It’s no easy task thinking back to when you were 13 years old. My grade 8 brain had all sorts of notions about where life would go and what it would mean to be successful. Man was I an idiot. The best part of that year was the fact that we wrote ourselves a letter that was supposed to be opened when we turned 50 years old. By some stroke of luck, I found the seed envelope a few months ago and told the story to Mary. She was fascinated by the concept that something I wrote to myself had been unopened for this long. What had I written? What would I become? An astronaut? A baseball player? All I could think about were the stupid things my teenage mind would have written. Time will tell as I will open it in 2022 but for now I figured I would take stock against the things a 13 year old thinks makes you successful.
Strike out – Own a house with a pool (indoor would be awesome!)
No chance here. For one, we live in Calgary where you might be able to use a pool for 8 days a year. Not much value in that. Secondly, it one of those things that is the kind of luxury that very few people have the money to buy and less have the money to support. My luxury money has better uses.
YES! – Own a Big, Big, Big screen TV
That always seemed like something only the rich people would have. When you were 13, you were happy to have a 21″ colour TV and by 1985, you had at least a dozen channels to watch. The real lucky ones had a Superchannel cable box and more programming than you could imagine. In those days, all the good stations we on cable boxes and those of us without it were shut out. Like any typical teenage boy, we would spend late evenings watching the CBC French channel hoping to catch the occasional nudity or something dirty that only existed on the French channel. Now we take for granted that we all have TV’s larger than life and 900 channels of stuff we never knew we cared about. The is always a bigger TV out there somewhere and mine certainly isn’t the biggest around but the combined amount of screen in this house would make one hell of a TV.
YES! – A car phone
You know the ones from 1985, the phone built into the dashboard of your car or even better yet, built into the backseat! Nobody I knew had anything like the ones on TV and you would have thought that it would have been one of those things that would never happen. Suddenly, the microprocessor is created and we have phones that can basically do anything. It’s not the way I envisioned it back when I was 13 but I essentially watched a movie on my phone today and that’s amazing to me still.
YES! – A home basketball hoop that looked like an NBA hoop
This was another pipe dream for the pre-teen basketball fan. Most of us has a wooden pole with a wood backboard. If you were lucky, you had something mounted to the roof of the garage to shoot at. Even the luckiest of kids, had nothing that resembled the pro version. In today’s world, you can buy some sweet hoops now. We are lucky the boys are totally into basketball and we have a cup de sac to use it in so we bought one of those sweet hoops for them to enjoy. No wood backboards for these guys.
YES! – A home computer
You remember the computer of the 1980’s…
Nope, I didn’t have a Commodore 64 or an original Apple or even an early version of a PC. It took us until the mid-90’s before I invested my hard-earned dollars into my first PC. It was a clunky piece of shit but it was amazing. It connected me to things that my brain never had even thought of outside of my ole’ Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias. Like we all did in the 80’s, we just wanted to be a part of the digital world. I was lucky to have an Atari 2600 to see what happened to the video game console evolution but through sampling programming and other simple computer options when in school, you wanted to have one of these things. It seems pretty trivial now with the technology we now see.
Being 13, these “might” be the kind of things that I would have written about in that time capsule letter. It could always be worse, as I might have written about the following:
Time will tell what my adolescent mind used valuable paper and ink to write about. It will be fascinating to me no matter what it says. My advice is get your kids to write something down for themselves as 50 years comes faster than you could imagine. Can you only imagine the amazing things they will predict will be in their future!