Old to some

I was hanging out with my baby cousin the other day.

“El Guapo, have you had the same cell phone number since you were a little kid?”

I looked at him and mentally calculated how far out the window he could be tossed.

I tried explaining to him that I didn’t have a cell phone when I was a little kid.

“Why El Guapo? Were you really poor?”

I figure if I spin him around a couple of times I could probably get him about 15 feet or so out the window..

No, well yes, but cell phones were very expensive when I was a kid. The only kid that had a cell phone was Zac Morris. He sometimes let his Mexican friend use it.

“Who is Zac Morris?”

Nevermind. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, I’ve had several phone numbers because I kept on changing companies before they let you keep the same number?

“Why did you change companies? Was it because you didn’t like their text message plan?”

You’re five. How the hell do you know about text messages? Anyway, no, back then I there were no text messages. There were no color phones, no camera phones, no ring tones, no voting for American Idol.

“How did you vote then?”

There was no American Idol back then.

The kid sits down on the floor and I can see his little brain computing the black and white world of my yesteryear. I’m 27…

“So, what did you watch when there wasn’t any American Idol?”

Well, actually, back when I was your age, we didn’t even have cable.

“Shut up.”

En serio. We didn’t even have UPN or the Spanish channel. There were only four channels. They were all free.

“Geez. That would get boring to flip the remote to only four channels. You’d have to pick a channel quickly or TIVO everything.”

I’m 27 f-ing years old and I can’t believe I’m about to tell him that when I was a kid we didn’t even have a remote control much less a TIVO. I remember playing in the yard with my He-Man toys and GI Joes. The games would take weeks and would sometimes involve freezing the toy men in a glasses of water, tying them to string and throwing them out the car window and, if we were lucky, throw them into a pool.

This kid will likely never experience this because he can have a machine record 17 shows at one time for him to watch whenever he wants. So, I did what I remember enjoying when I was a kid.

I ran up to my room and found my uncle’s first cell phone that he had given me years ago. It was one of those 5 pound ones with the large, six-inch antenna. I think they only came in off-white and black. He, of course, had the off-white. So tacky… Anyway, I showed him the cell phone and explained how with technology they were able to make things smaller and smaller.

Then, I showed him how to take the phone apart and went over (what I knew) all the little pieces that make it work.

“Do you mean that everything has little pieces like this that make it work?”

You bet. Every machine can be taken apart and put back together. Just make sure that the machine is never plugged in and that I’m around when you’re doing it. I don’t care if you take apart your dad’s stuff, but he might.

Thank God I didn’t have to tell him that we didn’t have a remote. I couldn’t stand explaining how old I was….

Mucho Amor,

El Guapo