Meditating About the Past

Meditating can be good or it can be bad, but it’s important to remember where we’ve been. This post is from  four years ago but I still meditate, ruminate, remember, and look back. Ruminating means about the same thing as meditating except that ruminating  could refer to a cow chewing her cud slowly, swallowing, burping and chewing again. I don’t much care for the picture of me chewing over my thoughts. And I’m not sure my meditations are that deep but they are coursing through my head like bees swarming around a hive and I have a feeling the only way to capture them is to write them.

Someone on a television program yesterday said the 1950s were a more wholesome era than today; a time of hope and innocence, and since I grew up during that time, I am inclined to agree. Bobby sox, penny loafers, saddle shoes (boy, they were hard to polish), can-cans, pony tails and blue jeans were the teen girl’s attire. Jeans were rolled up, because they were too long, not because that was fashionable. Sometimes they were rolled to just below the knees. When I bought a new pair, you can bet they did not come with ready-made holes, for goodness sake!

I liked to ride horses, climb trees, and play ball, read and write and draw. The piano figured big in my girlhood. I played hymns and recital pieces but I also learned to play by ear “The Beer Barrel Polka”, “The Tennessee Waltz” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

My little brother and I watched and listened to Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Sky King and The Mickey Mouse Club. We had heroes. The good guys were good and they always won;  the bad guys were bad and lost in a big way. We believed that Right and Truth always triumphed.

Grown ups were respected. Talking back to my parents? Unheard of. I said “Please”, “Excuse me”, and “May I”. We had very little money and might have longed for more, but that was okay because my parents were the best in the world. For many years I was positive that my dad was always, entirely, unfailingly, irrevocably and on every occasion, right. If nobody else in all the world had the same opinion as my dad, they were all wrong.

Mr. Truman was President, then Mr. Eisenhower. We may not always have agreed with them, but we respected them.

Knowledge has increased dramatically in the last fifty or sixty years but has happiness kept pace? With technology, the whole world is within reach. If I want to know the answer to a question, I Ask Jeeves. He always knows. People rush around a lot today. We hurry to finish one job so we can do something else. But somehow, with all the “modern conveniences” and technological helpers, we never have enough time.

So sometimes I indulge in an old person’s prerogative, I look back, ruminate, meditate, and remember. Today’s children probably consider the 1950s The Dark Ages, but there were good things. We might not have had all the knowledge of today but we had innocence. And, there’s a great deal to be said for innocence. We didn’t have computers but we had television and radios and books. If our home library was sparse, there was the Carnegie library in town with an endless supply of books.

Living in the past is not good, because who can see where they are going if they’re always looking back? But, it is good to remember where we came from and to hold on tightly to those things we had that were good.