HAMBURGER SANDWICH
And other amazing inventions.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
This was first said by Jean-Baptiste Alfonse Karr in 1849. I know! Crazy, right? But lately, that sentiment seems truer to me than ever before. I feel like the past few years have been a sea of change and adjustment … and yet there has also been a continuum of so many familiar things.
It’s amazing when you start to think about how things have changed, and how they’ve mostly improved. Technology improvements are the easiest examples: records to cassette tapes to eight-track tapes to CDs to digital. Film to disk to digital. Operator assist to rotary dial to push button to cellular. Having a home telephone used to be truly amazing, and now we all carry minicomputers in our pockets. My grandpa worked on one of the first computers at Univac. As a little girl, I always wondered … was a computer a big vacuum? The point is that we’re all still listening to music, taking pictures, and trying to communicate. The methods have just changed.
Technology may be the low-hanging fruit of change. I was at a cocktail party last night, talking with an eighth-grade schoolteacher. She reminded me that we can’t just skip over the Industrial Revolution!
My great-grandma rode in a horse-drawn wagon for heaven’s sake! I imagine her riding with her mother to the market and picture an old-fashioned store like the one on the TV show Little House on the Prairie. My great-grandmother, decked out in a gingham dress, with a bow in her hair, and picking a candy from the glass jars on the counter. She was like the Laura Ingalls character, always nice and proper, not like the rude, spoiled Nellie Oleson. I remember shopping at the Kroger grocery store with her once. I pushed the cart up and down the aisles as she checked items off her list. She paused in the international food aisle, in front of a can of La Choy chop suey, but didn’t put it in the cart. Some change is just too much.
She grew up at a time when the food on the table came from your own farm. The pigs and cows were contestants at the 4-H Fair and then fed the family for the winter! Morning chores included milking the cow and gathering eggs before breakfast. Such hard work—every day! No wonder they say necessity is the mother of invention.
It’s the mothers who make the changes around the house. We all like to think that we will be different from our parents. There was no way my grandma was going to milk a cow or gather eggs … she embraced things like canned chop suey and frozen pizza. My grandpa, on the other hand, was not so happy about it. For him, dinner was meat and potatoes and didn’t come in plastic wrap or out of a can. I remember grandma working hard to convince grandpa that sandwiches were dinner food!
This trip down memory lane proved to me that the more things change, the more they stay the same. I realized this while listening to music through my iPhone with Bluetooth EarPods while searching for a farm-to-table restaurant for dinner and checking the date for our tickets to the restaurant crawl on Main Street that will award the #1 best spot for a hamburger sandwich.
