Nostalgia
As I Recall...
We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
It was like wanting to learn to mow the lawn; once I had accomplished that, I was hard to find when it came time to actually mow.
Silver Screen, Golden Years
Drive-in Movie in the Age of Netflix
Between the two features, we got another ten-minute burst of a “Let’s all go to the lobby….” intermission with a cartoon family who gobbled refreshment stand goodies like goats eating the lawn, and large hot dogs and cups of soda coming to life and dancing for us. It would have been surreal, except that it was so comfortingly familiar and innocent. It was the kind of stupidity that didn’t make one angry; it made one smile.
Tunnel Visions
The Leaves of Brown Came Tumbling Down, And So Did the Branches
When I was a child of about eight, I thought everything had a life-force. Small animals, bugs, flowers, trees, perhaps even rocks and earth. I later learned this is called animism, the belief that all objects and creatures possess a spiritual essence, common in primitive cultures.
Social Insecurity
The Eternal Quest to Beat the Heat
Willis Carrier developed the air-conditioning process 115 years ago in 1902. The first home air-conditioning unit was 7 ft. high, 6 ft. wide, and 20 ft. long. Sort of like having a steam locomotive attached to your house.
Traveling in the Magical, Marvelous Station Wagon
My trips may be faster and more comfortable, but they’re infinitely less interesting than those treks across lonesome two-lanes and through small towns long vanished after being bypassed by four-lane freeways.
Silver Screen, Golden Years
The Best Years of Our Lives
It is left to the minor characters of Butch and Al’s son, Rob, to introduce the post-war world for us by discussing the atom bomb. The central characters are too preoccupied with jobs, and fitting into their families and fitting into their clothes to care about the new geopolitical realities.
Vintage Vibes
Old Home Remedies
When my doctor said I needed to have a kidney stone surgically removed because it was too large to pass, I was not looking forward to the “passing” or to surgery so I eagerly listened when a member of a senior ladies Sunday school class whispered to me that she knew a cure for kidney stones.
Social Insecurity
Schools Today Look Nothing like Mine
Today, I see little kids staring at their phones while walking to the neighborhood elementary school in the morning....You never saw this when I was that age. If I had wanted to take my family’s gargantuan black phone to school, I would have needed a wheelbarrow.
As I Recall...
The Residual Effects of the Great Depression
My grandparents were born in the late 1800s and my parents in the early 1900s – and all lived through the Great Depression and the above-mentioned wars. They never forgot the hard lessons they learned during those years and tried to teach them to my generation.
Leslie Goes Boom
A Mixed Bag of Memories
And who can forget S&H Green Stamps? Nowadays you can only find them in the attics and basements of those of us old enough to remember what they were. We find them, we hold them, we hesitate to throw away a book completely filled with stamps, but in the end, we toss them aside like everything else today.