Memories of an old lady

Yesterday was Valentine's day.  the Today Show had a whole morning of men proposing to women.  While it was beautiful, and emotional, the interesting about it was that all of the couples had lived together for several years before the proposal.  Some had children together.  I was thinking back to the days when you hid the fact that you were living with someone without marriage. It was strange when my mother left my father to live with the man she would eventually marry.  You just didn't do that in those days.  I saw a report that the youngest women marry these days is 25.  I was 22.

But lots of things are different now.  Some good, some not so good.  I still remember vividly the first mixed race couple I saw.  It was outside my high school and I was just shocked to see them being so affectionate with each other.  Now, good grief, it almost seems strange to see two people of the same race together.  Commercials that show families almost always have one African American married to one Caucasian and sometimes one of their children is Asian.

I remember the first time I saw a woman doing the news on  TV.  News reporters were exclusively men, Now it's not unusual to find both reporters on the TV news as women.

It's interesting to watch shows, like Jeopardy, where the contestant introduces himself and says that he lives with his husband.  Nobody flinches.  I remember when men were arrested just for being in a gay bar, without any interaction with anybody else happening.  And now gay couples are often having children.

A woman in Texas was recently handcuffed and jailed because she let her 8 year old son walk the half mile home from school alone.  In Florida, a mother was arrested for letting her child go to the park, less than half a mile from their house, alone.  She faced up to five years in prison.

My goodness, if these are crimes I should be in jail.  For  that matter, so should my parents, who let me walk the mile to grammar school and to the local playground by myself.  When Jeri was in 1st grade, we put her on a city bus to take her to her school.  Our kids here in Davis always walked or rode their bikes to school.  Now it seems that it's not only encouraged, but required that parents not allow their children to travel anywhere alone.

In most cases, we have improved but in other we have not.  I'm old enough to remember what it was like 70 years ago.  I wonder what my grandchildren will remember when they turn 80.

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It was Valentine's day, so we had heart shaped pizza for dinner.

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