"When I was your age...."

Parents, grandparents, and older people in general often complain at how easy we 'young folk' have it and how when they were young they had to walk to school in the snow up hill both ways carrying their younger sibling on their back etcera, etcetera. I'm sure many of them exaggerate their situations, but I really don't know because all I know is from what I have experienced, seen, and read in a book. This last January my last living grandparent passed away. It occurred to me that I really didn't know anything about my grandparents' lives save for what I knew from my personal experience interacting with them. But I became extremely curious, wondering who they were before they became grandparents, before they became parents, and before they got married and so forth. And that wondering led me to wondering about my parents lives. So I sat down by my Dad one night and began asking him questions about his parents' lives and anything he knew about his parents' parents, and so forth after three hours of listening to him talk I was ready to ask him about my mother's parents and also his life (for some reason my mother isn't as talkative about her past- she sometimes answers a question but won't tell me anything beyond that question, whereas my dad will answer the question and tell a story with it or add extra random information). The next night I began my questioning of his life and my mother's (I have yet to further question my mother :) I learned some really interesting things though. There never used to be women's sports (in my little hick town) when my father started high school, but at some point when my dad was 8-10th grade they got women's sports, but not all of the ones there are now just like volleyball and basketball, and he wasn't sure about softball. He also remembers watching Neil Armstrong land on the moon on the TV. The point of everything I've said is : ask all the questions while you can. My dad was able to answer a lot of it, but there were still things he wasn't sure of and I don't think there's anyone alive who knows some of those answers. I wish I would've asked my grandparents about their lives while I had the chance, so for now I'm left with asking my aunts, uncles, and parents everything that they know. The results: a little peek into the past of what life was like.