The Good ‘ol Days?

The Good ‘ol Days?

No matter when you were born, it seems what you had or what you missed those times or things are now considered the Good ‘ol Days?  Occasionally I see something that one of my friends on Facebook sends me that tell me I grew up in a time when we had it made.  We rode bicycles and didn’t wear helmets, played outside without the benefit of electronic devices, watched black and white television if our family was able to afford one, went to double feature movies on Saturdays for a quarter and drank, usually hot water, in the summertime from a water hose laying in the yard when we got thirsty.

            Our parents told us of their Good ‘ol Days. For mine, it was when they weathered the Great Depression and World War Two.  I never saw anything particularily good about the country going down the tube financially or going to war, but different strokes for different folks, I guess. Their point was they were forced by circumstances to make do with what they had and everybody pitched in to keep everyone else afloat.

            Now that I look back on it, maybe they had something after all.  As I write this, there are several police cars, a fire truck, an aide vehicle and three power company trucks in front of my house.  Earlier this morning I was watching a television news program when I head a very loud BANG and my television went black and all my lights went out.  I immediately thought the end of the world had come.  No television!  No lights! What am I going to do?  My first thought was “duck and cover.”  If you have to ask, it will make no sense, but then I checked my service panel and all my breakers were still in the right place, so it had to be an outside source.

            By this time I realized my electric tea kittle where I was heating water for tea for my wife was not working and that was definitely not a good sign.  She is from England and if she doesn’t get her morning tea, she wants to call the Queen and have her send the Redcoats to put the Colonist’s in their place. Stroke of genius.  I’ll heat water on my gas stove, right? Wrong.  It has an electric spark igniter for the pilot light. I’ll just get on the city’s website and see if they have posted anything about a power outage.  Wrong again.  No Internet. Not even on my laptop which, by the way is what I’m using now at the kitchen table with only the light from an open window to see with. I did look down the street and saw someone ran into a light pole and it was down in the middle of the road.  Fortunately no one was hurt.

            My grandmother always told us about how tough it was for her growing up.  Her family did not have electricity.  They used oil or kerosene lanterns for light. They had to cook on a wood stove or in the open hearth of their fireplace.  They kept milk and other things cold or at least cool by putting them in the spring that flowed on their land.  If they wanted a fresh tomato or other vegetable they just went out to the garden and picked it.  I doubt she ever heard the word computer or Internet or Facebook or microwave and she lived to be almost ninety.

            Still waiting for my modern life support systems to come back and save me from myself.  As that great philosopher Yogi Berra said, “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.”