By By Leada DeVaney, Hartselle Enquirer
When I was five years old, my favorite toy in the world was my little refrigerator.
There's an old picture of me standing beside it, taken one Christmas morning back in the 1970s.
I'm wearing my Winnie the Pooh nightgown and sporting a Dorothy Hammill haircut. I'm standing beside a small, metal toy refrigerator, painted harvest gold – it was the 70s after all.
My favorite thing about the refrigerator was it had a toy icemaker. This was really neat, since our avocado green real refrigerator didn't even have an ice maker.
The "ice maker" was actually a little slot on the top of the refrigerator. You would drop the little plastic ice cubes in the slot and, magically, they would land in the ice bucket in the refrigerator's freezer department.
To my 5-year-old mind, the refrigerator was magic and, much to my bedraggled parents' delight, it kept me entertained for hours. A harvest gold metal refrigerator and some plastic ice cubes – this was high technology.
Fast forward 30 some-odd years.
My nephew, Isaac, is sitting on the sofa at my mother's house. He will be five this month and, in my completely unbiased opinion, is a genius.
In his lap is his father's laptop computer. Isaac is busy playing games, manipulating the buttons and moving the pointer as if it's no big deal.
No plastic ice cubes for this kid.
"So, what are you doing," I asked him.
"I'm searching for the diamonds and saving the princess," he said, not looking up from the screen. "You have to move this button to do that." Gesh. It would have probably taken me a while to figure that out. He had it licked in about a minute.
I heard a comedian recently who talked about what he received for Christmas one year. He told the story of receiving one of those wooden paddles with a red rubber ball attached with a elasticized cord. The goal of the game is to hit the ball back and forth.
Exciting stuff.
In his story, he said he would play with the wooden paddle until the ball would come flying off and hit something in the house, breaking it into a million pieces.
"Then, you would get a spanking with the wooden paddle," he said.
Times have changed.
We've moved from wooden paddles and red balls to harvest gold refrigerators and plastic ice to now, 5-year-olds with laptop computers.
Who knows what Isaac's child will play with? Probably holograms and virtual reality.
Or maybe she will just pick up that wooden paddle with the red ball, break something and get a spanking.