I find this completely adorable. It's one of those "my God, how I wish I were there" things. It provokes an alarming impulse to escape everything in my current reality and go backwards, back into a time which I perceive to be simpler, happier, more civil.
Now, in THAT regard I may be right.
The world grows more appalling each day, and there is a feeling it's disintegrating, or at least human decency is. And yet we are called upon to be happy. To wrap the day around ourselves like sable, or ostrich-plumes, depending on the mood. For the most part, I surprise myself by feeling at home in the day. I am not ridiculously happy all the time, but I always seen to find satisfaction in something-or-other, even just hearing a bird in a tree.
So why do I still yearn to escape? There's this feeling that sooner or later, there will be a day of reckoning. I have no real fear of it myself, because I have lived far, far longer than I ever thought I would, or could. It's for my grandchildren that I fear. I know they will have to take this up and carry it themselves, but I fear, I quake for them.
I know we can't go back. Everyone says things like, "It really wasn't that good back then. We had war, we had crime, we had disease." But we had people relating to each other, not staring into glassy little talking gadgets as if they were alive. If you walked into a manhole back then, you were in a Buster Keaton movie, not texting.
At any rate, my rose-colored fantasies can't come true except in my mind. If I could jump back, I'd pick 1964. 1964 was the best year of my life, though I had no idea of it at the time. It was well before puberty, so my body still belonged to me, hadn't yet been hijacked by hormones. My Dad gave me a horse. A HORSE. The thing I had wanted more than anything in the world! The Beatles exploded onto the scene, performing on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time on my 10th birthday. I was in an advanced Grade 5 class in school (having skipped through 3 and 4), in which we did absolutely nothing except create anarchy and give the teacher a nervous breakdown.
I can't go back. There's no Wayback machine. I keep asking myself why I'm not more unhappy. Denial, I guess! It'll all end when it does, and no one knows the day, or the hour.
