Comic and serious cultural references are high-tech, whether of "Inspector Gadget" or "The Terminator." A 4-year old listens wide-eyed to tales of "Uncle Wiggily and his Friends" and doesn't understand how Gentleman Rabbit's red, white and blue crutch could substitute for a barber pole. What's a barber pole? The mug of barber's lather doesn't look anything like the stuff from the can his father uses. The glass jar that Uncle Wiggily fills with fireflies to light up the forest isn't nearly as much fun as a flashlight with three different settings.
Thus has it been, always. When my mother talked of churning fresh peach ice cream in a wooden tub, made with the creamy milk she had taken from the family cow on a tiny farm in Ontario, I felt pity for her. She grew up never enjoying the thrill of digging out the chocolate in "Chunky Monkey" or the nuts in "Uncanny Cashews."
A man down the lane cuts the grass with a hand-pushed mower and the kids think he's eccentric. Physical exercise is for people who work out in gyms and run in marathons. If the lawn has to be cut, there's a powerful mower with a place to sit and ride, above it all. Ordinary tasks require little energy.
Grown-ups talk of farce in California, and for once there's no tension over talking politics because it's about entertainment, not politics. Whoever said politics is show business for ugly people obviously didn't know about the Terminator. Vacations and real life have become interchangeable, too. In the high-tech world of work and pleasure it's hard to make distinctions between work and play. Children only think they're playing computer games; they're actually "stretching educational strategies." Pagers find fishermen pretending to seek solitude.
Getting away doesn't mean what it used to mean, but it's not all bad, considering the alternative. By the time the new backpacks are filled with books and there's no sand on the floor beneath the computer or the fax machine, high tech lives will have moved into a higher gear. Soon enough we'll recall the summer's idyll as an interlude of delicious distraction. More iced tea, Mom?