Prologue -
Once upon a time, when I was just 8 years old, I moved with my mother into a very old house that was filled with a bunch of very old things. The house and grounds were filled with things that should have been tossed long before I found them. Decay and mildew and dust and vermin and slovenliness had worked away through the years and had rendered most of the very old things useless. But it was like living in a docent-less museum! There were things like a moth-eaten, hand-cranked phonograph with extra-thick records; a decrepit, haunted player piano with sticking keys that was missing its insides; a thin metal curling iron that had to be heated in an open flame...just a few of the hundreds of fascinating artifacts that I would secretly sift through and "play with" whenever I had a spare moment. (I didn't have as many spare moments as you'd expect for an 8 year-old.)
There were two bedrooms crammed, ceiling high, full of chests and boxes that held things that had been unseen by human eyes for decades. A basement was filled to bursting as well. In the block-long backyard there was an outbuilding, made from corrugated tin, that we called the garage - although I doubt that a car of any sort had ever seen the inside of it. While I was banned from digging through the boxes and chests in the bedrooms and basement, nobody seemed to care if I rifled through the stuff in the "garage". It was like a treasure hunt. At least, that’s the way I saw it. Stray cats had left their mark on things, but I didn't care. I shook off mouse droppings and bug casings from chunky pink crystal bowls, dainty sherry glasses and plaid tin coolers with matching tin plates inside. I found old shoes - from the '30's, if I remember the style correctly - with grosgrain ribbon bows and thick high heels, and a bunch of crunchy old coats with fur collars, which scared me for some reason. Since the house was an addition to a neighborhood grocery store, built in 1917, there were loads and loads of old display signs and broken-down display cases still stocked with bottles half-full of products like hair bluing and cornhuskers lotion, and toxically old boxes of corn starch with plenty of worm holes.The people who had lived there since it was built - my new step-family - had never really thrown anything away.
There was so much to look at and play with and dig through. But what I loved above all were the books! I can still remember the smell of the old, old books – primers, storybooks and cookbooks from the ‘20s, '30's and '40's that had been left indiscriminately on shelves in the tin garage. I immersed myself in the old books, careful not to crack their spines too badly as I read stories about kids who said "Mother" and "Father" instead of "Mom" and "Dad". As a precocious cook and baker, I made my first batch of shortbread from one of those old books, as well as a batch of something called Sally Lunn Bread.
I also found a jackpot of old sheet music, crispy and yellow with age and exposure. I played piano back then and I kept the found sheet music in my piano bench. Besides Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which I was thrilled to pick my way through, I also had the pleasure of learning great hits like “Yes, We Have No Bananas” and “Who Threw the Overalls in Mistress Murphy’s Chowder”. Awesome stuff. I reviewed old, glossy black and white photos of children in band uniforms (taken decades before music programs were cut from schools and at a time when even elementary school bands had uniforms complete with white side-buttoned boots). I poked through war photos of smiling infantrymen and shiny white-framed photos of Christmases past, everybody clustered around the now-defunct player piano. I felt part of those eras, by association with the artifacts I surrounded myself with. Still...though I associated myself with all the fanfare of those earlier eras, I still thought of it as ancient stuff.
Back to the present -
The other day as I wandered around waiting for new tires to be put on my vehicle – I saw an old, discarded book in an empty lot. Its spine was cracked and it was laying open and facedown in the gravelly dirt. As soon as I registered what it was, the smell of those old books from my childhood swam back into my brain and I nearly bent to pick it up – a treasure from another era. But then I realized that the book couldn’t have been that old at all. It looked a little like a compilation of Reader’s Digest Condensed Stories; certainly published no earlier than say…the ‘70s. But wait…! That’s still going on 40 years old! The same age of some of the old books I treasured when I was 8 years-old, in the very early ‘70’s.
Why did those books seem so much older and so far removed from my life. Is it just because I lived through the ‘70s and it is part of my intimate history? Or is time really measured by changes? Between the ‘30s and the ‘70s a World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War shook our nation. Advancements in music and freedoms changed our paradigms and the way we live our day to day lives.
So, does that make that particular 40 year segment more impactful than the forty years that have elapsed between my childhood and my own son’s? Only to me, I believe. Not to him. To him, a Chevy Vega is still a super old car, capable of coolness (something it never achieved in its own time). And he says things like “Mom, wouldn’t it be cool to have a radio station that played really old music, like stuff from the renaissance and music from the ‘80’s?” In other words, my “modern” is his “old”.
Yet, as I get older and the years fly by, there seems to be not much time between my childhood and his. But in his view, the years are crawling by; stalling, even. And the gap between my youth and the world he inhabits is enormous. Things from my childhood are old to him. So, so old as to be mythical.
And as I think about it a bit more, and as I look at photos of people who are no longer here, I wonder at time being so malleable. A minute more with them would still be only 60 seconds, but it would be significant. Yet, look at the minutes I waste, avoiding this task or that "issue". There’s no way of figuring it out. Time is just so freaking weird. Looks like Einstein was right about the relativity thing.
