Things change quickly; accepting that change is tough

It has been said of us older people that we don’t like change.

I have to acknowledge some of that in myself, since I find myself resisting some changes. My excuse is that sometimes we have a perfectly good system set up for getting our things done, and we don’t want to change it just because some new way has appeared.

One example that comes to mind in recent times is the series of ads on television encouraging us to “ditch the old way of selling our car, and take up the new way — selling our old car entirely online.” To us older folks, it is an invitation to let their automatic system decide how much they will pay us for our car, and all we have to do is accept what they say, take whatever they offer us, and go home. It’s so easy. There’s no hassle, no haggling. Some of us older people think that a little haggling is just part of the process of buying or selling a car, and who would want to just accept whatever a computer out there somewhere comes up with to offer us? Or, why would we want to just accept what the little Car Fax fox tells us a car is worth?

I remember that my mother resisted some changes we suggested, even when we thought it was obviously a better and easier way for her. For example, for years she had been “locking” her front door by wedging a stick under the door knob and fixing the bottom of it in a place in the carpet. I decided one day that I was going to permanently “fix” her front door latch so that she wouldn’t need to “lock” it that way. So I put in a new lock set, and fixed the door so that it locked properly and she wouldn’t need her locking stick again. The result was that she never opened that door again for the remainder of her life.

Another example, I took out her old house phone, on which you had to dial the full phone numbers (or punch the buttons, that is, for the full number). I set it up so she could call us by hitting just one button on the new phone. The result? She refused to learn that one new button, insisting that she had always dialed (punched in) the full number, and she aimed to keep on doing it that way. So she did!

I’m recalling a conversation with my brother about changes in his office computer setup. He worked for the company that once was Wendt-Sonis, doing tests in his lab on machine cutting tools which were produced and marketed by his company. They produced many carbide milling tools for companies such as Ford Motor Co. His job was to push a tool to its limits, to see how fast it could work, how much force it could bear under load, how well it cleared the cuttings that were removed, and so on. He had worked out a Symphony spreadsheet that worked really well for recording the results of his tests, and performing analyses on the data. So, suddenly the company decided to change over to all Microsoft software. No more Symphony spreadsheet. So, not only was there the project of relearning a new spreadsheet system, but some of the functions that had been provided by the old system were not provided in the new Excel spreadsheet.

One of the ways change affects our current generations is that change often comes so quickly. I think of all the years when horses were the primary motive power source for human civilizations, pulling buggies, wagons, chariots, coaches and doing farm work by pulling plows, cultivators, mowers and so on. That continued for hundreds of years. Then in the 1800s, there came steam-powered boats and trains, and a bit later along came motorized vehicles, cars, trucks, tractors. Those changes have revolutionized transportation and farming over the past 150 years. My point is that some changes develop very slowly over long periods of time. But it strikes me today that some of the changes we are seeing in northwest Arkansas, and in our own hometown community, may happen very quickly.

When my Dad passed away in 2010, my brother John inherited the home and acreage on Arkansas Highway 72 west in Pea Ridge. After a few years passed, he decided to sell the property, and that finally went through late in the year 2020. A few days later, my brother suggested that I drive by the place. To my astonishment, I found that all the fences had been removed, all the trees had been dug out, all the out-buildings had been crunched down and piled up in splinters, only the house remained. A few days later I went by again, and found that the house was gone, and only the fireplace and chimney remained. A day or so later even that was gone, and the acreage was being grooved for streets and platted for houses. The place was unrecognizable.

One would never know that life had gone on there in its previous forms. I’m thinking, we are not anti-progress, but sometimes change and accepting change is tough for us old folks.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published June 4, 2008. Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and an award-winning columnist, is vice president of Pea Ridge Historical Society. Opinions expressed are those of the writer. He can be contacted by at joe369@centurytel.net, or call 621-1621.