The Good Old Days (repost)

 

"Looking Back"

oil

9X12

 

I'm amazed at how much the world has changed since my childhood. I have always explained to my children  that kids in my era were largely ignored by the adult world - at least in comparison to now. There were no blue ribbons for participating...in fact I don't remember that many blue ribbons for winning either.  But then, maybe there were blue ribbons, but I'm unaware because of never having done anything worthy of having received one. Hard to say.

In my day (in my recollection, anyway), parents expected more from sons than daughters. This is especially true of fathers. Yesterday my brother was talking about how angry our dad would get when he (Dad) would pitch balls to him. As my brother put it, "It always made him so mad that I wasn't Ted Williams." True. But then my dad would never have pitched a ball to me in the first place. 

Occasionally, my brother and other little boys would play ball out in a field somewhere (we lived in the country, so fields were not hard to come by). They would always stick me out in the far outfield, where I would proceed to daydream. On one such occasion, a boy hit a ball all the way to the outfield where I was standing...daydreaming with my glove held up in the air. The ball literally fell into my glove. I'm not exaggerating. I was unaware that anyone had even hit the ball, and suddenly the ball was mysteriously in my glove. 

Of course, everyone was shocked (no one more than me), and delighted. They made a big fuss over me (people had to make fusses over cute little girls, you know), and I was at least clever enough to have kept my mouth shut and to let them think that I was as competent as they were. Well...that was probably wishful thinking on my part. I don't think any of these little boys or their dads thought for one moment that I was in any way competent.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if we didn't - in some ways - get a better overall education back then. I know that school is harder now. Certainly the math is harder. But then...we had no computers. No internet. Research papers had to be typed on a typewriter. An actual typewriter. Or written by hand with no mistakes. 

And back to the issue of "adults largely ignoring kids"...for those of you who grew up in the 50s and 60s...didn't your parents let you roam all over town and (in my case) country with no regard to specifics and no regulations except to "be home by supper"? So we learned a lot of things hands-on.

I will end this rambling "back in my day" post by relaying a conversation along these lines with my cousin Tricia a while back. She reminded me that 1) when she would visit me, we would walk about two miles on a little-traveled road to a gas station on the highway to buy cokes and candy cigarettes. She remembered that one time a couple of men stopped and asked us questions/directions...or something. She's just sure that one of them looked like the serial killer Otis Toole. In hindsight, of course. And 2) she reminded me that she and her siblings/friends used to love it when the truck came by to spray for mosquitoes, because they liked to follow the truck and play in the spray as if they were at a water park. Of course, there were no water parks then. But in theory, it was much like a water park. Except for the toxicity.

I'm surprised we're still alive. Large numbers of us, anyway. And most of us are no worse for the wear. And I suppose having been largely ignored by the adult world has prepared us somewhat for old age, in that now we are largely ignored by the young. I can hear "The Circle of Life" playing in my head now. It's hard to be me...