The ol’ days

When my mother was raising her family, she did not enjoy the household luxuries we take for granted today. Homemakers made do with what they had, expanding a lot of energy while seeing to their daily tasks. Luckily, little by little, things improved.

Few people would want to go back to those labor-intensive ol’ days, yet most of us mourn some aspect of the past which we somehow feel would make our lives better today. Pangs of nostalgia seem to be most common when prices are being discussed. Someone will inevitably say they remember paying less than 50 cents for a gallon of gas.

But nostalgia has a way of being selective. We tend to forget what the minimum wage was in the ol’ days. We glorify only the memories which seem to prove the argument of the moment. For example, we may complain about today’s ethics comparing them to a time when concern for others was, we feel, the norm rather than the exception. What we are tempted to forget is that some of the attitudes of the past were grossly narrow-minded.

When I was in high school, one of my classmates left abruptly after Christmas one year to return only the following September. She had gone to Europe to live with an aunt for a while, our teacher said, but there were whispers in the hallways. When she returns, she’ll be changed, one of my classmates said all-knowingly. Something in the eyes is not the same after you have a baby, she added for everyone’s enlightenment.

When the poor girl did return, I kept looking into her eyes to see the change for myself. I remember seeing only a lot of sadness. How could it have been otherwise? Society through its better-than-thou authority figures had judged her so she had no choice but to give birth to a child she would never be able to hold and love. Of course, the pendulum has now swung to the other extreme, and often today having a child is a prerequisite to marriage! But I digress.

In the ol’ days, prices might have been cheaper, but when it came to certain attitudes, we could very well call them the dark days. Not a time everyone would wish to relive.