My dad can boast that he survived having five teenage daughters at one time. (He spent a lot of time outdoors.)

Mom was pregnant while diapering previous babies, washing 2,000 eggs a day by hand, line-drying laundry after washing in the old wringer machine, and cooking three big meals a day. Farm, garden, husband, no microwave (not until I was past college), and never a minute to call her own - she was too unselfish to claim "self" time, anyway (not a 1950s concept).

We thought we were living in a real Modern Age, with indoor plumbing, electricity, radio, telephone (the party line: yes, I'm that old!), and television. Our grandparents were medieval peasants, compared to us.

Guess who's become "so last-century."

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Just when I learned how to program the VCR (crowning moment of my techno-challenged life!), husband switched to DVDs. Our TV (no, make that "entertainment center") has so many remotes, I have no idea which is which. The Singularity makes more sense to me than the router that connects our pcs, which in turn connect us to computers connecting us to Big Brother. Surveillance cameras watch our every move (I taped a sticker over the little Skype lens on my laptop, lest some hacker or voyeur who needs a life could be watching as I type this).

GPS, tracking devices, cell phones, Virtual Reality, and techno-glitches are just a few of the things my harried, over-worked, 20th Century mother never had on her mind.

Now we have picture phones, something only dreamed of in my childhood, so we don't need pictures on the wall. It occurs to me I do not have a row of matching pictures frames with high school senior portraits of my own 21st Century offspring. We have thousands of photos in our computers. Prints just fade over time. And collect dust.

I rarely flip pages of a paper book. I thumb the screen of my Kindle. And pray that an EMP or solar flare will never deprive us of electricity. Without it, I can access nothing. Not the thousands of books in my queue, nor the gazillion photos of Collies and cats that have come and gone. Ooh, and grandchildren! That day has come!

If the power grid ever goes, those fading, yellowed paper-copies of things in clumsy metal file cabinet drawers will outlast the cyber wonders. (Maybe I should start printing out some of my pc files, just in case?)

My primitive Last-Century life had its merits.

Julie (the one in glasses, pictured above) never made it to her 19th birthday. Today, November 28, is the 42nd anniversary of her last day alive on this Earth. You can read more here if you're interested in Cold Cases that might have been solved with 21st Century forensics.

Whoever raped and strangled her is walking free - mostly likely still alive today - quite likely enjoying his grandchildren. Maybe even an iPod, or any number of techno-miracles Julie would have embraced. She loved music, 33 rpm record albums, and The Midnight Special on NBC. She did not live to see MTV, or CD players, or even the portable boom box on city sidewalks.

She probably never got to hear Queen's epic "Bohemian Rhapsody." While Julie was missing from Nov. 28 to March 18, that song rose to the top of the charts. She never mentioned it in her diary, but every time it played on the radio, I believed she was alive somewhere, loving it even more than "The March of the Black Queen" (1974).

Did she hear it in some heaven light years away? Is she rocking in the clouds with Freddy Mercury, singing along, like that epic scene in the movie Wayne's World?

One can dream.

May the power of the little pieces of light which penetrate the darkness give you reason to go on
--Sister Joyce Rupp, O.S.M.