Can You Hear Me Now

Note: The underlying article can be found at Where do the Children Play.

Pip: There’s a site called Can You Hear Me Now, which is either a meditation on human connection or a very long complaint about cell service — and today, Andrew Prokop makes the case that it’s definitely the former.

Mara: Andrew Prokop’s latest takes us through the distance between a 1950s childhood and the world his grandchildren are growing up in — safety norms, the death of anticipation, and everything that quietly vanished between then and now.

Pip: Let’s start with what changed, and what that actually means.

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Where the World Went While We Weren’t Looking

Mara: The post opens with a grandfather’s observation — not a complaint exactly, but a reckoning. The question underneath everything is: what does it mean to grow up in a world your elders can barely recognize, and what did we lose, and what did we rightly leave behind?

Pip: And the epigraph sets the register early. Beckett, before a single word of personal reflection: “It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days.”

Mara: That framing matters. This isn’t nostalgia dressed up as wisdom — it’s an attempt to hold both things honestly. The post sorts the differences into themes: safety, immediacy, technology, and a long list of specifics that probably won’t survive another generation.

Pip: The safety section is where the post earns its credibility fastest. Kids bouncing around on bench seats, Jarts — actual metal-tipped lawn darts — being flung at skulls. The conclusion is not “those were the days.”

Mara: Right. The post is direct: “I applaud today’s safety measures and cringe when people call us a nanny state. The safety of my grandchildren is far more important than the misguided nostalgia of my wild, wild west childhood.”

Pip: Which is the kind of sentence you don’t write unless you’ve actually watched someone romanticize a concussion.

Mara: The immediacy section is where the argument gets more genuinely ambivalent. Weekly TV shows, movies that took years to reach your living room, photographs you had to wait to see — all of that enforced a shared rhythm. The post notes that missing a Carol Burnett broadcast meant missing what it calls “a mini family reunion.”

Pip: And now entertainment is, as the post puts it, “communal to solitary.” That’s a real shift, not just a curmudgeonly one.

Mara: The post pulls in Samuel Smiles on anticipation — “an intense anticipation itself transforms possibility into reality” — and sits with that question: what do we give up when waiting disappears entirely?

Pip: The technology section extends that unease without resolving it. The post isn’t anti-technology — it’s worried about dependency, and specifically about leaving room for what it calls “manual and imaginative experiences.”

Mara: Then there’s the “Potpourri” list — rotary phones, cursive, slide rules, Saturday morning cartoons, licking postage stamps. The post is honest that most of it is nostalgia, that “very few of these things have any real importance to me anymore.”

Pip: The “Good Riddance” section does the real work of the piece, though. Corporal punishment in school courtyards, girls barred from wearing pants, language used casually that shouldn’t have been. The post names these without flinching.

Mara: And it closes on something generous — the recognition that his own parents looked at his generation with the same bewilderment he sometimes feels now. Cat Stevens gets the last lyric before the poem: “It’s them they know, not me.” The job, the post concludes, is to help grandchildren navigate a planet that keeps changing, not to slow it down.

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Pip: What stays with me is that the post never picks a side — it just insists on holding the whole picture.

Mara: Wins and losses, as it says. The moon child shines when all else retreats. More soon.