Back to the '50s

Families taking walks together; parents, not on their phones, paying attention to their children; children, not on their phones, paying attention to the world around them; people sitting in parks and reading; children outside playing, biking, skating, running around on the beach, swimming in the Puget Sound; families biking (or skating/paddleboarding) together; neighbors outside talking. 

--Seattle Times

I discussed some time ago the Ray Bradbury short story, broadcast as a radio drama when I was an impressionable youth, about an expedition to Mars where the crew stepped off the space ship and discovered the world of their youth -- long dead relatives living happily in Small Town, USA, honeysuckle and picket fences and all the trimmings -- their relatives welcoming them with love and kindness

The story didn't have a happy ending, of course, but that's not my point.  We all long to return to whatever era we grew up in, assuming we had a reasonably happy childhood.

As the reader of the Seattle Times wrote in the quotation above, the terrible Covid-19 does have a silver lining.  Ever since the orders to "Stay Home" were issued in March, we have been rediscovering some of the joys of life in the 1950s and 60s.

I noted in my Fourth of July essay that

in some ways, Seattle's Fourth was like Fourths you see in old movies, like Fourths of July as they were celebrated before I was born, before everyone had an automobile in which to high-tail it out of town.  When families did everything together, and neighbors were neighborly.

And this new atmosphere has become increasingly obvious in the weeks since.  Every evening, my neighborhood is full of people walking.  Not just the brusque exercisers, like myself, or the hand-holding lovers.  Those we've always had.  But entire families out strolling, with their little tykes walking, or pushing scooters, or riding trikes or bikes with training wheels.  

People are out sitting on porches in the twilight, porches whose existence hadn't even been obvious until now.  Neighbors stand six feet apart chatting over their property line or on the front sidewalk.  And what happened to all the helicopter parents?  I see kids, nine or ten, out riding their bikes -- alone or in groups -- with no parent keeping an eye on them.  Just like when I was a kid.  I suspect that after weeks and months of enforced togetherness, many parents have been quite happy to send the little dears out the door with an exhausted exhortation to "be careful."

In general, despite a large number of basketball hoops in my neighborhood, I had been unaware of how many families with children do live around me.  I guess that until last March, the kids had been whisked out of the house each day and chauffeured to soccer practice or oboe lessons or ballet classes, night after night.  Those diversions unavailable, they've suddenly appeared outside, like real children.

I could go on, but you get the point.  The pandemic has forced us to live as we did when we had more free time and less disposable income.  It's a quieter life, but not necessarily a less happy life.

Maybe, once life returns to "normal," folks will not only remember that cooking was fun, but that certain aspects of the lives of their parents and grandparents were actually pretty satisfying -- and perhaps worth reliving.