Full disclosure: I’m so old I’ll never laugh at a Preparation H commercial again.
I’m so old my career is old enough to be president.
I’m so old, I know that the correct response to “I’m so old…” is “HOW OLD ARE YOU” (yelled at the top of your lungs).
You certainly understood that last one if you are of a certain age because you watched Johnny Carson more nights than not and you still can remember who Ed McMahon was. If you’re a member of the Millennial or Gen Z groups, I’m thinking your eyes just rolled back into your head with such force that you’re going to have to lie down from the resulting headache.
Fear not. I’m not shaking my walker at the younger folk today, so all you junior Gens are safe from my cranky, nostalgic wrath.
However, if you know all the words to “Daydream Believer” or “Mack the Knife” (IYKYK) hear me out. If you know what the heck IYKYK means, go back to your rap or hip-hop or whatever you kids listen to these days. But if you ever owned a Monkees lunch box or poodle skirt or knew someone who did, I want to have a little chat about the "good old days."
If I know you at all, it’s likely that you’re missing your Monkees lunch box/poodle skirt and those "good old days," those halcyon days of our long-ago childhoods when people were uniformly kind to each other and men wore hats and women wore gloves and kids rode their bikes through endless summer days, without helmets and car seats and look how well we turned out! It doesn’t matter which decade you lived those golden moments in, because they were all perfect.
Except when they weren’t. All I have to do is say things like "Kitty Genovese" or "Woolworth's lunch counter" or "Vietnam" to bring us all back to earth.
Since I am harshing your nostalgic mellow with all my facts, here’s another truth: The "good old days" were wonderful because we were oblivious kids and didn’t have to worry about a mortgage, or the economy, or how we were going to get dinner on the table tomorrow. Same goes for our parents; their "good old days" were their own childhoods, like their parents before them. That music from our senior prom (it may have been Motown) that is so much better than that rap and hip-hop kids listen to today? We were so hopped up on emotion and hormones and raging young love that you could have Rick Rolled the school gym with bagpipes and we’d be listening to it non-stop today and saying, “Now THAT’S music!”
The "good old days" weren’t good because good stuff happened; they were good because we were innocent and unaware and had our whole lives in front of us and anything was possible. Nothing we experience in life is ever going to show up with that glandular intensity, and nothing is ever going to feel quite like that again. The only antidote to feeling like your best days are behind you is to find something new to care about, as deeply as you felt about your first Mustang, or your first crush, and that feeling that anything was possible. That will put your best days back where they should be: Right in front of you.
And Motown. Anything’s possible if you throw in enough Motown.
Elizabeth Evans is a local mother, wife, daughter, sister, former stay-at-home mom, former work-outside-the-home mom, former work-at-home mom and a human resources consultant.
