What good old days?
When people long for “the good old days,” my nostalgia wheels start to turn.
If I could press rewind, how far back would I go? When would I choose to live besides now?
In my mind, I assumed that I would live out my days in a small Midwestern town. After all, those who grew up rural were in the majority until the 1920s.
I often settle on a birthdate of 1850. I would have been too young to be drafted to fight in the Civil War, but old enough to remember the event and talk to the survivors of the great battles.
The Civil War, a horrible affair, would be in the collective memory as a war which achieved something noble, namely the abolishment of slavery and the preservation of the Union.
World War I, and even more gruesome affair which achieved little but the disillusionment of all concerned, would happen when I was too old to care.
That is, if I was still alive. The average life span at the time was 55. I would have to live to 69 years of age to be alive for the end of the war.
As I grew up in the late 1860s, I could read using a lantern. The excitement of an evening power outage would happen each night after sunset. No yakking television or jibbering radio would interrupt my reading of leather bound literary classics.
I would spend my productive years in that golden era when the railroads were king of transportation, before the world was made unbearably noisy by the internal combustion engine. Steam engines, with their elegant huffing and puffing, would be the only transportation sounds other than the clop, clop, clop of horses.
The telegraph would have been invented, but the telephone was still two generations away. The telegraph ensured that important news, personal or national, could be transmitted instantly. But to exchange mere pleasantries with friends and loved ones, you would still need to write a letter.
In my sixties, which would be near the end of my days on earth, I could marvel at the exploits of Wilbur Wright, but I wouldn’t have to watch sunsets marred by jet trails. If I wanted to go back to visit the Old World, I would have to take a steamship.
Instead of going to town for milk, I would go out to the barn twice per day. The primary excuse to go to town for edibles would be when the flour sack got low.
In my later years, the countryside would fill with beautiful new barns. The Midwest would bustle with construction. Countryside churches, built by the locals, would have elegant wooden steeples and enormous bells — none of the concrete and steel that make new buildings look so sterile.
You could eat pie without guilt to end every meal, pour cream over most of your food and spread butter on the rest — without knowing that you might die at an earlier age for doing so. When it comes to diet, the ignorance of 160 years ago would be bliss.
Yep, life in the good old days would be graceful, slow-paced, and filled with little pleasures accompanied by people polite enough to enjoy them.
Until you got a toothache. Or your hip went bad. Or you died of diseases for which a antidote had not yet been found.
What if you got appendicitis? You were at the mercy of the whiskey-guzzling quack who set up shop next to the blacksmith shop with a can of ether and a bloody set of knives.
What if you got depressed? You’d probably start guzzling whiskey yourself. Or snorting cocaine. Those were the only known cures at the time, as General Grant would attest to.
What about your wife and kids? By law, you owned them. Domestic beatings, even murders, were ignored. The wife and kids had no recourse. There was no provision in the law to protect them from a violent husband and father.
When my grandmother was nearly killed by my grandfather, she went to her mother for advice. “You made your bed, now you can lie in it,” said my great-grandmother.
Grandma did not make her own bed to lie in. Her marriage was cruelly arranged by the same mother who now told her she was stuck with the son-of-a-bitch.
What if you had a learning problem that today would be addressed, but which at the time would cause your teachers to call you stupid and the townspeople to consider you an idiot? You would get no help, much less sympathy.
What if you loved children but couldn’t get used to losing over half of them to disease before age five? No wonder families didn’t call their babies by name until they were three years old.
The parents of the 1890s actually distanced themselves from their infants by referring to them as “the baby” until they were two years old and less likely to die.
Indeed, if the baby died, the old-timers often gave the same name to the next child of the same gender.
My great aunt once showed me the grave of her sister “the first Millie,” who was killed when run over by a hay wagon at age four. The “second Millie” was luckier. She lived to age 90.
These are just a handful of the problems faced by my immigrant ancestors who actually lived through the era I am tempted to idealize.
Disease. Hard, hard work. Lots of death. Unaddressed cruelties. Breezy cabins and uninsulated houses to guard against the Midwestern winters. Outhouses. Hunger. Poverty. The list goes on.
The old days are frequently idealized, but they don’t deserve it.
The more one learns, the more one realizes there were no good old days. We might be thankful to be born when we were, especially if we just got a new hip.
No wonder my grandparents had no nostalgia for the past whatsoever. One time I uncovered a beautiful old wind-up clock in the attic. I proudly showed Grandma my find, but she told me to put it back. She knew the clock had value, but did not want to look at it every day. She wanted no visible mementos of a miserable childhood spent at the mercy of her drunken father.
Even so, when I hear an old steam whistle, which is rarely, I allow myself to think the last two decades of the 19th century and the first decade of the twentieth were, aesthetically, at least, more graceful than what has come since.