School Holidays

It's the middle of Winter here and that means:  school holidays!  Yes, the two weeks off where kids everywhere around Australia will be home from school drive their parents up the wall; after the first week anyway.

Personally, I'm not too crazy about school holidays.  The shopping centres are twice as crowded, you can't go to the movies without most of the seats being taken up by tweeting, facebooking, smsing teenagers doing just that all the way through the movie (and don't tell me they don't, because every time I've been to a movie in the last year, I've been blinded by some idiot's mobile phone while they habitually checked their mail just in case somebody couldn't wait for them to write back!).  I'm not scared of teenagers; I just find a lot of them very annoying.  

I remember school holidays were fun, long and we had assignments set us most of the time to get done before the holidays were finished; which most of the time, I got over and done with before the holidays were even begun.  I wonder what kids get given now; seeing I was always busy on my school holidays with books to read, visiting my Grandparents and long trips to the city that took half the day (and that was just to get in there... getting back was a matter of calling my parents up).  

I remember during high school Mum worked at Chardon's Corner Bookstore on Ipswich Road.  It was a store that was over-run by books; you'd even find them in the kitchen and in the toilet.  Most times, you go to the toilet and sit there for about twenty minutes browsing over books; forgetting what you were there for... oops (and eeww... disgusting).  But really, I enjoyed spending my days sitting in a seat and reading the latest 'Sweet Valley High' book.  If there was only one copy - and somebody wanted it - I'd have to give it up and pick out something else.  My older brother would soon become bored and he walked to Grandma and Grandpa's house.

As the years passed by, she stopped working at the bookstore and Gabe and I visited our Grandparents one a regular basis.  It was fun.  Gabe learnt to play snooker and Billiards while I perused their bookcases upstairs, played the piano and cooked with Grandma.  It may seem boring compared to what kids do today; but we treasured those times with our Grandparents seeing we lost them in our late 20's.  Grandma tried to teach me to play piano - but my brain couldn't work it out properly.  She wished I could and felt I was missing out and I often wondered how she did it; as piano music sounds beautiful seeing it makes our hands play two different ways.  She taught me to knit when I was 12 and I have never forgotten that skill; and now knit a lot of things that are useful and mail them off to friends and give them as presents.

I often wonder if the school holidays of the past are going to ever return; where kids learn from their family the old-fashioned values, skills and traditions as my brother and I have.  I can see that Gabe has tried to instill this in his daughter, Riley, to keep the traditions going from our generation into hers, so she knows how important it is to us that she doesn't lose touch with this kind of thing. 

But do kids of today - and the future - really care about the older ways of things?  If they do, why don't they show it?  If they don't, why not?  Is technology taking over the old skills?  I'm asking because I'm finding that the older I become, the more teenagers lose touch with talking to people, the more plugged into their phones, iPods, MP3's and other gadgets they become... the more detached they are becoming from the world.  It's unhealthy to not want to communicate with anyone around you; to push others away.  Until my next post, take care, keep warm and remember, I'm always here.