KnowledgeI’m back to school now, and as usual I spent some of my summer vacation time ‘spring cleaning.’ I always feel like since I am not working and the Beloved is, I need to have something to show for my day, so I clean like a fiend. And I have been busily working some family heirlooms into our home since the passing of my grandfather.

It struck me, as I made my finishing touches for back-to-school, how much things have changed since my mother’s time. There are products, services and routines my parents considered par for the course which people my age have done away with completely. Consider the alarm clock, for instance. Almost everyone I know just uses their phones…

What other changes have come to the book-lover’s home since my parents time? Here is a roundup of some things my mother had which I don’t have—or which I have, but put to radically different uses.

1) Fine China. How is this a book thing? Well, we inherited a gorgeous antique dining room set from my grandparents, and my mother was appalled to learn that we have been using its capacious buffet to store sheets, reusable shopping bags and the yearbooks/photo albums of our respective childhoods. But where will we put the china? she asked me. Um, what china? I know three people my age who own china and none of them ever use it. But if we don’t have china, what will we do if we have company over? Um, use regular plates? It’s a foreign concept to my mom, but I know two things. One is that our regular ceramic dinner plates will be just fine for the limited entertaining we do at home, and the other is that I value that capacious, elegant storage space too much to waste it on plates we’ll never use. The china goes. The yearbooks stay.

2) Book shelves. My mother uses hers for books, and framed pictures. I did a little count of my bookshelves the other day and this was my tally: in the kitchen, two bookcases of eight shelves each. Two were used for cookbooks and the rest served as pantry space. In the desk area, one bookcase of eight shelves. Three of them have books on them, but one of these are teaching resources I use for work and so don’t really count. Living room, four book cases of three shelves each. None of them have books. This shelf grouping serves as a room divider and stores movies, collectibles and hobby stuff.

3) Computers. We didn’t get a household one until I was in junior high, and it got used solely for word processing. We use ours for so much more. I have all my workout videos ripped onto my Mac for streaming onto my iPad during workout time. We subscribe to Netflix and stream it via Apple TV boxes. I have over 2,000 eBooks in my Calibre library to replace the paper books I am no longer using the shelves for. It has replaced newspapers, cable television, the photo album and so much more.

4) Framed Art. My mother was fond of buying framed art posters from museums and places like that. We don’t do that in my house. We still have a few of her hand-me-downs that haven’t yet been replaced. But the new art we’ve acquired together has all been of two categories: media tie-in stuff (he has some bachelor-days Star Wars posters he won’t part with) and carefully displayed collectibles. He had a favourite literary quote of mine done up into a poster. I’ve been eyeing a Lego minifig display shelf for him. And the first real ‘art’ I ever bought was a shadowbox display for some antique books my grandmother owned. It’s a very different kind of ‘art’ than my parents owned!

5) Printed Ephemera. We used to have a drawer for take-out menus. We used to have another one for the phone book and yellow pages. And now? Now, we have internet-enabled phones. That is two drawers reclaimed. A victory for the minimalists!

It’s so interesting to me to see how my home is different from hers. I wonder what my own kids homes will look like someday!

SHARE
Previous articleMorning Roundup: Amazon releases new Kindles. Ultimate reading spreadsheet
Next articleApple Watch shows Cupertino has lost the plot
"I’m a journalist, a teacher and an e-book fiend. I work as a French teacher at a K-3 private school. I use drama, music, puppets, props and all manner of tech in my job, and I love it. I enjoy moving between all the classes and having a relationship with each child in the school. Kids are hilarious, and I enjoy watching them grow and learn. My current device of choice for reading is my Amazon Kindle Touch, but I have owned or used devices by Sony, Kobo, Aluratek and others. I also read on my tablet devices using the Kindle app, and I enjoy synching between them, so that I’m always up to date no matter where I am or what I have with me."

NO COMMENTS

The TeleRead community values your civil and thoughtful comments. We use a cache, so expect a delay. Problems? E-mail newteleread@gmail.com.