BY SEAN DIETRICH
OPINION —
I miss glass bottles. I come from a generation of glass.
And therein lies a fundamental difference between my generation and the current one.
Glass bottles were everywhere. Glass packaging contained everything from mayonnaise to Bayer aspirin. You walked into a restaurant, and there were glass Heinz ketchup bottles sitting on tables. You had to fracture your palm to get the stuff out.
We had no space-age plastic polymers. Just glass. It was reusable. It was substantial. Eco-friendly. And glass, somehow, just made us happier. It kept crime down. It made us American.
Which reminds me, I was at a ball game when the national anthem was played. Everyone stood. But do you know what? Almost nobody sang. It was weird.
The singer was a recording artist from Nashville with three Grammys. She performed two minutes of vocal gymnastics so that it sounded like she was undergoing an unanesthetized colonoscopy. The boy in the seat next to me leaned over to his mom and said, “When is this going to be over?”
When I was a kid, everyone sang the “Star Spangled Banner” at games. We sang it all the time. We sang it in SCHOOL. My veteran grandfather didn’t let Nashville recording artists outsing him at ballgames.
Something else about my generation. We were not required to leave tips for every single blessed financial transaction completed.
Yes, we tipped. We tipped restaurant servers, barbers, bartenders, and talented professional dancers. But we did not tip our McDonald’s drive-thru attendant.
Know what else? There were no video ads at our gas-station pumps, blaring 24-hour headlines at a volume loud enough to make your gums bleed, advertising everything from potato chips to marital aids.
Other things were different, too. People still held the doors for each other. Children were actually skilled conversationalists.
Music, movies, and TV were not streamed, they were shared, communal experiences, so everyone had something to talk about.
Nobody knew, or cared about gluten. We left our eggs sitting on the counter. We ate ridiculous amounts of saturated fat and sugar. And somehow—I don’t know how this is possible—everyone was skinny.
We never wore bike helmets. Seatbelts were optional. Every boy above age 3 owned a pocket knife. There were ashtrays in airplanes and hospital waiting rooms. Smokers weren’t viewed as despicable human beings. They were just people.
I miss those days. I miss the days when kids were told to go outside and play instead of being shoved in a corner with an iPad.
Neighborhood streets were overrun with tiny bicycles. We had Saturday morning cartoons, typewriters, and you asked directions.
Churches didn’t use projection screens. Guys could work on their own cars without requiring college degrees in nuclear computing. Bookstores thrived.
I miss a lot about the way things used to be. I miss the days before airline passengers wore pajamas, slippers, and overstuffed headphones. I miss the days when Boy Scouts weren’t in the headlines. I miss seeing people talk to each other in public spaces instead of staring at their 7.6-inch glowing screens.
But mainly, I miss glass bottles.
Sean Dietrich is a humorist and stand-up storyteller known for his commentary on life in the American South. His column appears weekly in newspapers throughout the U.S. He has authored 18 books and makes appearances on the Grand Ole Opry.
