You’ve seen the lists on Facebook or some other online time-sucks. They are designed to tap into your nostalgia for the way things were when we were growing up. Live telephone operators, doctors selling cigarettes on TV, cursive writing, looking up things in an encyclopedia, milk delivery, phonebooks, payphones, drive-in movies, tie-dyed shirts, lava lamps and bell bottom jeans. The lists go on and on.
The compilers of these lists are people who are extremely nostalgic for the way things used to be and they want to entertain us with those memory associations. Or maybe they want to drag us back to those good old days because, well, why not?
Wait just a minute. Doctors telling us that cigarettes are OK and have great flavor? That was the good old days? Barbie dolls set a good example for adolescent girls? Riding motorcycles without helmets was safe? Trying to get decent TV reception with rabbit ears on top of the set? Penny candy that rotted your teeth? Chemistry sets that could blow us up along with the house? Cereals loaded with sugar? Candy cigarettes that we could suck on until we were ready for the real killers? Eating Swanson dinners that lacked any real nutrition (and now we know the Tucker Carlson connection)? BB guns that could take out an eye? Really. Sunbathing without sunscreen – holy melanoma! Lead paint everywhere at home and asbestos covered pipes in schools? No seatbelts or car seats for infants?
Are boomers being encouraged to fondly remember things that in retrospect should have scared the hell out of us if we really thought about it. Just revisionist thinking you might be saying. Granted, we survived, but maybe we should be a little bit more realistic about our nostalgia. Remember the benign but thank your lucky stars the other stuff didn’t maim or kill you.
My favorite mostly safe childhood activity? Attaching baseball cards to our bicycle spokes with clothes pins so that our bikes sounded like powerful sports cars when we peddled as fast as our little legs would go. Innocuous? We thought so. Still have all my fingers.
Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. You can also visit his author page here. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.
The pandemic of 2020 put a halt to our frequent family visits to India until 2023 when my husband and I ventured out to his family’s home in Kolkata. Emirates Airlines made it happen on the very same day that Southwest couldn’t. Masked and seated in an unusually roomy row, we felt good about things. It is a long journey and I can’t help but think about the not so distant future when a flight of this proportion may be just too much for an aging body. But not this flight. We arrived very late in the evening in Kolkata, met with perhaps the same chaos that Southwest passengers faced—only we were told there were no taxis! The driver we hired in advance informed us that his car broke down and he was busy fixing it. So we waited and fix it he did!
He studied her across the table as she read the menu. He knew what he wanted. His favorite, the spaghetti carbonara. She finally looked up, head canted, her sidelong glance asking, ‘What?’ to his intense stare. He shrugged. What could he say? They had just spent forty minutes at the bar waiting for the table. Like old times, she had her usual Negroni. Talk was easy. It had been thirty years since they had last connected. Much to fill in. At this point they were actually free between divorce for her and widowhood for him. The waiter took her order: saltimbocca, salad, Chianti.
