An Empty Can of Memories

By Gordon HopkinsI spend a lot of time thinking about experiences that the younger generation will never get to, um, experience. I suppose that is true of a lot of folks like me. Folks with more experience behind them, more years behind them and, frankly, more behind behind them.Today's youngsters will never know the incomprehensible joy of waking up at 6:00 in the morning on Saturday, pouring yourself a bowl of cereal (a part of this balanced breakfast and enough sugar to give a plow horse the jitters), plonking down in front of the TV and watching Saturday morning cartoons. The very phrase, “Saturday morning cartoons,” is meaningless today, thanks to cable TV, the internet, streaming and everything else that is awful in this modern world.By now, you are likely rolling your eyes and groaning, “Is he gonna do this shtick again? We’ve heard it all before.”Well, you are absolutely right. I’ve grumbled about the long lost past more times than I can count. (And I'm a pretty smart guy, so I can count pretty high.) So, I really don't need to do it again.Yet, just this morning, I had an epiphany. Human beings are not the only ones impacted by this phenomenon. I was feeding my cats this morning and I suddenly realized something I’d never thought of before.My cats have never heard an electric can opener.As regular readers of this column are aware, Archie (the fat, orange cat) recently went to the hospital. He is home now but the vet sent some pills home with him.While normally a pretty laid-back sort of dude, Archie can be a bit obstipant at times, like when I want to shove a pill down his throat. Normally, I feed my cats mostly dry cat food. Rather than continue to get my hands and arms ripped to shreds by the most efficient set of teeth this side of a velociraptor, I bought a few cans of wet cat food and have been secretly slipping Archie's pills into the dish. So far, he hasn't seemed to notice. Or, if he has, he clearly doesn't care. To be fair, I've also been giving the wet food to his brother, Groucho (the black, not quite as fat but getting there cat). So, this morning, I placed two bowls in front of me on the kitchen counter, got out a can of “Chicken & Liver” or “Seafood Delight” or something the sort, popped open the can, and my cats came running at the sound of the psssst.It was at that moment that I thought back to my childhood days, when the electric hum of a can opener sent crazed felines racing into the kitchen like a herd of gazelles fleeing a hungry lion. Archie and Groucho have never heard the sound that, for so many years, set countless numbers of their fluffy ancestors into motion like a starter's pistol.Nobody needs a can opener to open a can of cat food anymore. These days, cat food cans open with a pull tab, like a can of pop or beer. Compared to that warm, enticing electric hum, the psssst of a pull tab seems somehow banal and anticlimactic.Do my cats care? Probably not. Should I care? Probably not.It is the big things, the social and political and technological upheavals, that make the world unrecognizable from the one I grew up in. Some in bad ways, others in very good ways. Yet, it is those little details, more than the big ones, that make me feel somehow detached from reality, as if I'm watching a science fiction movie with myself not as the star but as a peripheral character in a minor subplot I don't really care about.

Salute to Boy Scouts

Gary Eugene Littrell

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