Inspector Gadget is Here to Stay

Today's children would feel lost in the Spain of over thirty years ago. There was even less gadgetry and technology than in the Boston of that same time. I remember coming to visit one summer when I was nine. Our house at that time consisted of four tiny rooms, a cubicle of a bathroom and a large attic. There were wooden beams crossing the ceiling, holding up the attic floor. On those beams in the rooms and hallway there were naked lightbulbs hanging. When they were turned on at night I realized I couldn't see well. I remember asking if they were twenty watt bulbs, but no, it was that the voltage was low. There was no television, no refrigerator, no telephone. There was an old radio and that was about it. But then, our house had been shut up for nine years.

Some neighbors and family had refrigerators and televisions, though. But because of the low voltage the refrigerators only barely cooled the food and couldn't freeze anything in their tiny freezers. I remember visiting the cousins who would take care of our house, opening windows and making sure the roof tiles were in their place and everything fine. They had a black and white television which they had recently bought. There was no signal until around midday, and at midnight it would stop emitting. So you could watch television only twelve hours a day. There were only two channels. If you didn't like what was on, you could only turn off the television. (Though that still generally happens nowadays, too, even with more channels.) Luckily, at that time there were intelligent programs being produced.  

Phones in rural areas were confined to bars and taverns and other businesses. The phone company had plans to extend its infrastructure to private homes in villages, but they still hadn't begun. So, if you wanted to call someone it had to be an emergency, everything else could wait. You would have to go to the nearest tavern, where they would call the establishment in the village of the person you wanted to talk with. At the tavern you or the owner would call and send a message to have that person call you back. Then someone from the other tavern would go to that person's house and bring him to the phone. Time consuming, but good business for the tavern because while you waited for the person to call you back, you would drink something. The phone call wasn't free, either. It had a meter. To be able to use it everyone, including the owner, had to set the meter. The owner would charge you for your call and then the telephone company would send someone once a month to read the total meter to bill the owner.

Because we weren't living there permanently we had a camping stove with two burners attached to a gas bottle. But on cool days my mother would light the fire in the wood stove and make lunch or dinner there, just as she had always done before leaving for Boston. Most people by then had gas stoves, but they were all served by gas bottles. The stoves looked like the ones in Boston at that time, but they had a smaller oven to accomodate a little closet for the gas bottle. Nowadays we're still served by butane gas bottles, but the law obliges you to have them outside the house, just in case.

Somehow, I can't imagine a teenager of today living in that world. Rare is the teenager, or child, that doesn't have a cell phone, a television, cold drinks at hand, a computer, internet, a game console or an ipad. Even e-books. We are now surrounded by so many things we once did without. Even my in-laws have cell phones. Though, granted, my mother-in-law has problems adjusting to hers. She has called us without wanting to, hung up on us without wanting to, and asked us to take her to the store to fix the phone that wouldn't turn on simply because she was pressing the wrong button. Don't ask her to sit at a computer and do a web search, either. She'll start searching for the webs behind the desk. My husband is also not much of a fan of technology. I had to teach him how to use an ATM machine and even so, he's made mistakes. Once, he didn't understand how the machine spit two hundred euros at him when he had only asked for twenty. He thought it was a lucky glitch. I examined the receipt and explained he had pressed one zero too many. He has a smartphone but he only uses a messaging service, the camera, and the phone itself. Besides that he only checks one app. And because he has big hands, sometimes he also presses the wrong keys and I have to exit whatever he's gotten into because he doesn't know how.

He'd better get used to it, though. We're not that old, and new technologies and gadgets are appearing every day. We're going to have to learn to use them, though turning off everything and returning for an evening to yesteryear can also be restful. And help us understand that these gadgets don't enter into our most basic needs. Because after we turn off the lights and just sit to look at the stars, we realize that all along we've always had what we most need.