Things Are Good

Look it – as we grow older we sometimes can’t help ourselves and start grumbling about the way it used to be. The music was better, hockey was better, life was simpler, but I have to tell you that while there is nothing wrong with reminiscences and remembering fondly those things which caught favor with us early on and remained entrenched in our memories as the best of this or that, it doesn’t mean that everything was the best. Let me tell you that I do not remember fondly, learning in school to duck beneath our desk in case of a nuclear attack. Do you remember that? Heck those desks wouldn’t have stopped a good slap shot let alone the idea it would protect you from the initial explosion and subsequent fall out of a nuclear holocaust. Automobiles is another one. I don’t care what anyone says, but driving my ’65 Corvair anywhere was taking your life into your hands. Need I remind people of the self-lighting Pinto’s, the aluminum Vega’s and the miserably constructed Gremlins appropriately named because the only thing that you could count on in those cars were the gremlins.

 

Don’t get me started on talking about the red velveteen pants that Santa left me for Christmas one year with the assurance from my parents that all the cool kids were wearing them. Oh yeah and the puffed sleeved psychedelic shirt with the mother of pearl buttons to accompany the pants. It was no wonder people wanted to beat me up lest their parents saw me wearing them and thought that all the cool kids were wearing them. Fashion was just awful back then and if you think I’m lying just check back and look at some old pictures of the great clash of plaids and dots that hammered the lenses of the brownie camera’s everyone sported. Most of the pictures went undeveloped because the cost of developing them was equal to the national debt.

 

Now TV is another item that causes most people to skew the past far too heavily in favor of being great. If you ever lived through even one Velveeta cheese commercial or the Wayne and Shuster comedy hour you would know what I mean. Hockey games that only started at 8:30 and you would join them in progress and watch them on a set with rabbit ears in black and white and if someone shifted in the room you could lose the signal until everyone returned to the exact same spot that they had been in before.

 

Go ahead, remember fondly those days for whatever reasons warm your heart but please let me enjoy my ipod, HDTV, cars with all wheel drive, DVD’s and at least enough fashion sense to know a good pin striped suit when I see one.

 

Happy New Year and bring on more of life’s changes.