Instant Karma
Task 18, My 2 to May 9
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were”. Marcel Proust
If you are a boomer like me you get a lot of emails with the following subject lines: SENIOR OBSERVATIONS, or THOSE WERE THE DAYS, or DO YOU REMEMBER, stuff like that, and the content is divided into two main tranches: 1) wry comments on being old (i.e. “I made a huge to-do list for today. I just can’t figure out who’s going to do it…”; or 2) photographs of food/toys/games/clothes/social mores/etc., etc. that don’t exist anymore for one reason or another yet they have an irresistible, and somewhat incomprehensible hold on us.
I’m going to deal with the latter today, because the pithy statements either A) assume that I am technologically inept, which I am not; or assume that i think that technology is a bad thing, which I do not, i.e. “I don’t know how to use TikTok, but I can write in cursive, do long division, and tell time on clocks with hands…” first of all, cursive is overrated; second, I was never good at long division, and three: who gives a crap if you can’t tell time on a clock with hands?
Instead, I am going to address the photos meant to transport us back to the 50s and 60s when everything was so great and simple and easy and fun and safe–and I’ll give you my take on them.
One. A black and white picture of a boy, maybe 12, in mid-air, eyes and mouth wide open in terror, after launching himself into mid-air from a swing on a playground. The caption reads: REMEMBER THIS FEELING?. Yes, I remember that feeling, especially the feeling of face-planting on the roughly tarred playground at St. Joseph Elementary school. I repeat, roughly tarred–there was no grass behind St. Joes.
Two. A picture of kids playing JARTS. The caption: DID YOU PLAY WITH THESE? The answer is yes. Our family had Jarts, and one errant missile hit our dog Casey in the hindquarters. Casey bolted for the neighbors yard, bellowing angrily. We didn’t see him for two weeks.
Three: A photo of a hot girl, wearing a tank top and boots, stretched over the front seat of a mid-60s pickup truck. The caption reads: BRING BACK THE BENCH SEAT. This is nostalgia at its most mis-leading. It implies that there were all these hot young women who wanted to have sex in the front seat of cars with the likes of someone like myself at the time: acne-ridden, tongue-tied and inept at small talk. I could have owned a Rolls Royce and it wouldn’t have helped.
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Four: A picture of an overhead projector, the kind a teacher would roll up in front of the classroom and display (for example) a math problem. The captions says: THERE IS A GENERATION OF KIDS THAT HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THIS IS. Thank god.
Five. A photo of a 70s rotary phone. The caption reads: SOMETHING NO ONE EVER SAID IN THE 70’S: I’VE LOST MY PHONE. I don’t remember the phone in our house in the 60s-70s as being that great–they were clunky and hard to use; it was usually located in a central part of the house–meaning, there was no privacy; it didn’t take or store photos; ours, in the early 60s, was connected to a party line (look it up); it belonged to my sister–just ask her!
Six. A photo of a young woman, kneeling down, thumbing through a card catalogue at a library, looking for a specific book. Caption: PREHISTORIC GOOGLING. I went to college in the 70s. I am willing to bet that there weren’t ten people on the campus of 17,000 that knew how to use the Dewey Decimal System (look it up). I don’t know who Dewey was, but I bet he (or a relative of his) also designed the DMV website.
Seven. A picture of drive-in motion picture theater car speakers that had been left abandoned when the theater was torn down. Caption: ARCHEOLOGISTS RECENTLY UNEARTHED ANCIENT ARTIFACTS IN A FIELD. Now, I can speak to this with authority, as I was gainfully employed at the SKYWAY drive-in theatre in the late 60s. Those speakers were terrible–when they worked at all. The sound was tinny, the volume control NEVER worked, and you needed to crack a window to mount them inside the car, which let in the mosquitos. I say one thing in defense of Drive-in motion picture theaters: IF you had a single seat pick-up, and IF you could convince a girl to come to the theatre window, and IF you snuck in a six pack of Strohs, you MIGHT get lucky, depending on circumstances.
Eight. An illustration of a man and his wife and a gas station attendant looking at a road map. Caption: BACK IN MY DAY WE DIDN’T HE GPS, WE HAD ROAD MAPS. If that’s what you're nostalgic for, then be my guest: try driving around LA with a map in your lap.
Nine. Finally, a black and white photo of a dad talking to his son. Caption: (Son to dad) WHEN YOU SAID THE DISHWASHER WAS LOADED, I THOUGHT YOU MEANT THAT MOM WAS DRUNK. Hardee-har-har. Putting aside the blatant sexism, NO ONE can really be nostalgic about washing or drying dishes. It was terrible. Non-stick pans? No way–EVERYTHING STUCK TO THE PANS. They used butter or lard as non-stick agents, which only made the clean-up worse. It was drudge work, plain and simple. Anything that was used as a form of punishment is nothing to pine for…
Sure, it was great to grow up in the 60s/70s. I hitch-hiked across the State of Ohio three times and no one tried to sever my head; I could buy a 32 ounce bottle of beer for fifty cents, I didn’t have to pay to watch television and we didn’t lock up the house when we went out. But today ain’t bad, either.
Task: Compare your own past and present. Which do you prefer?