Remember When
Old man Jones had his grandkids hanging on his every word; stories from his childhood, with all the expected embellishments painted a magical time. After an hour of frivolity, Jones thought it was time to end his story telling; he knew just the perfect tale. “When I was a boy, Momma would send me to the market with a dollar. I would come home with six potatoes, a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread, three pieces of chocolate, a jug of milk, and a box of tea bags.” He paused with a grin and then with a frown growing on his face, said, “ah but you can’t do that anymore…. too many damn security cameras.”
It is a common refrain today, voiced by many “the good ole days;” referencing the past in glowing terms is not a new phenomenon, folks have been invoking this phrase for years. In fact, as long as I can remember, I have heard older people lament current times and speak longingly about the past. I bet you have done it, I know I have, and I seemingly do it more as I get older. I’m not sure why, but lately it seems to flow off my tongue naturally, “I remember how wonderful it was to go to a pizza buffet, man I loved Mr. Gattis Pizza, I used to dip every bite of my pizza in their marinara sauce.” My telling of the days I would belly up to the buffet bar gives the impression I ate pounds of the best pizza on the planet. I have regaled my kids with how awesome the pizza was; I doubt I would want to eat there today.
Let’s be honest, there were some great things about the 80s; the drinking age was eighteen, no one in my college town checked your ID if you wanted to enter bars, there weren’t so many rules, and frankly I lived a carefree life. Kids these days, don’t describe the world as carefree. But before my walk down memory lane becomes too optimistic, I should acknowledge, my happy go lucky nature wasn’t a sign there weren’t problems in the world, it is just a reflection that I lived a sheltered life.
It is an important point to make; throughout history, regardless of which era you lived in, there have been things that occurred that don’t sound so good or pleasant. When I was young, my grandparents and their cohorts extolled the good ole days and how everything that was going on now was a sign, we were all going to hell. Mind you, they were born before the depression and lived through World War Two; let that sink in, they lived during a period when unemployment was twenty-five percent, and a world war killed over fifty million people worldwide; and yet they still talked highly of that period. In 1950 life expectancy was sixty-five for men and seventy-one for women—by 2007 that number had risen to seventy-nine for men and eighty-four for women. I am not saying the greatest generation wasn’t justified in feeling nostalgic about their younger days, I am just suggesting it was not because times were so good, with little problems to worry about.
Take my parents’ generation, they say the same thing about the sixties and seventies; “man those were the days.” Did you know that there were roughly 2,500 bombings a DAY in the US in both 1971 and 1972; that’s almost five bombings a day; CNN would lose their mind if, today, there were five bombings a day. My parents lived through the Vietnam War era; a war that killed over 58,000 US soldiers; President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King were assassinated. There were major riots in Watts, Detroit, Chicago, Newark, Birmingham, and D.C. Internationally, the Khmer Rouge killed almost three million Cambodians in a three-year period in the seventies; I could go on; suffice it to say, all was not perfect when my parents’ told stories about how grand life was when they walked to school in the snow, uphill, both ways.
The point is our memories and the veracity of our claim of how great it was in the past are biased and generally arguable. Each period has good things and bad things, and I guess how you want to measure things informs whether you believe the past was better than now. My mother-in-law and I used to debate this very subject; she frequently wanted to suggest how awful things are today, she would reference whatever disaster had befallen people or what outrage had been uncovered and say, “things are so much worse than they used to be, the world seems to have more problems than ever before.” I get the feeling; it’s just the data doesn’t support that.
And now I am getting older and finding myself saying the same damn thing. I’m not going to lie; it bothers me to remember how silly I thought that notion was when I was younger only to begin to repeat the same thoughts two decades later. After some serious private cogitating, I think I have figured it out; and least I have figured it out for me, I can’t speak for anyone else.
So, what is it? When I think about the past and remember the good ole days, I am not thinking about what was happening or the variables around my life, I am thinking about how I felt. The pizza at Mr. Gattis wasn’t so good as to make me long for it, it was the way a felt as a senior in high school when I would sneak away with friends at lunch and spend almost an hour eating pizza. When I think about the first time I sneaked into a bar, it wasn’t the beer I remember, it was the feeling I had knowing I was growing up and beginning to experience things I had never done before. When I tell stories of my first job, I am not reminiscing about how great my position was or how much I learned or what they paid me, I am thinking about how excited I was to know the rest of my life was in front of me.
I don’t want to go back, I like, despite all you can complain about, my current way of life and the way I get to spend my time; I don’t want the world to return to the way it was, I want to return to the way I was. I want to relive my naivety and the joy I got from experiencing something new; I want to go on a date with my wife and feel the same anxious anticipation I felt the first time I took her to a place I couldn’t afford. I want to find joy when my team favorite wins, not because I expect it, but because I don’t.
The good ole days are today and tomorrow; they are every day; that is, if I can allow myself to find newness in what I do and not only remember the newness in what I did.
If I am honest, and I intend to always be, the emotion of starting anew is part of the reason I find so much joy in writing. Every day, I get to embark on a brief journey into something that, even for a 58-year-old man feels like I’m playing hooky to eat pizza; and frankly, isn’t that what we all want to do, not just when we are 17, but until are days are done.
