I'm one of those people who get extremely bothered to discover that some mundane norm has changed while we were sleeping — incensed, even, like an irate grandpa in an Archie comic book who storms and rages because the backfiring muffler on the teenagers' jalopy has woken him from his place of slumber, in a rocking chair, on his front porch, an old-fashioned hat tilted low over his closed eyes. We are still clinging on to whatever it is (a saying, a kitchen implement, a habit of dress) while the rest of the world has moved on. "Come back here!" we shout as that jalopy we call progress screeches away, kicking up a cloud of dust, the sound of rock-and-roll left echoing behind in the street.
Being a gold-medal curmudgeon myself — the Simone Biles of curmudgeonly backflips, as I've mentioned here before — I take note of these things that have changed despite my best efforts to stop the actual flow of time and progress. I note them down with a sharpened pencil that I lick before lengthening the list of needless non-improvements in my miniature pocket notebook. (Not really! I don't lick the lead end of pencils, or lick pencils at all, and cannot explain why you see meddling spinsters and supercilious waiters doing so in the black-and-white Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s.)
For your entertainment, and possibly so you can debate me in the Letters to the Editor section of this newspaper, here are some dull, mundane, boring, everyday things that have disappeared from this world Since I Was a Girl.
Coverlets and bedspreads (almost) no longer exist. Their numbers are few, like the black rhino. You don't even see the word "coverlet" or "bedspread" any longer, except in the pages of the Vermont Country Store catalog. (The Vermont Country Store is run by a family named Orton who I should meet someday, as they are clearly also Olympic-level clingers to old things and old ways. Do you remember Tangee lipstick? Lemon Up shampoo?) Anyhow, I love a good coverlet, especially the kind that has seams or piping to outline the shape of the mattress and delineate it tidily from the bedskirt-drop portion of the bedspread, a sort of box-shaped domestic linen that is the antithesis of the mound-shape duvet. This one is a change for the worse.
Not long ago I saw a stranger on Reddit asking the world if it was still necessary to buy top sheets for your bed. Many consumers are no longer sleeping under top sheets, because we have duvets and duvet covers instead. I can actually remember my first encounter with a duvet. It was 1985, and it was in the Hotel du Quai Voltaire on the Left Bank of the Seine. The duvet was a satin number — stuffed with goose down and the color of dark mustard — and it was encased in a white cotton sleeve that had an oval opening on the top, rather than the side, through which the "bonne" (the maid) stuffed said duvet. I lifted this strange, European item up off the bed and looked under it. I wondered if we were supposed to slip our legs in through the opening in the cotton cover, nestling in for the night like a baby in a papoose. Plus ca change, plus ca change.
So, American-style bedding is losing the culture wars, and loot bags are also on the wane. The moms of today call a birthday-party loot bag a "goodie bag" or a "swag bag" — pronounced, by many of these moms, as "schwag," to my irrational ire — and many of them are against it. When I Was a Girl, birthday favors were things like a paper blowout noisemaker (useless), a Charms lollipop (highly desirable), and perhaps a metal kazoo or a slingshot with which to harm siblings, all tucked inside a thin paper bag with the face of a clown on it. But, what happened was, between the 1990s and early 2000s, birthday parties became an occasion for horrible, cheap, sweatshop-manufactured plastic junk to be heaped into the arms of babes. Eventually, the population took notice that no one, neither children nor their parents, needed or wanted horrible, cheap, sweatshop-manufactured plastic junk. Some of these parents, as an alternative, began handing out things like wildflower-seed packets wrapped in brown craft paper and tied with brown twine as a thank-you at the door of their 6-year-old's fairy-themed party; others put a flat-out ban on the swag bag. Either solution is depressing and needlessly reactionary, in my estimation. Just give the children what they want: candy and a nifty little novelty that may physically harm someone, like that prank gum that, when the sucker goes to take a slice, snaps onto their fingers like a mousetrap!
What about undershirts? When I was very little, girls wore white cotton undershirts, either white and tank-shaped or possibly a camisole with a bit of eyelet lace. Why did we need undershirts? Why don't we need them now?
People used to drink entire glasses of milk when they were thirsty, either whole or skim. Teenagers, kids, and adults. They'd clomp noisily into the kitchen, having worked up a sweat pushing the lawn mower or throwing around the pigskin, and swallow half a gallon straight from the carton. Who knew that Perrier, when it arrived in the late 1970s in that very status-stamped green pear-shaped bottle, would lead to a bottled-water mania that would kill off the whole culture of milk-fed Americana? I personally don't care about milk, one way or another, so this one doesn't raise my blood pressure.
Ditto the disappearance of butter in pats on the dinner table, the whole business of setting bread and butter out to supplement each and every lunch and dinner meal: I don't care. I'm just noting it down on my list of post-20th-century cultural shifts. (My family never ate like that anyway.)
Remember when not just bread and butter but salt and pepper traveled in a cunning little pair around the dinner table, as well? They were like a happy married couple, salt and pepper always holding hands, whether your family used the octagonal plain-glass shakers with the silver caps or preferred a matched novelty souvenir set, the cactus salt shaker and the sombrero pepper shaker, the ceramic Mr. and Mrs. Claus in December, the smiling apple-cheeked apple traveling always beside his smiling, round, orange wife. . . . Today, practically everyone grinds their pepper fresh and no one needs Mr. Pepper. That's an improvement, I'll agree wholeheartedly, although the quirky factor has been lost, I suppose.
Where have you gone, bedroom slippers? That drinking glass that used to sit on the side of the bathroom sink for rinsing teeth after brushing? Pressure cookers. Ashtrays. The pocket address book, the Rolodex, the Filofax. (In certain cases, it's no mystery why these quotidian items have disappeared.) Electric can openers! That brick-heavy countertop opener was seen in every kitchen in my 1970s childhood, beside the avocado or harvest-gold-colored appliances; I guess America really did eat from cans more frequently in those days of Hormel Corned Beef Hash, Dinty Moore Beef Stew, and Alpo. Brown paper bags as covers for school textbooks. Brown paper bags to carry your lunch. Sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper (that was better than plastic, obviously). Metal ice-cube strays with a lever.
Galoshes. Galoshes! Can you believe we covered our street shoes in rubber galoshes when it rained? This one, this vanished ritual, certainly does seem like an unnecessary extra step. (The shoes we wore were less disposable 50 years ago, and we had fewer of them, so we had to take better care, I guess. Blame fast fashion.) I'm just barely old enough to remember a rubber galosh on my foot, secured at the ankle with a button and an elastic. I tried to explain the galosh to my children once, and it was difficult to even explain. Somewhere in these great States of America — Mississippi? Maine? — there is a rubber factory that used to manufacture galoshes but that stands empty, its peace and silence disturbed only when teenage vandals come in the night to smoke weed and break beer bottles against its brick walls.
One forgotten item that needs to be returned to active duty is the egg beater. Who convinced the cooks of America that they were better off using a whisk when they prepared eggs for an omelet, a scramble, a frittata, or any of their baking projects? Don't be silly, chefs of America. An egg beater is quicker, better, and faster every time. You can toss it in the dishwasher and it doesn't even take up much room in your kitchen drawer. Throw your Instant Pot into the dustbin of history and buy an egg beater.