From the pages of the South Philly Review / Chronicle 

Time is going faster than it used to . . .

    Milk bottles. What happened to milk bottles? They were made of thick glass and they curved abruptly inward at the neck, as if someone had tried to strangle them, then bulged out again in the section where the cream theoretically collected. They had a crimped paper cap and an inner cap of cardboard that fitted into the lip of the mouth. There was a half-moon shaped tab you picked at with your fingernail to raise it so you could pull the cap out.

    Of course, once you start thinking about milk bottles you can get sucked practically into prehistory. Remember milkmen and those wood and steel milk crates, and grocery delivery boys and ice men and whoops, that's going to far.

    Remember church keys? Of course you do. Only an infant wouldn't recall opening beer cans with that little triangular blade, usually on the other end of a bottle cap hook. Every market and liquor store had them. They gave them away. Gift shops sold fancy church keys with wooden handles or plastic sculpted woman's legs. Now you have to pay for a plain one, if you can find it outside of an antique store.

    Remember bridge tables? The wooden folding kind with the rickety legs that screeched when you opened them. At first they all had green baize tops, but later the gift shop sold quilted, form fitting covers. When was the last time that you saw one?

    Or oilcloth? Is oilcloth, that was used to cover kitchen tables and cookbooks, to line drawers and shelves, lost to us? Celluloid? Bake-a-lite, the 75+ year old father of plastic?

    Cellophane? Cellophane was so big that Cole Porter wrote a song about it: "You're the purple light of a summer night in Spain... you're the National Gallery... you're Garbo's salary... you're cellophane..."

    How about spoolies? They were those rubber curler things for home permanent. It wouldn't have been the '50s without them, but you hardly ever see them anymore, except in the '50s movies, tenderly preserved along with various forgotten Hollywood stars. Maybe somebody will write an ode to them, the stars I mean, not the spoolies.

    Surely there are people barely turned gray who used fountain pens and carried a little bottle of ink around with them at school (with a tiny glass pocket inside near the mouth so you wouldn't have to dip the pen all the way to the bottom).

    There was a time when you could send in only $10. for the new wonder pen-the ballpoint        .

    How about wire-basket popcorn poppers...BB guns with wooden stocks...metal cookie cutters...manual typewriters...carbon paper?

    Athletic records are falling every week or so. Time is moving faster that it used to. If you stare at the minute hand of a clock long enough you can actually see it move, If indeed the clock has any hands at all.