Tech turns to antiques in a hurry

Time is beginning to play tricks on me.

And I suspect that’s normal for someone my age.

Things that happened just a few years ago turn out, upon serious reflection, to have occurred 20 years ago or 30 years ago. Things that I think of as new turn out to be old.

Anyone over a certain age — say 60 — has run into that phenomenon. But the fact that it is common doesn’t make it any easier.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Shirley Dollar about her experiences as a fifth grader in Hartford City when a dreadful crime was committed.

Shirley and I are about the same age, and the events of that day were important to both of us, so it all seemed like yesterday.

But it wasn’t yesterday. It was 58 years ago. More than half a century.

If you had asked me when I returned to Jay County to work at the newspaper in 1974 whether I’d be interested in doing a story about something that happened in 1916, 58 years earlier, I would have been skeptical.

After all, that was ancient history.

Nowadays, the difference is that the ancient history was my childhood.

Ouch.

A few days after the Shirley Dollar story was published, I noticed something on the upstairs landing. It was a speaker system, a little portable thing that we’d given to our daughter Sally years ago. Somehow it had ended up back home.

We’d kept it because it fit my Apple iPod Nano, a sweet little bit of technology that I had stored hundreds of pieces of music on.

But when had I done that? The answer was 2005.

I still think of my iPod Nano as a cutting edge piece of technology, but it’s 13 years old now. It still works — if I can find it — but it’s been obsolete so long that histories of its rise and fall have probably already been written.

So, I wondered, would my parents have been hanging onto a piece of 1953 technology — as old as my iPod — when I graduated from high school in 1966? Would they have been hanging onto a relic from 1961 when I returned to Jay County in 1974?

Clearly, the answer was no.

The combination of the speed of technological development with the compression of time that comes with aging is making for some very weird moments.

In some ways, it’s fascinating. The blizzard of 1978 feels like yesterday to me.

But, then again, I know that our twins who were infants that rough winter are now parents themselves.

And as for that old iPod Nano, all I can do is wait until one shows up on “Antiques Roadshow” and mutter to myself — just before I doze off at 8:42 p.m. — “I used to have one of those.”