Arduinna

On her last visit, my aunt brought my mother a CD player and a stack of discs in the full knowledge that operating the thing would probably be impossible for her—she can't tell what she's looking at half the time when she's seen it a hundred times before, so finding tiny black-on-black buttons on an unfamiliar machine, forget about it. But no worries, the place where she lives is full of staff who are always happy to (and whose job includes) assist with that sort of thing.

Yesterday I picked her up for dinner and she said she'd asked someone to help with the CD player one morning this week when they came in to help her get dressed, and they'd said oh, sorry, they didn't actually know anything about how to do that—

—and suddenly in that moment I realized oh my god, it's—what it is, is—the Kids Today, all their music is digital, they just stream it on their phones, asking them to put any type of album in any type of player and press any type of button is completely unknown to them. This would have been the equivalent of someone asking me in the late 1990s to help their elderly mother with her 8-track player. I might as well have used the word phonograph, or victrola. Another staffer came in with a delivery as we were leaving the apartment, and I confirmed that she does know how to work a CD player so she's going to help my mom with it when she can. She's in her 40s and agrees that the young people can't do it for online digital reasons. "Hey, you printed the 'save' icon," I said. "They can't read analog clocks, either," she said. And on the drive to my house my mom and I were talking about how there didn't used to be any such thing as an analog clock or an acoustic guitar or a landline phone, because those were just called clocks and guitars and telephones, but now here we are—a biker is a person who rides a motorcycle, so a person who rides a bicycle has to be called a cyclist.

I remember when I was in high school my parents were pretty bothered that the fall of Saigon was being taught in history class, but now there are people who are grown adults with college degrees and almost old enough to run for federal office who were born after September 11, 2001. Which can't be right because that just happened. Himself pointed out that his date of birth was closer to the Armistice (1919) than to today. It's all very upsetting.