\nWhen I was a kid in the Maritimes in the late 70s, change was upon us. I didn’t fully realize it, of course, because I was unable to remember what it had been like before: my awareness began around ’76. However, the economy started to get rocky, after being still quite strong in the early 70s. By ’78 and ’79 it was plainer to see: the school was contracting, some businesses were closing, and people were talking about the declining economic environment. Moreover, prices were rising.<\/p>\n
In response to the developing recession, and also because it was a farming place, people liked to reuse and repurpose things. For townies, it was about saving money; farmers, since they had storage space, didn’t like to throw anything away that they could perhaps repurpose. Being a kid in that context, I developed that same point of view.<\/p>\n
\nOne example was inner tubes. Whenever one was finally beyond patching, kids saw it as gold: “You get great elastics from an inner tube,” one older kid observed. I wondered – did he mean cutting the tube into rounds or strips? Such an idea was foreign to me: at that age I wasn’t allowed to use cutting devices beyond scissors. Yet I decided that must be what he meant.<\/p>\n
\nLike so many ideas, I let that one rest. Over various moves, I rode my bike less. Eventually I ended up in cities where I took the bus. Yet I never fully forgot that kid’s love of expired inner tubes and the fact that you could get elastics from them.<\/p>\n
\nWhen my own kids had bikes, one of them had an inner tube that needed replacing. I kept the old one, still recalling what that kid had said around 35 years earlier. The old inner tube sat in the tool box, unused – until yesterday, when, doing yard repairs, I decided I wanted some big elastics.<\/p>\n
\nI got out the expired inner tube from the toolbox and cut it with shears to produce some elastic strips. It worked great, just like the kid predicted back in ’77:)<\/p>\n
Those farmers were smart:)<\/p>\nJack of Oracle Tutoring by Jack and Diane,<\/a> Campbell River, BC.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Self-tutoring about people and events from the past: the tutor thinks back about inner tubes. When I was a kid in the Maritimes in the late 70s, change was upon us. I didn’t fully realize it, of course, because I …<\/p>\n