And To Think That I Saw It on Montague Street

I was the first person in my family to grow up with computers. When I was four or five, my mother bought the first computer owned by anyone on either side of my family, for an amount of money no doubt only slightly shy of the current Pentagon budget. She had developed an interest in computers that, a few years later, would briefly see her employed in the now-vanished career of computer consultant, and I expect buying this behemoth was probably part of a career exploration.

Educational software was probably in its infancy then (this was 1985 or 1986), but my mother bought a few computer games, on floppy disks the size of pancakes, and I played them as constantly as she would allow me. Personal computers may have been a new technological marvel of the age, but in my youthful view of the world, I assumed they had always existed. One day, when my father came home from work, I asked him in all innocence what computer games he played when he was a little boy.

"When I was your age, computers were the size of this house, and nobody had one," he told me.

Stunned by this revelation, I asked him what tapes he had watched on his VCR. A few months earlier, my parents had decided to commemorate my first day of kindergarten by buying a copy of Walt Disney's Pinnochio and laying out construction-paper feet leading from our front door to the VCR, where the tape was ready to pushed in and played. At this time, apparently, videotapes of pre-recorded movies were so expensive that you couldn't just walk into a store and buy them; my parents had had to pay through the nose for this tape, and for a few others they had subsequently purchased, but I knew nothing of this. I must have believed that every little boy since Cain and Abel had come home the first day of kindergarten to find a videotape sticking out of the VCR.

"When I was your age," my father explained, with a mix of patience and bemusement, "there were no VCRs, and television was black-and-white."

I had no idea what this word black-and-white meant, so I cogitated for a few moments and asked my father, without any guile whatsoever:

"Did you have a car or a horse?"

I suppose that someday, my children will make me feel similarly old when I have to explain to them that, when I was their age, there was no Internet. And because there was no Internet, there was no Facebook, no blogosphere, and no place to go to watch streaming video of programs recently broadcast half the world away. Yes, that's right, kids: you had to wait for the movies to come out on video, and sometimes the one you wanted to see wasn't out yet, so you couldn't see it.

And--yes, I know it's hard to believe, Vankele, but there was no Google Maps! That's right--if you wanted directions somewhere, you had to call the place up on the phone and ask for them. And sometimes--gasp!--they were wrong and you got lost! And you couldn't put the little man down on the map and get a real-life moving image of the street it was on!

That little man on Google Maps may spell the end of tourism as we know it. With just a click of a mouse, you can now virtually "walk" any street or road anywhere in the world. You need never leave home again to get that feeling of really being at the Kremlin, the Sears Tower, or--as I did today--Montague Street in Brooklyn.

There's nothing particularly fascinating about Montague Street. It's the main shopping and restaurant street in upscale Brooklyn Heights, one of the first neighborhoods you come to after crossing the Manhattan Bridge into the Borough of Homes and Churches. The street has a lot of lovely little places to grab a bite to eat, including a little cafe called Teresa's where I used to go every Sunday for Lox Benedict before strolling over to the Brooklyn Heights promenade to grab a glimpse of the Lower Manhattan skyline before I headed off to a nearby Barnes & Noble. But today I went for a virtual "walk" along Montague Street, courtesy of Google Maps, and got to have my first glance at Teresa's since more than a year and a half ago, before I left New York for Taiwan.

It's amazing how much I remembered, and how much I had forgotten, about Montague Street. In my mind, I had placed the grocery store a block closer to the Promenade than it actually is, and I had completely forgotten about a Connecticut Muffin (Starbuck's local competition), where I used to get together with a good friend and drink iced chai while we discussed Jewish community politics. I had also forgotten a large storefront that seemed, incongruously in such a nice neighborhood, to be perpetually empty.

And to think that, today, I saw it on Montague Street.