I grew up in a home with a dad and a mom who were married to each other for nearly 65 years. They were rather simple folk by the standards today. They went to church every Sunday, taught their two sons to pray along with a host of other things (from cooking to plumbing), and were productive members of the small town in which they had grown up and lived their whole lives. Yup, pretty abnormal. They were not fancy people and their accomplishments were largely limited to the arenas of church, home, and community. Though they loom large in my own memory, I would be forced to admit that they are largely forgotten now. The store that belonged to my father from 1958 through 2015 is now closed. The building is occupied by a glorified junk dealer and I cannot even recall how much of the inventory was left from the remains of dad's store. Mom's work with the girl scouts, women's club, and a host of other worthy endeavors is as forgotten as those groups. The town and its people have moved on. It hurts me more than I imagined it every would hurt them. They did not live their lives for legacy but as people of faith living out in the present moment a life they strove to make worthy of their calling in Christ. My brother and I are probably their only estate of value to them. Yes, they had things but the things were not as important to them as me and my brother. They loved their daughter-in-law and were happy at the home she made for me and for our family. They loved their grandchildren and the mountains of photos from my family was evidence of how they cherished these babies who grew up into adults. It used to be a pretty normal life but I wonder how normal it is today.
I write this not out of nostalgia nor because I want to condemn the way things have become. It is more out of sadness that I admit what was the norm for me and my wife and the homes in which we grew up is now not so normal anymore. The world today has lost something precious and in its place has come something less than what was lost. I am sad because I grew up without a real care in the world. We played and worked and walked and rode bikes as if there was nothing to fear anywhere. It was a life without a rigorous schedule, without drop offs and pick ups from day care, and without adult worries to interfere with childhood. Sure, we had drills about hiding under our desks in case of nuclear attack but we did not worry about it -- much less think about the absurdity of a school desk keep us safe from the mushroom cloud and all of its destruction. We just did it. We did not worry about our parents divorcing -- I literally cannot recall that ever happening in my small town while I grew up there. We did not worry about figuring out our gender or what fueled our sexual desire. We were kids and most of us went through high school as carefree virgins who expected to find a wife or husband and have a family but did not brood on it. How unlike today with kids who carry around adult sized burdens on their shoulders and who have had the new normal steal away their childhood and its attempt at innocence!
I knew my great-grandpa, grand-parents on both sides, aunts and uncles, cousins and an extended family that numbered in the hundreds. We went to reunions and ate meals at each other's homes. We hauled out the giant tins of Schwanns ice cream for dessert and ate pickled herring along with chips and dip before sitting down to roasted meat, mashed potatoes, gravy, and vegetables. Though we were not rich, we did not worry if the food would be on the table. We did sometimes worry that it might be some food we did not especially like but we ate what was there. Everybody did. We wore hand me down clothes along with the outfits and shoes purchase once a year -- big enough to grow into as long as we did not wear them out. We had a TV that had a couple of channels on it and we watched it with glee but parents always controlled what we watched and when. That big screen was a nice addition to our lives but it did not replace playing with other kids or doing chores or all the other things. I guess growing up without a screen dominated life was better than anyone today could imagine. Like most folks, we could not wait to grow up but when we grew up we realized how special such a childhood was in a small town, with a loving family, and enough if not more all around. Sadly, as normal as it seemed then, it is not now and I am not sure anyone misses those easy, slow, carefree days. They should. We all should miss them enough to work to make our modern day lives a bit more like the old ones.
We have settled into a new normal in which families break up and homes are divided and children are optional and marriage is not necessary. We have accepted the new normal of a world in which you never really feel safe or secure (not even in your own home) and in which you balance dangers with desires when you plan things. We have become accustomed to a world in which the screens are our best friends and personal contact is secondary to the digital realities of our daily lives. We expect people not to go to church and we expect to fill our time with other pursuits. We are over scheduled and even lonelier than ever. I could be angry about how things have turned out but instead I am sad. I am sad for my grandchildren and for the kids I see at church. I am sad at how easily and quickly the new normal has made my childhood abnormal. In this we have forgotten some of the things that matter most and kept hold on things that do not matter much at all. I know I cannot change the world but I pray for it and for the future ahead of most of us. Anger may not bring things back but if we ever get to the point where we want to try something different, the abnormal past might not look so bad to us. The day may come when antique stores or old book shops or flea markets may hold more than a memory but a sense of hope, restoring what was lost for the sake of joy.
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People are products of their upbringing, with many traits we are told are evident at an early age in life. Our own experiences are not always similar to our neighbors, even in the same communities. Culturally we might share similar values, yet remain shaped mainly by our home life. In the small village where I grew up between 1949-1958, it was a microcosm of things I never understood early on, but came to see more clearly with maturity. The Catholic Church in this quiet north shore village of Northport, NY was foundational to my life, although my parents rarely attended church services. Yet they saw to it that me and my sisters went to parochial school. My NYC born parents lived through the depression of 1929 and the years of hardship, unemployment and poverty which was felt by many Americans. World War Two followed later on. These were not, as Charles Dickens might observe in “A Tale of Two Cities,” the best of times. My father was an Irish Catholic, my mother a German Lutheran. They both had faith, but rarely spoke about it. They left us in the teaching hands of the Sisters of St Joseph at the school we attended. I have always felt blessed that they saw to it that if we didn’t learn much else, we would learn to love Christ. Our village looked like a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting, but if one lifted up the veneer, one would see that some households were troubled places. We had our town drunks, our local cops guiding them home and keeping the streets safe and peaceful. There were rumors of adulterous spouses, troubled kids, fist fights on the ball field, thefts from the five and dime store on Main Street. But it was mostly a serene appearing village, one would see it as safe and respectable. Looking back, it was a different time. The world seems more upside down today, and since the 1960’s our society changed profoundly. Still, my parents would never say that things were better when they were growing up. Perhaps, some of us engage in projection, when we in our minds apply wishful thinking to our past lives, and like the picture window of a Main Street shop, we put the best stuff on display, and relegate the less perfect merchandise to the back shelves. “It is what it is,” my mother would often say. It was not a mere cynical approach, but something I remembered through the years. And when she saw someone struggling in life, she would say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” After 81 years of living, I came to understand fully what these words meant. Soli Deo Gloria.
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