The good old days
After a recent family trip to the library I was reading a book to my 7-year-old daughter that my mother read to me at about the same age.
It took some sentimental searching, but I was able to locate this series written in the 1940s about a family of children, their stern but sensibly loving father and their good natured and carefree adventures doing things that seem out of the question in todays post-9/11, 21st century world. This, it seems, a world wiser of the perils of life largely unknown in those simpler times.
I must confess that I was more than a little beguiled by the allure of this blithe and unsoiled work about a simpler time and place. Perhaps this was due in part to my reminiscence of the simpler life that I led while hearing those beautifully composed lines as a child.
I suppose the reason matters little; most of us can relate to how much less troublesome life seemed to be at an earlier time. Whether our perception is reality or not is debatable, yet I think that we often perceive it to be that way.
This thought made me ponder a bit more deeply. Could it really be that life was less polluted in the good old days or is this notion simply nostalgic wishful thinking? Are we so easily swayed by flowery prose that we forget how tainted life was in times gone by? Or is it, perchance, that there is another phenomenon in play here? I wondered if we as a species, or at the very least as a nation, have passed our adolescence and have somehow lost our innocence.
Cant we all remember the invincibility of youth? I certainly was once 10 feet tall and bullet-proof in what now seems like a previous life.
Maybe our world has not changed at all. Maybe it is we who have changed. In my minds eye I caught a glimpse of America as being a silver-haired elderly man sitting on a park bench watching the children play with a faint smile and misty eyes remembering how he once played without a worry in the world and wondering how the time went by so fast and left him here like this; old and gray and so full of cares.
This thought made me a little misty myself. It seems a bit sad to let our childhood slip away so easily. Could it be that we can still grasp this fleeting innocence? Or are we trapped, as I seem to be, sometimes knowingly or not quoting those famous words from Robert Frost:
... but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.
I certainly hope that we can stop to play without care, literally or figuratively, dark haired or gray if only for a little while longer.
Paul Mandeville,
31 July 2009
