Once Upon A Time A Long Time Ago
So, this sounds kind of like The Wizard of Oz or Star Trek, eh? Well, not quite. But as I look back on eighty years, yes, that's right, eighty years of living I'm surprised and sometimes appalled by the changes in all of life around me--my personal self included, perhaps most of all. I'm so far removed, physically, from the world I thought I'd never miss that sometimes I can't quite figure out how it all happened. Of course, eighty years does encompass quite a bit of living and I can't be sure I've remembered every single thing. But there are lots of memories that are as clear and vivid as if they happened just yesterday. Naturally, they say this about us senior citizens, that we have a better long-term memory than short-term, that we can recall the long-ago days but forget what we had for breakfast.My recent years, the twenty since retiring, are just as clear as the others. But there's something about those older ones, which are--what? happier? Well, maybe not as there's a mixture of the two any way you look at it. No matter. I prefer the older ones which, in retrospect, do seem happier. It's the last twenty that are less than satisfying.
I often thought my parents had lived through wonderful changes in their lifetimes: radio, movies, airplanes, you name it. But hasn't that taken place in my lifetime, too? Television, space walks and stations, cell phones--there's so much more about to happen.
What was so appealing about those times, a long time ago?
Winter, for one. The first snowfall meant getting out the sled, an American Flyer. I was a city child, big city--New York to be exact. You think snow in the Big Apple wasn't a great thing seventy years ago? I lived in the upper reaches of Manhattan where there were lots of hills to ride a sled down and very little traffic to interfere with the local kids' fun. Snake Hill--not its proper name but one we gave it because it snaked down a curving hill, onto a city street, even across the trolley tracks, when the snowfall was a good one--was perfect, a ride that could give you thrills and chills. A long ride, a lot to drag the sled back up and do it all over again. The other side of this street ride were woodsy areas, one which had a running-rail fence at the bottom. I was daring enough to do it, remembering to keep my head down so as to clear the lowest rail on the fence. But one time a friend tried it and didn't get her head down--she went home crying with a bump on her forehead. And I got blamed for leading her astray!!
When the snow was really deep, we climbed atop a shed that normally housed paraphernalia for the baseball fields and pretended we were exploring the Arctic regions as the snow covering the ball fields stretched into the distance (a great distance to our young eyes).
And how great to go home as dusk fell to hot chocolate and dinner with Mom and Dad.
posted by railtrax @ 4:00 PM
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