As I Age

As I age, I look back remembering many things of my past; cars with fender skirts and girls with poodle skirts. Then, the cars had clutches. Women carried clutch purses. Movies had lines like, “I have you in my clutches” and a lot of clutching went on in the back seat of the family car. Girls wore bobby socks on their feet and bobby pins in their hair. Guys knocked over pins at the bowling alleys and used cotter pins to build soap box cars.

We had hula hoops to play and hula dancers swayed competing for space on the dashboard with plastic saints. Behind many of the homes were outhouses and smoke houses. One eliminated food waste and the other preserved food keeping it from being wasted.

We had no drive-thru, only drive-in restaurants and drive-in movies. We played baseball calling balls and strikes while some grown up relatives smoked Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes. The idea of the Marlboro man hadn’t been born yet.

Doors had porcelain, brass, or glass knobs. Some of our cars sported knobs on the steering wheels. We “smoked” candy cigarettes and bubble gum cigars and no one worried. We had ball caps, cap guns, B. B. guns, and sling shots and played from sunrise to sunset.

Felix, the cat, Tom Terrific and His Mighty Wonder Dog, Manfred graced our black and white televisions. Kids wore Keds. Our skates were adjustable, had metal wheels, and fastened to the bottoms of our shoes with keys. Our games weren’t electric. All we needed an empty field, places to hide, or a can to kick to have fun. Our games were powered by imagination, not batteries.

Little boys kept garter snakes and grown-up girls wore garter belts to hold up nylon stockings. Boys bought dime priced comic books and men collected match books. Girls played with dolls. Women used make-up to look like dolls.

Telephones hung on the wall and had a crank handles. They were connected to a party line. We had to listen and count the number of rings. There were no musical ring tones, no texting, no Google, no computers. The fanciest thing we had was a typewriter.

We fought with our best friends one day and did a sleep-over the next night. Bullies and fights were a part of life, even at school the brawlers were separated and sent in different directions, rarely were we sent home. If fighting was a reoccurring theme, the gym teacher might put boxing gloves on the guys and allow them to duke it out.

Kids brought guns and pocket knives to school. No one was shot or stabbed. We were taught right from wrong and the value of life. We were guided and taught by our parents and teachers, not the government and its inflexible laws and set rules. Things were simpler then and were handled at a local level; parents, teachers, and school boards made the decisions for our education.

Times have changed, but can we say they have changed for the better?