Growing up

Growing Up Analog: Being a Kid in the 80s, a Teen in the 90s

Things were different. That’s not nostalgia talking. That’s fact.

I was a child in the 80s and a teenager in the 90s, and we lived in the world before. Before social media. Before everyone had a computer. Before the internet was in your pocket. If you wanted to talk to your friend, you called their house phone and prayed their dad didn’t answer. If they weren’t home, you left a message on the machine and waited. And waited.

We had pay phones. A quarter could save your life. If you were out past curfew, you ran to the nearest 7-Eleven, dug in your pocket, and hoped to God your mom was in a forgiving mood. Then came pagers. If you had a beeper, you were somebody. My code was 143. I love you. You’d get a page, find a pay phone, call back, and stand there with the receiver cord twisted around your finger, hoping no one was listening.

My mother drove a yellow ‘74 VW Bug. The thing was a tank. And in the dash was an 8-track player. That’s what we had before cassettes, before CDs, before you could carry 10,000 songs in your hand. I remember the clunk when the track changed in the middle of a song. You didn’t skip. You listened. You waited for your favorite part to come back around.

Then we went from 8-track to cassette tapes. I made mix tapes off the radio, finger hovering over “record” and “pause,” trying to cut out the DJ talking. I wrote the song titles in my best handwriting on the little paper insert. Those tapes were currency. You traded them. You gave them to your crush. A mix tape said more than a text ever could.

Then CDs showed up. Shiny, scratchable, skippable. We thought we were high-tech. I carried a Discman and it would skip if you breathed wrong. So you walked real careful, head tilted, protecting track 3 like it was a baby. Then DVDs. We went from rewinding VHS tapes — “Be kind, rewind” — to watching movies without the wait.

We didn’t document every second. If something happened and you didn’t have a camera, it just lived in your memory. Birthday parties meant disposable cameras and waiting a week to see if the pictures turned out. Half of them didn’t. And that was okay.

We knocked on doors. “Can Cathryn come out and play?” No texts. No location sharing. You just showed up. We rode bikes until the streetlights came on. That was the rule. The streetlights were our curfew. We drank from the hose. We knew all our neighbors. We got bored. And boredom made us creative.

MTV actually played music videos. You sat and watched, hoping they’d play your song. You learned the dances from In Living Color and Soul Train, not TikTok. We passed notes folded into footballs. We had Trapper Keepers and Lisa Frank folders. We collected Garbage Pail Kids and Pogs.

The world was slower. Quieter. You had to be present, because there was no other place to be. No feed to scroll. No notifications. If you were with someone, you were with them. Eye contact. Real laughter. Long pauses that weren’t awkward — they were just space.

I’m not saying it was better. I’m saying it was ours. We were the last kids to know life without the internet and the first adults to have to explain it. We straddle two worlds. We remember the clunk of the 8-track, the hiss of the cassette, the skip of the CD. We remember calling the movie theater to hear the showtimes. We remember when “viral” meant you needed chicken soup.

That yellow ‘74 Bug is gone. The 8-track player is gone. The pay phones are gone. But that girl — the one who rode in the passenger seat, listening to the music change with a clunk, waiting for her song — she’s still here.

And she still knows how to wait.