the good old (and not so good) days

You know you are getting old when you begin comparing the world around you with the world of your childhood. The differences between my growing up world and my grandchildren’s world run the gamut from the ridiculous to the sublime. I know this process of change has been going on as long as written history has been recorded. But my little piece of history belongs to me, and I have been stuck thinking about changes in life during the past sixty years.
Wearing shoes was optional after school let out when I was a child. Most of us went barefoot all week, only donning shoes for church or a trip to town. The delicious feeling of sand between the toes, the ticklish tender soles that toughened into a reasonable facsimile of shoe leather as summer wore on, the hot sand that caused you to hop from place to place when you crossed the dirt road, the sandspurs that were green and pliable at the beginning of summer and sharp instruments of torture as they dried, the cool squishiness of the mud at the edge of the creek... a connection to the earth was formed from the bottom up. It is hard to go barefoot when you are surrounded by asphalt.
There was no air conditioning in homes or cars. Only a few public places, banks and stores, had refrigerated air. Heat in the deep south of my childhood was a part of the natural order of life. We accommodated, sweated, slowed down in the middle of the day when the heat was at its peak, fanned with funeral home fans in church, built our homes with tall ceilings to help the heat rise and they were shaded by trees, sat and slept on porches screened to keep the mosquitoes out, drove cars with all the windows rolled down, wore lightweight clothing and drank lots of sweet tea. It was not always comfortable but we wore our sleeveless blouses over our skirts held out by fifty yard crinolines and managed to have a good time anyway. When you are forced outdoors to find cooling breezes, another connection to the world around you forms. It is hard to appreciate the breeze when you are inside with the air conditioner running.
Most families only had one car or truck. It was normal for families to make one trip to town a week to pay bills or buy groceries and shop. Dentists and doctors worked on Saturdays and took Wednesdays off. So did all the other businesses in town. During the work week, the vehicle was used for work. Children rode the bus to school and home without thinking twice about an hour ride. My sister and I rode less than twenty minutes in the morning because we were the next to the last ones to be picked up. But in the afternoon, we rode the bus for an hour over dirt roads, windows down, reading or talking and visiting, occasionally being called down by Mr. Woods, seeing each child’s home as they were let out, knowing their parents and their siblings by name. Going somewhere was not always convenient. Trips to town and vacations were Events, not a birthright. It is hard to appreciate the gift of easy transportation when you are a two or three car family.
The food our family ate was mostly grown or raised by my dad. My friends, like us, had garden chores in the spring and summer. We helped plant the garden, weed the garden, pick the vegetables, can and freeze vegetables for the coming months. We raised our own beef, had chickens and mama milked when Elsie was fresh. Oranges were a seasonal treat from Florida not readily available year round. Broccoli had not yet made its way into the grocery stores in our community but bananas were plentiful and cheap. Local groceries carried local produce as it was available during the season supplemented by others trucked in. If you lived in the town and didn’t have a garden, you could count on buying local potatoes or greens or tomatoes in season. When you visited someone in our part of the world, they would share an offering of something they had grown and preserved as a gift... cane syrup, pear preserves, honey, grape jelly. It is hard to appreciate food as a sacramental gift if all you do is buy it, not grow it yourself.
Because television was not a staple in most of my friends houses or mine, our information about the world came from reading. We read the newspapers... two different ones in our house, local and one from a nearby large city. Books (and the Bible) and magazines were stacked on all the flat surfaces in our living room. If we read of a family’s home being burned to the ground, chances were we had already heard of it through the community grapevine that functioned without the aid of the computer or many telephones. Our world view was limited and in some respects ignorant, but it was comprehensible, connected and bearable. It is difficult, painful and sometimes overwhelming to know how to love your neighbor if you don’t know your neighbor, and there are millions of them in need.
Not everything about the good old days was good. Racism and segregation, poverty, illnesses and death that are preventable today, a too small world view, a restricted understanding of God, a simplistic understanding of the natural world in which we lived, separation from and judgement of those we saw as different from us be they Yankees or Jews or Catholics or from Atlanta... And yet, some of these same qualities are still present in this day and age. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.
The human condition is in many ways the same now as it was during Jesus’ time on earth.
Perhaps that is why he responded with the Great Commandment to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. Everything else changes but this never changes. If we love God, love our neighbors and ourselves, all of the world is in proper perspective. We will treat our neighbors as children of God, our cousins in the faith, blood kin, who need and deserve our loving care. Church becomes a family reunion every Sunday where worship reminds us of our ancestors while we hug and connect with our living family of faith, faith kin who speak with the same dialect you do. We leave that reunion to search for ways to lift up the family members who need us. We know we are not Supermen and Superwomen gods who can save the world singlehandedly, but we are the Children of God each doing our own little bit to help out the family.
I am grateful for all the gifts of my time, my country childhood, and the time in which I now live with computers and heart stents. It has been a joy and a wonder to live through the changes in the past sixty years. But thanks be to God for all that is unchanging in this rapidly changing world... for Love that knows no end, for love of neighbor and self, for life its ownself as gift and opportunity. I am blessed to have lived all the times of my life and I know it.