MELANCHOLY NOSTALGIA? WHERE DO I SIGN

Melancholy nostalgia is no one’s idea of a good time.

Nostalgia alone is more than enough.

Those ‘good old days’ never looked better until you start scratching around.

Add a dose of melancholy to clear things up.

Like most baby boomers I enjoy social media for the interactions.

Facebook is still fresh enough to find anyone you remember and getting caught up.

Twitter is still a place to find common ground, to find agreement, to find new ideas.

Those two, along with boomerpdx, is as deep as I wade in.

A boomer phenomena that consistently appears is the idea that any parent would let their kids roam the neighborhood unsupervised with instructions to be home when the street lights came on.

Inconceivable?

Not when you live in the last house on a dead end road with a forest next door and sand dunes across the street.

That was Ohio Street in North Bend before the Funkin family bought the lot next door, built a house, and had a baby.

Before that it was a wild country with a sandy boundary on the uphill end and Myrtle Street on the other with old Mr. Snow on one corner and the Hugols on the other.

Eventually we were allowed to go further.

You knew you were on the way to being grown up when the old man trusted you enough to write a permission note and give you a buck to go to the Roadside for a pack of cigarettes.

With bikes the whole town opened up. We could stay out longer because we could get home faster.

What millennials and zoomers and alphas don’t understand is why their boomer elders were allowed out into the dangerous world at such a vulnerable age.

 

The State Of Marriage

 Based on divorce rates, not every union is a happy one.

 

Divorce rates often reflect changes in society’s values and expectations.

After the 1970s, divorce became more common as laws changed and women gained more independence.

 

Some of the kids who had the freedom to stay out until the street lights came on?

They didn’t want to go home.

Little Jimmy, or little Billy, lived in a home with the curtains drawn where teenaged sisters and cousins and aunts smoked cigarettes and nursed their babies in a blue haze with a TV blaring.

“I’ll be outside.”

Tommy and Bobby’s parents stayed together ‘for the children’ and spent their time together screaming at each other.

“We’ll be home when the street lights come on.”

Kids on their bikes rode for different reasons and you eventually narrowed down who you rode with.

The group agrees to take a long ride past the boundaries your parents set?

It’s easier to obey the rules when the house is in order.

“I’m going home.”

 

Homeward Bound With Melancholy Nostalgia

I was out with friends during the spring of my sophomore year in high school.

Kids who had repeated a grade, started school late, or borrowed their parents’ car on the sly, were driving.

“Let’s go to the college dance.”

“Okay, have fun. Pull over and I’ll walk home.”

So I did.

When I got there my older brother’s friends were there. They were seniors doing big things.

My dad was sitting with them in the living room when I walked in around nine o’clock.

They had been to the college dance.

“What are you doing,” one asked.

“I live here. What are you doing?”

“Your mom is out in her jump suit looking for you in the college dance parking lot. We wanted to be here when she caught you.”

I checked with dad. “Is that right?”

It was. They’d told me not to go to the college dance and I didn’t go.

I passed the test.

If I’d failed my mom would have jumped out of the car in the parking lot and yanked me around in front of the entire world.

I’d rather be in a blue haze with nursing teenagers.

 

The next time you’re tempted to wax poetically about a time gone by? There’s more to it than what’s shown.

And that’s when the real fun starts.

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