Vicaria Hurrah

 

It’s a turn-off to “live in the past”.  It’s a cultural demon, established as far back as the 1950s, in those compelling Shirley Booth characterizations in Come Back Little Sheba, and Hot Spell,  For a positive and healthy existence, we’re not supposed to languish in our childhood recollections and selective memories, but rather accelerate forward at jet speed, fixated upon our future’s advancement, be it our childrens’ achievements, our own, our professional or material gains, and our ever-empowering self-image as a product of it all.  No lifestyle article on any web service homepage will ever espouse anything to the contrary.

What they will alternately offer is some eight-box article on how to relieve the immediate stress and anxiety of today’s world that plagues each and every one of us in some way, and a reminder on how to breathe, how to stop cold and think before even thinking further, step out for a walk, hum a tune, or do most harmlessly whatever the hell you can to break the dark torpedoes veering down suddenly on your brain.

It's sure nice to see those little features, which if nothing else remind us just how plagued we all really are anxiety-wise today. It’s easy to forget.  All I know is, when I was a boy of seven, a half-century ago, there really weren’t articles like this jumping out at you all over the place.  Lifestyle magazines, bought and read strictly by housewives would roll out a column now and then.  Men had no emotions, and there was no internet or moving screens in your face as you crossed the boulevard.  There was also no 9-11 or COVID shutdown to recover from. 

In 1974 however, there were the remains of the Vietnam War, city crime, pollution, and a deadly inflation that no one was willing to admit was just as bad as what their parents dealt with in 1934.  Denial went a long way back then, and things like “family groups”, where folks unite to talk openly about their emotional struggles were a much more covert operation in the pre-Self Help days, before it became a full-on cottage industry.

The common consensus now, after a world of misguided quarantines, market crashes, unprecedented anxiety over “retirement” amongst a generation mostly convinced that their elderhood will consist of paycheck employment until the hereafter, is that anything you can add to your daily life to relieve that tension, if it’s safe, harmless and risk-free, is healthy and worth it.

I’m not the only one to have landed upon his or her Utopia.

More and more, the artifacts of a distant past are surfacing.  Our vital cyber-friend YouTube is hills alive with the work of a population of history-dedicated uploaders, benevolent with their time and effort, to restore the television and radio obscurities in full-form to our availability.  Only in recent years has this harvest come to fruition, and for some of us, it’s just the wallpaper our inner sanctums call for.  An anti-inflammatory treatment for the alienation of an indifferent, colorless, flavorless world a Generation X-er can’t quite taste.

Any world is an acquired taste.  I had just about zero tastes for the worlds I lived in during the 1970s and 80s.  I was busy being a scorned, alienated fat kid with no friends, angry teachers, and really couldn’t drudge up too much respect for the likes of Shaun Cassidy and Olivia-Newton John at the time.  I laughed smugly at the 1980s when I lived in them adolescently.  It was my only recourse.

Where does one look back to for solace in the 2020s..?  Likely to a world that finally few any younger can respect.  Having lived in those times myself, I certainly can’t blame them.  That doesn’t stop my vicarious crusade.

It’s a crusade only I or someone with a compass similar to mine will understand, and I make no effort to defend or explain.  But an hour or so each day (if I’m lucky enough to have the time) with a full-length radio or TV-news program aircheck, sound siphoned through the “aux” of my exquisitely placed twin Crosley “Ranchero” reproductions in a classic mid-century flat, suddenly rendering my abode into a virtual “holodeck”, chiming the beautiful FM sounds of waiting rooms in 1974, complete with aspirin commercials, is a stunning relief to any current day emotional inflammation.

What’s the charm to this..?  Perhaps the desire to step aboard a virtual Circle Line cruise to a time when my elders were my age, much less healthier, and much more accomplished, and stronger, for all their ailments, puts me in that brief experience of being the grownup in a world that weathered much tougher times.  Amongst the people who saw hurt, tragedy, loss, family drama, divorce, addiction and the requisite car wreck.  I won’t be as strong or courageous as they were.  I won’t be commanding all that they once farmed.  But I can visit that world, and remind myself of the terrain these people once crossed when I was too young to know better.

Part of the catharsis of such indulgement comes from knowing how it all turned out.  Bad times, good times……you’re still here.  You’ve made it.  Your higher power saw you through to this safe place now.  It’s a somewhat guilty pleasure to revel in one’s survival success by taking the time to appreciate those moments in past history that you never properly could.  Maybe, good or bad to come, you’ll make it through the next frontier.  Just the way our predecessors who never got to see the millennium did.   It’s kind of a learning component.  A step ladder that gets us to the next shelf in this world just a little more safely.

The young are thankfully too absorbed with the world in front of them, the way us X’ers were.  Those beyond my years have no taste for that elusive past.  But as I define it, it’s merely a tool to see one comfortably through these ambivalent and sometimes frightening days.  I recently watched a 1975 Johnny Carson show, where guest Rex Reed notes that the best thing you can do in this world is to survive it.

At midnight, that’s exactly what I was very gratefully doing.

 

Noah F.