We should have learned from Hansel and Gretel: Soliloquy

In the old folk tale "Hansel and Gretel," the children who had been left to die in the woods scattered breadcrumbs along the path from home, confident that they could return home by following the crumb trail. Unfortunately, birds flew down and ate the crumbs.

Sometimes, you can’t get back again.

I once collected cheap Christmas record albums to play on our stereo phonograph.

Eventually, I transferred the songs to cassettes and could play them in our car or on portable devices!

Later, I moved records and tapes to CD format. I had a great collection.

Technology was fabulous! Music was cheap and portable!

I took silent films with a Super 8 movie camera as our kids grew.

Then, we bought a digital movie camera that could use SD cards, so I didn’t have to pay for developing, and we no longer needed a projector to view family films.

When videocassettes came out, we transferred the movies to videocassette, and later to DVDs.

Videotape format was great for professional movies, too. You watched movies from the comfort of home at any time you wanted. And you could either rent them cheaply or buy them and watch them over and over.

Later, films were on DVD, and your kids could watch movies even in the car.

Wasn’t technology grand?

I saved digital family movies onto the hard drives of our desktop computer and later moved them to my laptop’s hard drive.

I rarely watched them, but I was secure knowing that I had them saved.

But the promise of new technology shone so brightly in my eyes that I couldn’t see the drawbacks, I couldn’t see the downside. I couldn’t see what would happen next.

What happened next was the subscription model of technology.

First, everything was free. Free, free, free! Music was free. News was free. Movies were free, word processing was, if not free, at least cheap. You bought the software, and it was yours forever.

New things were so free that we cast away old things.

One day, I realized that my movie formats, the files in which I’d saved all my old movies, were no longer compatible with any device I owned that still worked.

Others were lost on hard drives that failed or laptops that broke. I even had a large backup drive that failed.

We had no working videocassette player, and players were now impossible to find for a reasonable price. To see movies we’d already purchased, we now needed subscriptions to varied streaming services, if they were available to stream at all.

You must pay monthly fees for your music, to store your photos, to watch movies or shows once free on TV. You must pay monthly fees even to use a word processor.

Our laptops no longer have slots for CDs or DVDs.

Recently, I moved unviewable home movie files from an old laptop to an expensive thumb drive I bought, hoping my computer-savvy son could restore them to a usable file format.

I thought they had transferred. I saw them listed in thumb drive folders. They were there when I deleted the files from my cluttered old laptop. But they were gone when I went back to the thumb drive.

The record of our children’s childhoods was here today, gone tomorrow.

When Hansel and Gretel scattered their path of breadcrumbs and walked toward the bright promise of the candy house in the forest, they were sure they could get back home if they needed to.

They didn’t know there was a witch in the house.

They didn’t count on hungry birds.

Sometimes, there is no going back.

Donna Marmorstein lives and writes in Aberdeen. Email dkmarmorstein@yahoo.com.

This article originally appeared on Aberdeen News: We should have learned from Hansel and Gretel