Pray for my grandkids. They are deprived.

Don’t misunderstand, my children are great parents, but, all the same, there are vital experiences being denied their offspring.

I don’t think any of my grandkids have been caught up in the mystery of coffee making. Products of the age or microwave, Starbucks, and Mr. Coffee, they are prisoners of an age when the coffee pot turns on mysteriously just before waking, or costs thirty-five cents a sip or three dollars a cup. And for them hot water is a product of the magic box in the kitchen.

Never have my grandkids stood transfixed as they watch the water in the lower container of the drip-o-colator slowly inch its way up the center pipe, disappear into the upper container, and then the rain of black liquid pours down into to fill the lower container again. Sad! I guess this also says my grandkids will never know how real coffee tastes.

My grandchildren have bicycles. But for them the bikes are only a means of recreation limited to a small radius of activity not more than several hundred yards from their mailbox. I lament their lack on knowledge that a bicycle was invented to be a mode of transportation to take one from point A to point B. My grandkids are transported to and from school on a bus. They will never know the character building endeavor of pedaling a bike up a hill with but one hand on the handlebar while the other holds seventeen textbooks and one three-ring binder. Nor will they know that magical sound of a bike turned into a motorcycle with a clothes pen and a playing card.

These bright, bright children are prisoners of high definition television that projects stories in color that is limited to the color it is. The radio now only offers rock music or talk show hosts who blab away hour after hour hoping the constant noise of babble will camouflage their lack on intelligence. But there was a time when there was no television and a child’s entertainment came on Saturday afternoon stretched out on the bed listening to his Hopalong Cassady radio. There was a day when if the child wanted Roy Rogers’s shirt to be blue it was because reality was defined only by the child’s desires. And the B-Bar-B Ranch stretched to the ends of a limitless imagination.

The occupants of my grandchildren’s world no longer wish upon a star; they make plans to travel among them. They’ll never know the joy of air rushing through the vent window to blow across a perspiring face as a sedan travels at the amazing rate of fifty-miles-per-hour. Rather they look to the day when they will cool themselves by the heat of the sun. Never will they know the taste of a needs-to-be-licked stamp; the sound of a real live person saying, “Operator;” or a smiling teenage boy asking, “Fill it up?”

The world has changed. In the time it has taken for me to collect eggs from the chicken coop with my great-grandfather to my walking hand-in-hand with my granddaughter down the side of Cloudland Canyon a revolution has taken place. From what I read, however, the transformation I have observed is but the prelude to what is to come.

In that short distance from my grandfather to my grandkids an unimagined distance has been traveled. Pray for my grandkids. Have we prepared them adequately?