Roman Sandals

My grandsons can’t imagine living without cell phones, the internet, and colored television. Technology is changing our lives so drastically my poor old brain can’t keep up.

Sixty years ago, as a young newspaper reporter, I typed my reports on an old manual typewriter, reaching up with my right arm to sling back the carriage to begin each new line When my children were in school and I went back to work, it was my skill as a typist that enabled me to make $4.00 an hour during temporary work for all the major corporations headquartered in the Chicago Loop. By then the latest thing was the IBM Selectric, the electric typewriter with a little ball which spun around to print the letters. I gave mine away when I left Albuquerque to move back to Texas.

For the past 35 years I’ve written all my fiction and correspondence on my personal computer.
I forget what it was like using a typewriter.

With difficulty I try to imagine what life was like 2,000 years ago, when Germany was on the frontier, and the Romans built a series of forts to protect the Empire from the Barbarians, much as the U.S. Army built forts (including Fort Worth) across West Texas to protect settlers from the Comanches. The difference was the Indians were no match for the U.S. Cavalry and were vanquished to Oklahoma, while the Barbarians overran and conquered Rome. .

The Romans abandoned the forts along the Rhine. Before they packed up and pulled out of the fort at Bad Homburg, they threw a bunch of stuff down a well. In the ooze at the bottom, enough was preserved to put on display in the small museum inside Kaiser Wilhelm’s “restored” fort.

Looking at the 2,000-year-old objects in glass cases in the museum, the big surprise was not how much had changed but how many things looked the same! A set of carpenter’s tools, hammers and chisels and planes, could have come out of my father-in-law’s tool box. Even more amazing was a glass case with several shelves of shoes. The Roman sandals were identical to styles for sale this summer at the Town East Mall.

Two thousand years ago Romans had indoor plumbing and a “modern” sewer system. In Albuquerque houses had privies in the backyard until after World War II. I knew a man who lived in one of those houses. It was built of adobe and had floors of hard-packed dirt. When Lou and his brother came home from the war, they added a bathroom and put in wooden floors, which lowered all the doorways to less than 6-feet high.

Every day I use technological wonders – computer, television, cell phone – which did not exist when I was a child. At Bad Homburg I was reminded that some basic things, like hammers and chisels and summer shoes – have not changed since Roman times.

Some other things, like honesty, loyalty, and fidelity, were the standard of behavior among all peoples and religions since the Jews were exiles in Babylon. Sadly, the ancients also had liars, cheats, greedy patricians, and power-grabbing politicians -- just like today.