Mark KennedyView other columns by Mark Kennedy
As time passes and you reach the doorstep of senior citizenship, you notice little parts of the culture flaking off.
Driving back from the beach last week while my wife and our two boys napped, I tried to come up with a list of things I like that are inexorably slipping away. If not extinct, the items on the list are at least endangered.
Some are victims of advanced technology. Others are on the endangered list because of changing tastes and attitudes. But all are going, going, (and nearly) gone.
* Photo albums. Have you noticed that a whole industry - encompassing photo processing and retail camera stores - has virtually withered away in just a decade? Today's smartphones make it amazingly easy to take and share photos instantly, but the trade-off is the loss of heirloom photo albums.
Digital photos can exist forever in "the cloud," I suppose, but there is something more endearing and social about sitting on a friend's couch and looking through a family photo album or shuffling through a stack of vacation photos.
Sharing photos has gone from being a face-to-face conversation starter to a momentary impulse. And photos that reside in the clouds tend to be out of sight and out of mind. A photo album that lives on the bottom shelf of your coffee table, meanwhile, calls your name year after year.
* Cafeterias. Driving through a small town in South Carolina, I spotted a freestanding Piccadilly Cafeteria, which reminded me that the era of cafeteria-style dining in Chattanooga died without a proper obituary. The Piccadilly in Hamilton Place mall closed on Christmas Eve 2014, according to news archives.
I've always loved cafeteria food. Back in the 1960s, my parents would take my sister and I to the B&W Cafeteria in the Green Hills area of Nashville. There was something about seeing all the food arrayed and chatting with smiling servers that was more social than regular restaurants, which stress isolation and privacy.
More importantly, I miss the down-scale goodness of pinto beans, cornbread sticks and hamburger steak and gravy ordered without remorse.
* Phone conversations. Have you noticed that talking on the phone has become little more than an emergency backup when someone won't answer your texts? Ring tones, consequently, have become as startling - and bothersome - as car horns.
I remember when people would save up a whole day's (or week's) worth of information and share it all in a phone call. People falling in love would talk in hushed tones for hours. Texting has become so ubiquitous in today's world, nobody has an excuse to call you any more. Remember conversation as recreation? It died and nobody noticed.
I'm told that today's young people have a special aversion to phone conversations - preferring instead to text and Snapchat. Is it any wonder that their face-to-face social skills suffer? If every interaction you have is composed or framed in advance, you'll lose one of your most attractive features: vulnerability.
* Video rental stores. To lament the demise of video stores seems counterintuitive. Isn't it better to have nearly unlimited access to pay-per-view movies through streaming and cable TV on-demand services than be tethered to a bricks-and-mortar video story?
In a word: No.
And here's why. Picking out a DVD and taking it home was like making an appointment for a happy event. Plus, I enjoyed browsing the aisles and reading the DVD jackets at Blockbuster.
And speaking of blockbusters: Remember the little charge of excitement you got when you were able to snag a blockbuster movie on the first day of its DVD release?
Having access to everything is like having access to nothing. It's the Midas effect.
* Moderate politicians. Part of me was hoping for a Ted Cruz vs. Bernie Sanders presidential race. There would have been something cathartic about a winner-take-all cage match pitting the two ideological wings of our major political parties.
Instead, we have a race between two political lightning rods with character flaws: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The race promises to settle nothing and guarantees at least four years of high-level acrimony.
Funny thing: Most observers now agree that had either party succeeded in nominating a more benign candidate - say Joe Biden for the Democrats or John Kasich on the Republican side - either guy would win in a walk in the general election.
But centrists are quickly moving to the "extinct" column. And we may all pay the price for not protecting the endangered moderates.
Mark Kennedy is a resident of Signal Mountain. His columns appear in the Times Free Press on Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Contact him at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.