Monday, 11/19

It appears as if this is now a different world than the one in which I grew up. And it leaves me a little sad.

First of all, I'm not saying that today's world for a kid is better or worse than it was when I was a kid. After all, that was last century, and things change. It's not better now, nor is it worse now. It's just different now, as different as the 1940s or the 1950s were to when I grew up.

Change is a constant. That's a fact of life. It's not a bad thing.

That being said, here's now it's a different world than the one in which I grew up. As I mentioned last week, it was my nephew Abel's second birthday. I looked around a few stores to find a gift for him, a gift that would both appeal to a 2-year old and show off what a cool uncle he has. I tried to find him a spaceship. A rocket. Something that would show him about the wonders of space flight.

Guess what you can't find in stores any more?

I mean, you can find Transformer-like toys that could (loosely) be called spacecraft, and you could find a bunch of “Star Wars” vehicles that (theoretically) could fly in space. But I couldn't find a toy that's a realistic space craft. I couldn't find a shuttle, an old Apollo/Saturn V stack, or even a Space X Dragon capsule or the new STS booster. There was nothing along those lines available in any of the stores I checked.

I was bummed.

In all honesty, I didn't know if I actually expected to find any; after all, the US hasn't flown humans into space for seven years now. And I know that rockets and spaceflight aren't as magical to kids as they were to kids back when I was young (you know, the last century). So I wasn't totally surprised by what I found (or didn't find). But still—spaceflight is one of humankind's great, defining technical achievements.

Shouldn't kids know about that?

I ended up buying Abel something that all kids seem to like, a dinosaur puzzle. And I had to laugh at the irony. You can still buy toys of something that hasn't roamed the Earth for 65 million years. But something that left the Earth just seven years ago?

Not so much.

(jim@wmqt.com), a bit disappointed in things.