The Boy and

I ate at our favorite BBQ restaurant last week for lunch, where the food's

always good, the waitresses are always friendly, and the prices are always

low. Well, two out of three ain't bad.

While sipping

sweet tea from two large-mouth Mason jars, a familiar conversation came

up, one that reminded me of a similar conversation between another teenager

and his dad many years ago.

The Boy was

complaining about how hard he has it growing up how everything is so expensive,

video games, paint balls, movies, and gas for his car. He doesn't think

it's fair that he has a driver's license but can't drive everywhere whenever

he wants to. As he kept complaining (I have found t hat

teenagers do that relentlessly), I thought back on what my Dad said to

me about 30 years ago: "Son, you have it easy. You should have been

around when I was a kid; you wouldn't have survived 5 minutes."

Dad told me

how hard his life was when he was growing up, and how much easier I had

it. How he had to wear his older brother's hand-me-down clothes and used

cardboard to fill the holes in his worn-out shoes. Shoes he wore out walking

three miles to school, uphill each way, in blinding snowstorms. (Funny,

I guess there were a whole lot more blinding snowstorms in Georgia back

in the 1940s than there are today.)

Well, now it's

my turn. I turned to The Boy, who was still complaining about how hard

it was to cut our big yard with the riding lawn mower. I said, "Son,

you have it easy. You should have been around when I was a kid; you wouldn't

have survived 5 minutes.

"You have

hundreds of interactive computer games in full color with 3-D lifelike

graphics, endless levels, and multiple lives you view on a big-screen

television with stereo surround sound. Growing up we had Pong ­ a

little white ball that bounced across the screen of our 12-inch black

& white TV. We had only one life, one level, and one screen as the

little white ball bounced faster and faster between two paddles.

"When

you want a new game you just go on an Internet site and download it for

free. We had to beg Mom for a month before she would take us to the store

and let us buy a new game with the money we earned from cutting grass.

"At 16

you have a $150 monthly allowance that you do nothing to earn. You have

your own car and can drive to the movies, drive to play paintball, or

drive yourself to the video store and buy the newest interactive video

game. That's if you can't steal, er, download it off the internet. It

takes you one hour to cut our grass with a 36-inch riding lawn mower.

"At 16

the only allowance I got was two dollars a week. That was only if I did

my chores. When us kids wanted to go anywhere, Mom would load us all up

in the green station wagon with wood panels and drive us. I worked for

25 cents an hour cutting grass with a 14-inch rotary push lawnmower, the

only power source being me. It took my brothers and me all day just to

cut our front yard.

"We had

no paintball guns with laser sighting that shot paintballs 200 yards.

All we had were guns that shot rubber bands two feet and water balloons

we could throw 10."

The Boy was speechless, indeed a rare occurrence and one that I had to

capitalize on and not let go by unrewarded.

"You have

a 27-inch TV in your room hooked to a satellite dish that has over 500

channels, 20 stations of cartoons, two remotes, yet you complain that

there's nothing on. A state-of-the-art computer sits on your desk connected

to the Internet by way of a high-speed DSL line, putting the entire literary

world at your fingertips.

"Back

in the day, there was no cartoon network. If we wanted to watch cartoons,

we had to wait all week 'til Saturday morning. The only TV in the house

was a 25-inch B&W one in the living room. Dad had five remotes: Big

Brother James, Older Brother Richard, The Sister, Twin Brother Mark, and

me. If we needed to look up information that couldn't be found between

the pages of the musty National Geographics Mom kept in the basement,

she would load us all up in the green station wagon with wood panels,

and off to the public library we would go."

(Note for younger

readers Public Library: A big building with lots of books one uses to

find information not found in musty National Geographics in one's basement

­ a precurser to the internet.)

The Boy had had enough and admitted that it was indeed possible that I

had a harder time growing up than he has, which was good 'cause I was

about to tell him that, growing up, I walked three miles to school up-hill

each way in blinding snowstorms.

[Rick Ryckeley

is employed by the Fayette County Department of Fire and Emergency Services.

He can be reached at [email protected].]