Growing Up Modern Amish

It seems I'm behind on a lot of the quintessential 80's, 90's and even early 2000's pop culture that I should have been eating up as a kid. The first time I saw 'The Goonies' was about 5 months ago. It was an enjoyable movie, but I can't help but compare the twinkle in my peers' eyes when they imitate Sloth grumbling 'Hey, you guys!' and the fact that I just had to look that quote up. I also didn't know who New Kids on the Block were until way after they were accused of lip syncing. And I surely didn't know any of the words to 'Ice Ice Baby.' There are many reasons that contribute to me having missed out on some of the childhood memories people my age seem to have enjoyed, but I think the biggest factor was that I grew up Modern Amish.

We didn't have cable. I didn't grow up watching videos kill the radio star on MTV, and I had no idea that over on Nickelodeon Clarissa had all the answers. The programs I watched were whatever came out when the TV was plugged in, and the rabbit ears were adjusted just so. My mom and I actually had a TV that we had to 'warm up' before watching. In the winter, we would sometimes watch TV together cuddled into her bed, and before we moved the operation from the living room to her bedroom, she would give a 10 minute warning on the commercial break of the show before the show we wanted to watch so I could run to her room, switch the TV on, and be back before I missed anything good. It needed time to adjust to being on, otherwise, if a frame had too much white in it, the TV would make a horrible buzzing sound and you would miss DJ lying to Stephanie about how much she ate that day because she wanted to slim down before Kimmy's pool party. On Saturday nights, my mom and I would watch 'Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman' (and to this day, I would still try to touch lips with Sully) and 'Walker, Texas Ranger.' I think 'Dr. Quinn' ended up getting canceled somewhere down the line so we replaced that time slot with a double header of COPS. To this day, I can sing the theme songs to both 'Walker and 'COPS,' and if 'Dr. Quinn' had words in her theme song, I would be able to sing those too (instead, the show opened with dramatic music that set the stage for the trials and tribulations for life on the American frontier in the 1800's). 

Most of the music I listened to was whatever came on Colorado's go-to for continuous lite rock, KOSY 101, and I can tell you it wasn't Prince or Madonna coming out of the speakers of my mom's yellow Subaru hatchback. I had a cassette player, but for a long time, my tapes were limited to Raffi and The Safety Kids ('We're The Safety Kids, The Safety Kids, The Safety Kids, Playin' it cool. We're the Safety Kids, The Safety Kids, The Safety Kids, keepin' the rules!) When I did finally get my first 'cool kid' tape, I proceeded to warp my favorite song, Michael Jackson's 'Bad,' because I became obsessed with it, figured out exactly how many seconds to hold down the rewind button so when I let go it was exactly at the beginning of the song, and blast it out of my Casio, over and over and over. I didn't ask for a CD player until the Christmas of my fifth grade year because I wanted to know what the other kids were talking about when I heard them saying words like 'skip' and 'disk.' 

The first email account I had was the one my college assigned to me when I got there and had The Internet right in my dorm room. I didn't have the internet growing up, so for projects in high school, I was lugging research books back home from the library in my Jansport and looking up facts on our CD-ROM Encyclopedia while my classmates were chatting on AIM and cutting and pasting from other people's work. My mom finally got the internet in her house the year she retired and no longer had access to it via her job. I think the main reasons for her having it installed were so she could receive and reply to my emails, and order supplies related to her quilting hobby. 

As I got older, I realized there was a lot of stuff other people had that we didn't. We didn't have Caller ID because my mom said if she didn't want to talk to someone, she would just not pick up the phone when it rang. We didn't have Call Waiting either because my mom said there wasn't anything that couldn't wait for her to be done with the conversation she was already having. My mom likes to keep things simple. She held steadfastly to her cassette player until one day she was out in the yard trimming the bushes and sheared the cord to her headphones in one snip. I was able to convince her to replace the defunct cassette player with an entirely new CD player by explaining that you don't have to rewind a CD. My mom has cable now, but the only reason is because the tube went out on the old box TV and the new TV she got was much thinner and the rabbit ears would tip off it and she'd lose reception. She has a cell phone now too, but she only turns it on to make calls and then promptly turns it right off. AT&T called her the other day to let her know she was eligible for a phone upgrade, but she told them the one she has now still works fine and she doesn't want to have to learn the buttons on another phone. I bought her a DVD player for Christmas a few years ago, but she didn't play one movie until months later when I sat down with her and taught her how to use it while she scribbled precise notes that included phrases like 'the round button with the slash in the top right corner' and 'use arrows on remote to navigate to Play Movie on menu screen.' We had a similar situation this past Christmas when I bought her an iPod. We sat down together so I could teach her how to use it while she took notes, but about the second week in January she called me to let me know the iPod was broken. Something was wrong with the volume, and no matter how high she cranked it up, the music was still too soft. I told her she didn't have the headphones plugged in far enough, but she said if she jammed them in any further the damn thing was likely to shatter. Luckily my uncle was over to visit a few days later and using his technical wizardry, he was able to fix the issue by ... plugging the headphones in farther. 

When I was younger, I'd feel embarrassed that we didn't seem to have the same stuff as most of my friends. I didn't understand why my mom would keep the same kitchen table for 15 years even though it had a dent in it from when my dad dropped a piece of firewood the first year they were married. She had enough money to buy all that stuff, so why wouldn't she just buy it? My mom, like many of our parents, was raised by two people who endured the Great Depression, and therefore understood the value of a possession or a dollar. I remember my Grandma Olson washing and reusing plastic baggies until they would literally disintegrate. The summer after my grandparents died, we were at their cabin cleaning out the attic and came across a giant shopping bag filled with bras; bras that my mother and aunt wore while they were growing up. I'm not sure if my Grandma planned on saving them for the grandkids or what, but the point is that the bras were still usable, so why get rid of them? My grandparents passed that mentality on to their kids, and I remember my mom always repeating the adage, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'

That concept is one that so many people have lost touch with today. We're constantly at the mall buying this season's shoes, and exchanging our perfectly fine TVs because that one isn't HD. Our world today is filled with so many conveniences and luxuries, that we're losing sight of the basics; the things that really matter. So it's really no surprise that the average credit card debt per household is $15,788*. We're buying things that we can't afford, and that we therefore don't need. 

Now that I'm an adult, I appreciate being raised Modern Amish. I don't take things for granted, I understand the value of what I already have, and only buy when I need, not when I want. So Mom, even though I was pissed about answering the phone and not realizing it was a creeper from school until he started talking, and mad when I dropped the CD-ROM Encyclopedia behind the computer and it got scratched and I couldn't look anything up on it for my Shakespeare report, I want to thank you for teaching me the worth of things. Believe me, I apply your 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' saying to a lot more in my life than possessions.