Good Old Days actually weren’t, so quit kvetching
I’m interrupting my neverending weekly monologue on travel tales to bring you a complaint about complaining.
That’s right — I’ve never been the most patient person, but I get particularly riled when I hear someone go on about how wonderful everything was in the Good Old Days, and how now we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.
What does that even mean, by the way? Do you go to hell faster in a handbasket? It makes me think of Toto riding in the basket attached to Almira Gulch’s basket in “The Wizard of Oz.”
Anyway, um, no. Firstly, I’m not planning to go to hell, not even in a stretch limousine, and secondly, things aren’t worse today than they were Back Then when everything was idyllic.
Because it wasn’t. Yes, I agree that traffic is infinitely worse than it used to be. But while I’m sitting in gridlock — even in my 20-year-old Toyota Corolla — I’m in airconditioned comfort with my Bluetooth stereo blaring out my favorite tunes, streamed out from my smartphone in infinite succession, and I never have to listen to a single commercial about buying a car from Cal Worthington (who’s dead now, I think. RIP). Or I’m listening to a podcast on the subject of my choice. Or an audiobook that I downloaded for free from the public library.
I think back to riding in the back of my parents’ 1960 Ford Falcon station wagon, with no air conditioning, traveling the country with both of them smoking like nicotine fiends in the front seat. I was grateful for the chance to see the country on our many road trips. But those trips are a heck of a lot more enjoyable nowadays with air conditioning and streaming music. And no secondhand smoke.
In the morning, I now have a device that turns itself on and ensures that my coffee is ready for me when my eyes first pop open. In fact, sometimes the smell of the coffee wakes me up. It’s a pleasant sensation. I set up my coffee the night before, with cacao powder, cinnamon and cardamom added to the ground stuff the girl child brings me home from the Evil Empire where she’s a barista, and so it’s ready to be brewed at 6:30 a.m. In the Good Old Days, we had a percolator on the stove that churned out a blackish brew that only got more tar-like as the day progressed, No thank you.
It’s only a few blocks from my house to my favorite sushi restaurant. No one in this country had ever considered eating raw fish in the Good Old Days. “Raw fish, Roy? Doesn’t sound American to me.” And next to the sushi restaurant, there’s a machine on the wall that will give me money any time of the day or night. It even talks to me, though its vocabulary is sadly limited. Do I miss standing in line at the bank? No, I do not.
I have a device in my purse that allows me to run my life without ever getting out of my chair, including banking, grocery shopping, buying movie tickets, buying plane tickets and looking up the whole history of the known world anytime I want. I can also watch that TV show I missed earlier while I was stuck in traffic.
Remember having three network channels and that one or two was always fuzzy? And if you missed a show, you just missed it. Forever. Unless you were lucky and it came back around on summer reruns. And remember the sign-off screen at night, when the station signed off the air? And “The Star Spangled Banner” and the prayer when it came back on in the morning? I don’t miss that.
Nowadays, I can send mail to anyone in the world electronically and it will arrive within minutes, compared to sending a letter, which to a foreign country could take weeks. I know this because I had a couple of foreign pen pals when I was a girl. I do admit that it’s fun to get foreign letters with their funny stamps, and I never get those anymore. Not even postcards. I miss postcards.
People bemoan that kids don’t play outdoors as much as they once did. This is true. They’re also more likely to speak up if they’re molested or abused, or to have it discovered. And they don’t have to live in iron lungs now with polio. I don’t even have room in this column to list the changes for gay people and people of color.
Things change, and the best way to stay young is to just roll with it. Yes, some things are worse than they used to be, especially trying to drive down the Vegas Strip. But many things are better. I prefer to look ahead, not to the past. What do you think? You can email me at fisher@scng.com