aunt smiles, looks at her wrist and pauses for a moment, then announces “It’s 2:14.”
At last my mother succeeds at shoving her unbuttoned blouse cuff back far enough to make out the time. “…yeah, I’ve got about two…eleven?” That’s how she missed seeing it right away.
“Mama! Look!”
I say, excitedly, as my aunt holds up her wrist to reveal a new golden watch. It is SQUARE; with a tiny golden face that has NO HANDS on it, just a tiny black rectangle in the middle, and two shiny buttons on its right side.
“What IS that?”
my mother asks, as my aunt presses the top button, and tiny red lines blaze to life on the watch, in the rough shape of the numbers 2, 1, and 5.
“Have you ever seen anything like that in your life?”
my uncle crows, having proudly provided our first glimpse at Wearable Technology.
The answer was no, we had never seen anything like that in our lives. The Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury books that my mother adored as a child foretold possible futures filled with space-age wonders, but the current world outside was still oppressively analog, powered by gears and smoke - no flying cars yet, or antigravity belts, or two-way video phones.
…but here is this new thing on my aunt’s wrist, this…?
“It’s a DIGITAL WATCH!” my uncle explains. “There’s a tiny computer inside it that tells the time on this little screen…”
My mother assumes it’s radioactive: you can’t have a battery next to your skin like that, it’s dangerous. I assume that it’s expensive: it doesn’t look real.
My aunt then pushes the second button, and the numerical date appears in the little window.
She pushes the first button three times, and the rough words “I LOVE YOU”, followed by HER OWN NAME, appear on the screen.
It was the greatest Mother’s Day present I had ever seen. I had only gotten my mother a Hallmark™ card.
If I was to play this moment out,
both my mother and I would eventually get digital watches in about five years, once they made it to K-Mart and the price came down precipitously,
and we’d watch the world around us transform into a version of the future that Asimov and Bradbury predicted (along with Gene Roddenberry, and maybe Aldous Huxley),
and then I’d be HERE, now, writing these very words on a glowing miracle box from a company named after a fruit:
but I don’t think that’s how time works.
If time was one straight line, then that watch from 50 years ago, viewed in modern context, would not be all that impressive, and I shouldn’t feel any jolt of awe when thinking about it now.
But I still do. The memory of that moment carries with it the pure emotions that I felt in that car, at that time.
Some memories are self-contained, self-sustaining, still able to make us laugh or cry or fill us with wonder. Complete temporal ecosystems. Snapshots.
I have no idea what else happened that day, or what I ate at the cafeteria, but in that car, on that bridge, is where The Future began.
