I think it's a sign of growing older that you spend an extra amount of time missing things about the past.
Some of us, of a certain age, miss the 20th century. Not in a maudlin, heart-achy kind of way, but there is a part of us that yearns for the familiar experiences of our youth and young adulthood.
I was looking through some old newspaper clippings the other day and came across a list of 100 little-known facts about Chattanooga. I remember it took me weeks in the 1980s to assemble the list from the newspaper's clip morgue and magazines at the public library. I also remember the sense of young-reporter pride I felt when it finally published in the lifestyle section.
Now, it would only take a good reporter a few hours to replicate the list of Chattanooga trivia through a search engine. Heck, AI might be able to do it in mere seconds. The loss of thinking of tasks as points of pride in the human experience makes me sad, and makes me nostalgic for the last century.
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I realized that there is a whole list of things associated with family life that I miss from the 20th century, too.
Here are a few:
› Looking at photo albums. One of the most common ways of socializing with "company" during my childhood was to pull out the family photo albums and look at "pictures" — we didn't call them photos. The nature of photo albums were that they were organized in chronological order, so the new stuff — last summer's trip to Tampa, for example — was always near the end.
Somebody would sit in the middle of the living room couch, flanked by a person on each side, and flip through the pages, acting as narrator along the way. There was a storytelling aspect to this that has become lost in the world of modern digital photography.
(Funny, we took tons of videos — in several formats — when our kids were young, but we never watch them. When does that happen?)
› Watching TV as a family. When our two sons are at home, we hardly ever gather around the TV as a family. One, the boys' attention spans are too short; and two, they are laptop and smartphone kids. The thought of watching TV as shared, family entertainment doesn't really occur to them.
When I was a kid, I remember several programs that would cause the whole family to huddle around the Magnavox: "The Ed Sullivan Show," "The Carol Burnett Show," "All in the Family," "60 Minutes." I would sneak and watch "Laugh-In," which was a bit bawdy for the time.
› Going for drives. When I was a kid, "Sunday drives" were an actual thing. After church, Sunday School and some sort of crock-pot lunch involving mushroom soup and a slab of protein, our family of four would load up in our Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon and, well, cruise.
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Sunday drives involved meandering aimlessly through neighborhoods in other parts of town looking at houses — just because. I'd be in the back seat with my younger sister, a pillow and a tube of Pringles. In just one Sunday drive, you could knock off most of the deadly sins: gluttony, sloth, greed, wrath and pride.
› Attending family reunions. I didn't really like them as a kid, but now, as a newly minted senior citizen, I understand why family members wanted to meet back on the family farm where things got started.
There was something about a house (and yard) full of cousins that reminds us of our our shared family heritage and the simple roots that most of us 20th-century people came from.
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In the 21st century, where nothing seems simple and everything happens on a screen, there is comfort in those honeysuckle memories.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645.