Exotic becomes novelty. Novelty turns into rare; rare to common and “like to haves” become necessities. The rapid expansion of technology within modern America makes this true. We see it day to day. That’s been on my mind all week. Expand the day-to-day to decades and change becomes phenomenal. Things never dreamed about become common.

My Grandfather Taylor (Dad Taylor) lived almost 80 years, from 1883 until 1967 and saw tremendous changes. He saw the mobility of man expand from the common act of walking and dependence on animals for travel grow to the automobile  to the everyday act of hopping on a jet to travel worldwide. 

No, he never learned to drive, but he always wanted to see how fast a particular car would go. And he loved flying in the little airplanes at pasture field air shows that were common in the first half of the last century. And Dad Taylor witnessed the change from word-of-mouth communication and letters that took weeks and months to arrive to the radio and television and on to communication satellites that make talk around the globe instantaneous.  From sending a child to deliver a message to picking up the telephone and talking instantly.

The way people lived changed just as much on the everyday scale as it did in the technological. Most Monroe Countians eked out a living from the soil from long before what we like to call the Great Depression to the industrial period that came with World War II. Don’t misunderstand. I don’t mean to make light of the depression that held this country in an iron-fisted grip of almost universal poverty; that was a terrible time. 

No, I didn’t live through it but I have talked to many folks who did. Thus from my perspective it appears that the sad fact for too many of our friends and neighbors in the rural areas of East Tennessee is that the depression years were simply the worst of what was already a bad situation. Going from extreme poverty to a more extreme poverty doesn’t seem like a big change. But then I’m sure those who lived through it could point to many situations that grew worse.

People grew most of their food, though the best was sold or exchanged for other necessities. A crop of cotton or tobacco provided money for a year and the sale of eggs and butter made money for coal oil and coffee.

Though eggs and chickens would to us seem plentiful, to many only special occasions like Easter and Christmas, meant eggs on the table.  They were too valuable through the rest of the year for home use. But people got by. 

I’ve been told of a time when money was so scarce Dad Taylor had to forego his coffee in the mornings. But he found a solution; he boiled and drank hot water for his morning beverage.  Try it; I have and it works. 

Now most of the changes Dad Taylor saw were tremendous in scale, bigger than life to many. And all those things he witnessed have grown from exotic to rare to common to “have to haves.” And now they are necessities. Shoot, we think the same about the changes our generation has seen.

This bears witness: my computer has been in the shop all week. That’s a big change and means I’ve had no e-mail or Internet for five days. I guess that’s why all this has been on my mind all week.