Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
There was a time not so long ago when the only mail was snail mail, telephones were attached to the wall, and mail order deliveries took weeks instead of days—or hours. Computers took up entire rooms instead of fitting in your backpack or sitting in your pocket. If you needed to find out how tall Mt. Fuji is or how many types of penguins live in Antarctica, you had to go to the library, or—if you were lucky—look it up in your home encyclopedia sets. Now all we have to do is ask those mysterious sirens named Siri and Alexa or log onto that vast network of the world wide web, (taking care not to get trapped in those ubiquitous and very deep rabbit holes).
Things have changed in the forty or so years since home computing became a thing. Items we order in the morning are delivered in the afternoon; phone calls can originate from anywhere; all the knowledge of the world is at our fingertips. Instant gratification has become the norm, so the art of anticipation has become very nearly extinct.
Today, nearly any television series, limited series, or films can be accessed and viewed at will. Back in the day, the viewing audience was at the mercy of the networks. Disney’s The Wonderful World of Color—later The Wonderful World of Disney—could only be seen on Sunday nights at 6:30. If you missed an episode, you had to wait for the summer reruns. The same was true for any network TV show.
The same was true for music. If you didn’t own a 45 or an album or a record player—or until you saved up enough to buy one, you were at the mercy of radio programming. During the sixties, the fad for every teenager was to have a plastic transistor radio (about the size of an iPhone) glued to your ear or plugged into the ear with the ancestral earbud.
In short, we had to wait for stuff. Being able to push a button and access any type of music or media immediately was the stuff of science fiction—like the eerily prescient communicators in Star Trek (the very first flip phone?) or the precursors to remote video Zooms in The Jetsons.
Today, with Amazon, FedEx, and UPS, we can order a product in the morning and have it delivered to our home that same afternoon, or—at the very worst—in two or three days. Ordering from mail order catalogs like J.C. Penney, Sears, or Herter’s would take weeks. The order would have to be filled out, mailed via the postal service, processed, and then received. During that time, as a kid, I remember checking the mailbox every day and going back to the catalog to look again at exactly what I had ordered and to reassure myself it was as cool as I thought it was. Going through the J.C. Penney’s and Sears Christmas catalogs and circling the toys we wanted under the tree was the ultimate anticipation experience. We knew we would be getting something on Christmas morning, but not everything we circled. Part of the fun was trying to figure out what would arrive.
In elementary schools during the 1960s and 70s, The Arrow Book Club would provide bimonthly catalogs of paperback books children could order directly from their classrooms. Looking through the two-page flyers at classic paperbacks like Homer Price, The Enormous Egg, Ramona, Follow My Leader, and dozens more was not only exciting; it gave nine and ten-year-olds a feeling of independence. And when the new glossy books arrived a few weeks later, it was like Christmas in the classroom—a wonderful surprise.
We also built model rocket kits from a company called Estes, which provided kits via mail order. Once again, we’d pick our exotic rockets like the Mars Lander or historic missiles like the V2 or Honest John from the catalog, send in the order form (with a check) and receive them a few weeks later. And then we’d build them, launch them, and—hopefully—recover them.
Mail order items were everywhere. The back cover of most comic books was a treasure trove of cool items. Who wouldn’t want a pair of X-Ray glasses or a Nautilus Submarine Playhouse or a troop of sea monkeys? Or a World War II beachhead playset? Of course, even as kids we recognized the need for a little caveat emptor for this stuff, which was also true for the Columbia Record Club. They offered about a dozen free records (or eight-tracks) for a penny but would then send an album a month (their choice) at a regular or inflated price. I remember getting a Tom Jones record when I was thirteen years old—it didn’t really do it for me.
The difference between then and now is that convenience is king, and convenience today means instant gratification. You hear a song you like, boom, go to iTunes and download it, or go to YouTube and play it. You don’t have to put on your winter coat and your boots and schlep down to the record store where you might actually run into some friends, talk about other albums, and maybe hear about a new band. Instead of going to the theater to see a new release, it can now be downloaded and played through the ubiquitous streaming services. Buying a new fishing lure or model kit or even X-ray glasses online means it’s in your hand that day or the next.
There is a certain pleasure in anticipating something, of waiting, hoping, and dreaming for a desired item. Imagining what it might be like to hold that fishing lure or get that new book or to first put on those X-ray glasses or unwrap the model rocket kit was as much, if not more, fun that actually getting the product (some of which were pretty disappointing). Hoping—knowing—that “Light My Fire” would eventually come on my little transistor radio fueled my desire to hear it.
Television shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, when compared to today’s fare, also took their time to tell a story. There was no flash editing or excessive violence or gratuitous action. The shows took their time. They made us wait and were all the better for it.
The Spanish word esperar means “to hope” as well as “to wait”, a neat condensation of the meaning of anticipation. Instant gratification has robbed us of the pleasure of hoping and wanting long-term rewards. It’s still understood that some skills are not accomplished overnight and that only hard work will make them a reality, but when anything we want is instantly available online and or when our smartphones replace our imaginations in moments of boredom, we lose not only a certain aspect of desire, but the very necessary skill of patience.
To hope is to wait, and to wait is to hope.