I’ve always liked spring time. Not LOVED it, but I like it. I can hear the collective gasp from lovers of sunshine and warmth after a long winter. Let me explain.
When I was a child, I was deathly afraid of thunderstorms. Let me rephrase that. I had a pathological fear of thunderstorms. If it was a lovely spring day and a dark cloud came up, as they are wont to do, I would go into my bedroom, draw the blinds and watch the tv, hugging my map of Indiana that my parents had given me to track the weather advisories. Don’t worry, they weren’t enabling me, they knew I was a control freak and it helped me to know where the pesky storms were every second of their trek through Indiana. So, as winter would go away, I knew one thing. It was time for tornado sirens, storm watches and my eyes glued to Bob McClain the local weather man. Back in those days, we didn’t have the weather channel and buff Jim Cantore out chasing storms. We had a guy in a studio in Indiana, with 1980s technology showing us where the storms were going. “Swoop” McClain was my connection to sanity in those days.
Well to those of you on the edge of your seat, I “did” grow out of my fear of storms. However, one thing you realize when something scares the living daylights out of you, one has a tendency to learn quite a bit about that thing. At least, that’s what I did. Know your enemy-that was my policy.
This has changed quite a bit, since the invention of the internet. Now you can google anything you want and know far more than any person should ever know about a topic.
I was thinking back before the internet the other day, pondering if I would ever have gotten over my fear of storms, if I would have had 24/7 weather channel and google at my fingertips. There are so many people now with obsessive tendencies that get their feeling and thoughts ramped up by the almight google.
While I was tracking those storms, I had an encyclopedia at my fingertips as well, to look up symptoms and such. Born to be a researcher…that’s me!
When I heard on the radio that they were no longer going to be printing Encyclopedia Brittanica, I took a pause. For my generation, and those just a little older than me, the world has really changed. Would I have ever thought when I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation in the 80s and 90s that the “PADD” Picard read from would now be in my possession? That books were becoming things of the past and all the worlds knowledge (good and bad) was at my fingertips as long as I typed in the right search word?
I don’t know about you, but I kind of miss tracking my storms on my paper map of Indiana and watching for Swoop McClain’s weather forecast.
It taught me this. Today’s fear may be tomorrow’s misty nostalgia.