The Good Ol' Days

Jill has very clear rules about food. She'll eat something for supper, she'll take the leftover for lunch the next day, and then it becomes poisonous. No ambivalence. No shilly-shallying. Straightforward, no need for judgment calls or decision making. Moving right along. For me, it's not so simple.

It might be because of our half-generation gap. It shows up now and again, highlighting the ten year difference in our ages. I was raised by actual Great Depression parents, the kind that don't throw anything away if there's still some use left in it. The kind who used to say, "But you just got a new coat two years ago. Why do you want another one?" In that household, throwing away food was a sin just short of grand larceny.

For ten years now, Jill and I have had these related discussions:

me - "What happened to those mashed potatoes from the other day?"
her - "I threw them away."
me - "But I was going to make potato patties tonight!"
(She smiles with secret satisfaction, knowing she just saved herself from eating poisonous potatoes.)

me - "Are we out of sweet pickles?"
her - "I threw them away."
me - "What? Pickles don't go bad. That's why they're pickles, to preserve them."
her (shrugging) - "They were past the date."
me - "Don't you know that's just a marketing ploy? Why, Aunty Ann made pickles and we used to get them      from the basement for years."
(Same smirk.)

or this one:

her - "Is this milk still good? The date is ok, but...."
me - "Of course it is. That's the sell-by date, not the expiration date."
her - "But it smells funny."
me - (taking a swig) "Nah, it's fine."
(She wrinkles her nose and puts it back in the fridge, never to touch it again.)

Just like everything else we've encountered, this took awhile to iron out, and I think what we have today is an uneasy truce. I still have covered dishes of leftover dabs of things I think I might eat for lunch while she's not home, and she ignores them. I've come to accept that she will ALWAYS open the new jug of milk or juice, even if the other one is still not empty, and she will use the new one while I use up the old one. It's not perfect, but it works well enough.

I've been thinking about this, among other things, because I read an opinion piece online this morning about nostalgia as a political issue. It was this pundit's opinion that each of the major parties is suffering from Nostalgia ---- wanting to go back to the Good Ol' Days ----- but each focused on different parts of those ephemeral days. Now, I don't know if it's a function of age, or simply part of the human psyche, but I can relate to some of that pining for simpler times, even if I know that it's based on very selective memory.

Change is not an easy thing to embrace, a lot of the time. Of course, you don't hear anybody complaining about some changes. There might be a few, but the vast majority of people don't want to go back to having no electricity, no running water, no transportation except shoeleather or horses. (Keep in mind that there are still innumerable people for whom that is present-day life.)

So really, I think it's more the feelings than the actual reality that people long for. And that probably IS an indelible part of the human psyche. It is the warmth, security, and safety of early childhood that we long for. We don't want to be children again ---- Heaven Forbid! No autonomy, no adult beverages, no love life? Hell no! That's not what the advertisers and politicians are trading on when they evoke Mom and Pop businesses, families around the dinner table, Main Street, school and church, Little League and flag-waving. Oh, and don't forget apple pie. They're calling out our babyhood feelings, but placing them in grown-up situations. We'll get rid of the bad people, don't you worry. We'll make sure you're safe and secure and put a   chicken in every (deserving) pot. Vote for us.

I suppose there are folks who long to recreate the world they think they remember, where you didn't lock your doors and everybody knew your name. But that was never a universal experience, and even for those who lived it, the entire facade was dependent on other people NOT being able to live that way. There were no openly gay couples raising children on Main Street. In that America, the grunt work was done by the socially, if not legally, segregated non-white people who were never going to live in the big houses on Main Street or own the banks on Wall Street.

I expect it was pretty sweet to be able to simply ignore the unpleasant realities that were right under your nose, if you were white and male and middle class and at least moderately educated. The world WAS safe and ordered and predictable. But there's not a lot to be nostalgic about if you weren't.

When she was a kid, my daughter used to refer to historic times as "back when men ruled the world".  She grew up to be an historian.

These are the "good times" for kids being born in this decade. While the adults and all us old geezers are freaking out about how awful things are, they're just opening their eyes and discovering that the sun comes up and goes down every day, that seasons follow one another, that a hug is warm and sometimes things hurt, but the hurt stops after while. They won't all grow up feeling safe and secure --- that's never happened since the beginning of time ---- but enough of them will, that in 50 or 60 years, the Teens and Twenties will be soft-lens sweet, and folks will be saying "Wouldn't it be great if we could just go back to the Good Ol' Days?"