Life involves adjusting to changing times

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By Kay Conklin

Contributing columnist

Recently, I have become aware that I am not keeping up with the changes that go on every day. Of course, I blame it on my age. I have been spending some time thinking of the changes that have been occurring during my lifetime. Big changes like having 14 different addresses in the first 22 years of my life.

1. My life changed when I was 10 years old and got to help my older brother with his paper route. His route was the entire length of East Central Avenue, and I helped him by taking all the side streets. He paid me 5 cents a week to help him. One of the customers, on one of my side streets, paid him an extra 5 cents a week to have the paper put inside her storm door. I’m the one who got off my bike and put it in the door. Later, when I was older, I realized where my 5 cents came from.

2. Our lives all changed when we moved to the 300 block of North Sandusky Street in Delaware and had a bigger house with more room for everyone. We had a dining room big enough for all our family to sit around one table. What I have missed, since then, is the noise of nine of us at the table. After George and I got married, we rarely had more than four persons at one time.

3. Another change was when I turned 14 and got to babysit for 35 cents an hour. When I babysat with four children, from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., I got a whole $5 bill.

4. When I started to drive, there were filling station attendants who not only pumped your gas, but cleaned your windshield and checked your oil. Then the day came when you had to pump your own gas, and no one cleaned anything for you. Now, if you have the right gas cards, you don’t even have to go inside.

5. Getting groceries started out just telling the person who stood behind a counter what groceries you needed, and they got them for you. Later, we could take a cart through the whole store. Now, you can phone them in and have them delivered to your kitchen door.

6. As for money, I started out getting an allowance that was $2 a week when I was a senior in high school. However, the majority of it was for my lunches. Then when I got my first job, I got a real paper paycheck that I deposited in the bank myself. That was followed by direct deposit, and it has been “direct deposit” ever since.

7. As for the style of clothes, when I was a lot younger and working outside the home, I had more clothes that were in style. However, since the day I retired, style has gone out the window. To me, being comfortable is the most important thing.

8. As for libraries, from my seventh grade in school until today, except for a very short period of time, I have lived close enough to a library to walk to it. Hard to believe, but true. I am at a point in life now when walking to the library is also where I walk for exercise.

9. A big change along the way has been our mail delivery. My grandfather delivered the mail back in the early 1900s using a horse and wagon. Back in the early ‘50s, we had mail delivered two times a day — morning and afternoon. Later, we could have mailboxes out at the edge of the street where the delivery person could put it in our box while still sitting in their car.

With the Delaware Gazette cutting back to delivering just two days a week, it will take a while to get used to it. For the past 60 plus years, we have had the Delaware Gazette delivered to our house every day (except for Sundays). The paper was always delivered to the homes I have lived in, until the time it started to come in the mail. (Back in the past, when we had a delivery man put the paper on our porch, sometimes we didn’t get a copy. Our delivery person, “Harold,” told us that whenever he was short a paper, he just didn’t give one to us because he said he knew George wouldn’t get mad at him if we didn’t get a paper that day.) And he was right.

For a lot of years now, I have known that someday there wouldn’t be any newspapers printed anywhere. It is too much of a waste of trees in our environment. What I didn’t know was that it may be taking place in my lifetime. When I went to our mailbox earlier this week, it was totally empty! Not a card, or a bill, or a magazine, or a letter from a friend or relative. Not even the newspaper that I could always rely on. Just one of the many new changes I’m going to have to get used to!

Kay E. Conklin is a retired Delaware County recorder who served four terms. She graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University with a degree in sociology and anthropology.

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