Remembering Dad's New Technologies

Photo, left: Kerosene lantern (commons.wikimedia.org)


I was in my late thirties when I sat beside my dying father. As he lay in his hospital bed, he looked back and thought about things he remembered. Listening to him reminisce about the changes he'd seen in his long life was something I found familiar and comforting.

"As a child," he told me, "I walked barefoot behind the plough and oxen. "Now," (there was awe in his voice though the news was more than twenty years old at the time), "we've put men on the moon."An immigrant farmer from Sweden, my grandfather was a technology enthusiast who kept his radio tuned to CBC.

When I was a teen, Dad was the one with the transistor. His tiny radio sat on his bedside table when he lay on his bed, as he often did, reading about the ancients. His radio too was tuned to the CBC; to my annoyance, he never failed to listen to the newscasts.

In 1969, we watched the moonwalk with our neighbours; we had no TV at homw. But we did have electricity and running water. Until I was eight we lived on a prairie farm. Our heat came from wood and coal-burning stoves, and we carried water.

Our light came from a variety of kerosene lamps. Dad came home one day with a noisy sputtering gas lamp; we oohed and aahed when we saw how dim it made the light thrown by our biggest kerosene lamp.

I came home for Christmas one year to find that Dad had acquired new radiant kerosene heater. Taking it into my room at night, I reveled in the heat thrown by the red-hot dome-shaped element. On the down side, when heater kicked in and the element glowed against the silver reflector panels, the room was nearly as bright as day.

Oh, the joy of going to bed without the necessity of pushing my feet down into the icy reaches of the sheets, the luxury of not trying to sleep in the same position so no body part would have to touch bedding that I had not already shivered into warmth.

Best of all, to rise in the morning to a room already warm was extraordinary luxury. Yet, though the climate here is much warmer than there, and though now we use a toasty down-filled duvet in winter, I still sleep best in a cold bedroom.