WHEN ARE THE GOOD OLD DAYS?
It seems I've been hearing more and more people my age talking about the good old days lately. Maybe it's because of the pandemic or maybe it's because we're getting close to (or some of us have tipped over) 70. When I hear that and in the examples they give, it mostly refers to the 1950s.
I remember those years. I was born in 1951, and I remember watching Roy Rogers and The Lone Ranger on TV on Saturday afternoons. My Dad was in the Navy and until I was seven, my Mom stayed at home. She started working then as a secretary, a profession she had trained for and in which she had worked for 10+ years before she was married.
When we lived in Norfolk, we were just a mile from Oceanview Amusement Park and my friends and I were allowed to walk to the amusement park with an older teen babysitter and ride the rides or go to the beach. I even visited a friend who lived in the apartments on the beach there and we went to the beach alone with her when I was 10. I remember going to the amusement park with three friends when I was 12 and riding that big old wooden roller coaster.
Elvis was The King, we stayed out till the street lights came on, and I walked three blocks to school everyday with all the other kids in the neighborhood.
People had manners, said please and thank you, listened to decent music, and treated people with respect. People had higher morals and went to church.
It was the white bread, Leave It to Beaver, Andy Griffith, Father Knows Best, idyllic 50s. The Good Old Days. The Best Times.
There was racial discrimination. My African-American former coworker and shipmate (who is my age) grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, where his mother worked as a domestic for a white family. Every now and then she would take him with her, but he had to stay in the kitchen. It was a different world for him. Jim Crow was still alive and well. I remember seeing the "white only" water fountains and restrooms in Tennessee. The term "nigger" or the softer term "nigra" was still considered proper English among whites in the South and elsewhere.
Women couldn't buy a house or get their own credit card without their husband's permission. They also were not allowed in many professions where we find them today, either by law or by practice, which means they were kept out by the good ol' boys club. Sexual harassment and sexual assault were rampant, a part of life for many working women. Spouse abuse/assault was not treated as assault and was looked at as a personal matter, often resulting in enormous pain for entire families for many generations.
Medicine was crude when compared to today's advances. Childhood leukemia was a death sentence whereas today over 80% of children survive and many more survive from other forms of childhood cancers and illnesses once thought to be fatal or incurable. Same with adults. The aortic rupture that was ruled inoperable and ultimately killed my father is not only operable but survivable today.
And perhaps that's just scratching the surface. Solomon says in Ecclesiastes, "There's nothing new under the sun." I believe that sin, wrong-doing, and corruption existed throughout these times and yes, even in the "good old days." Maybe we idolize those days we consider better ones because we see them through our innocent child's eyes when we saw only the good. If we had an abusive upbringing, we might not see those years the same way. Or if we lived in a crime-torn environment or were the subject of heartless discrimination, we may not call those years the best times.
Is it possible then, that our lives, our days are what we make of them? Even in the midst of a pandemic, we have a choice about how we will respond. I can tell myself it's awful and I hate it and think about all the things I can't do or that I don't have. Or, I can think about what I can do and think about the things I do have. Yes, I'm afraid it does go back to counting our blessings.
Several years ago I heard a story about a Navy Sailor who was washed overboard a submarine at night and not found for over 24 hours. He said after the initial shock of hitting the water and the submarine leaving he thought, "If I don't calm down and start thinking about what I can be grateful for, I'm not going to make it." (or words to that effect). So he started thinking, "I'm alive, the water is fairly warm, I have a life jacket, there aren't any sharks, I can breathe..." and he did that for over 24 hours (in between praying I am sure!) He was finally rescued, but he said staying focused on what he had rather than what he did not have kept him from panicking.
I think there's a lesson there. While some of us might have nostalgic thoughts of times past, they were not perfect times. We have to remember we are looking at them though our own perhaps rose-colored lenses. And we also need to remember not to stay focused on the past for too long - we're not going that direction. We are here, right now. All we have is this moment in time. And now this moment. And now this moment. We need to make the most of each one of those moments. And count the blessings we have. The Good Old Days may just be right now.
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