One morning in grade school, our teacher said, “Because Alaska and Hawaii are now states, we need a new flag.”

I knew Alaska and Hawaii had recently joined the Union. And I knew that on the American flag, there was one star for each state. But I hadn’t put the two facts together and realized that two stars needed to be added to our flag.

The teacher dragged a chair over to the wall, stood on it, and took down the flag. In its place, she put up a new one; so new it still had fold marks on it. Instead of the rectangular collection of stars we were used to, this one had long and short rows of stars. It looked odd.

We then pledged allegiance to this 50-star flag.

Within a few days, the look of the old flag had faded from our memories. It was as if we had pledged to this one all along.

And that’s the way it is with change. The new is quickly embraced, and the old, quickly forgotten.

Advertisement

I’m amazed at how easily I’ve adapted to change, particularly in technology.

One evening when I was a second grader, my mother babysat for a friend’s two young daughters. The girls, a little older than I was, had no use for me. But I didn’t feel in the least slighted, because there was a television. A television! After one evening of watching “Have Gun – Will Travel” and a few other westerns, it was if TV had always been part of my life. This was enhanced when mom bought a crappy little black and white set with a screen the size of a saucer.

In the early 1980s while in the Army, a guy in the barracks invited a few of us to his room to see his computer. He typed a few odd-looking sentences on a keyboard. What he typed appeared on the screen, which in itself seemed amazing. He hit a key and the lines of text disappeared, replaced by three bands of color: red, yellow, and blue.

We all oohed and aahed.

“Now watched this,” he said, and typed again. Before our very eyes, the three colors switched places, the blue on top, the red in the middle, and the yellow at the bottom.

“You made it do that?” I asked.

Advertisement

“Yup.”

Within a year, I had a computer, learned to program in Basic, and played countless games of Pong. It was as if computers had always existed.

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union changed the rules of planet-hood. According to them, Pluto was no longer a planet.

As a child – clear back in the day when the 50-star flag was hung in our classroom – I had learned the sentence, “My very eager mother just served us nine potatoes.”

This was a mnemonic to help us remember the nine planets in order: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

All my life I have adapted readily to change. But not to this.

To me, we still have nine planets.

Comments are not available on this story.

filed under: