There are times when memories of your childhood come flooding back, and no matter how well you’ve plugged your fingers in the dike, it always has to give way and overtake you. I’m never too happy to remember my childhood as it wasn’t that happy, but at least I got out of it alive.
I am a child of the seventies. It was a time of lack hook rug kits that you never knew what to with once they were finished. Macramé planters with big, brown wooden beads hung from every ceiling. There was string art, and parents didn’t worry back then about handing small kids hammers and nails. Of course there was knit or crocheted blankets hanging on the back of every couch, with the matching throw pillow cases. Who could forget such raging crazes as the mood rings that changed color, the bell bottoms that always got caught and chewed up in your bicycle chain (this was before chain guards), and believed the Dr. Schols’ ads that said if you wore their clog sandals, you’d get toner looking legs. The only thing you got were your toes stubbed as your feet would slide forward out the front of the sandals. It was the day when Foster Grants ruled the sunglass scene, and on your feet were either platform shoes, or cheap pop out roller skates that never turned easily and landed you face down on the pavement.
When I see boot cut jeans today, I wince. When I see those big floppy train engineer hats back in style, I cringe. Thankfully, I haven’t seen my red and white polka-dotted polyester pants make a comeback. When I tried to describe this to an eighteen year-old kid a few weeks ago, she asked, “What’s polyester?” I couldn’t find an example of the fabric to illustrate the hell all seventies children experienced.
To watch an old re-run like “All in the Family”, it’s not for the bigoted language to show us what we used to be like, but to look at the kitchen table that I still see on “Everybody Loves Raymond” (in the parent’s house), complete with the vinyl and chrome seats you’d stick to on a hot summer day. It’s to look at a TV set when you still had to get up and change the channel yourself, and as a kid, you didn’t mind doing that back then. And it was for the love of everything harvest gold and avocado green – the only two colors that existed back then if you look at your parents’ old scrapbooks (if you’re too young to remember). You chewed on the lead based paint and you didn’t go to the doctor’s office for every little thing – only for your mandatory school injections so your parents could find a few hours of peace and quiet before you returned home and reminded them, “why didn’t I take my birth control pills that day?!”
The front doors were all unlocked, and the ice cream man was the highlight of your day. If you were lucky, you weren’t going to be the one the other kids would sing about that day: “You ain’t go no ice cream!! You ain’t got no ice cream!”
You were super lucky if you happened to be at grandma’s house, where she rarely said no, and was always the epitome of grace even if she looked as wrinkled as laundry you leave in the dryer overnight as an adult. She never asked if you did your homework before you went out to play or she gave you a sweet treat, and you always lived close enough to walk to her house unsupervised. No one grabbed kids off the street back then – they were busy pushing them out, and I think secretly hoped we wouldn’t find our way back home.
It was super cool when Grandma let you help on her paint by numbers craft kits, and you always knew you could find a good, hearty meal at her house. The liberated working moms of the seventies all had the same curse: they cooked by fire alarms, and often used the broom handles to whack at them until they shattered and rained down pieces of sharp plastic. They had barely managed to avoid burning water with their domestic goddess skills.
I can remember reading a book about how the way it used to be in the 1940’s and laughing so hard I had tears running down my cheeks, with my curious schoolmates finally taking the book out of my hand to see what was so funny. The book talked about how the woman’s mom used to boil solid food into a liquid. They didn’t get it. My mom had been reducing solid food into a liquid for years – it’s called “Irish cooking”. Ham and bean soup? What ham?! I don’t see any ham in here! Are you sure there are beans in here? It looked and tasted the same always – like the box of wallpaper paste you used to buy at the small family owned hardware store around the corner.
