"Remember When Everything was Possible?"

How naive many of us were as kids.
We always grew up things would get better and better.
We never seemed to have a specific goal...."only better and better" as if that were enough.
And for youngsters in those days it
was all part of the optimism we were invested in.
We could climb the tallest mountain.
Swim the English Channel.
Write the greatest book of all time.
And become a statesmen, a great mathematician, or an award winning physicist like Einstein.
Anything was possible.
And that was really the climate of the time.
Anything was possible.
We thought these things as we played on the street with our Spauldeen's playing hit the penny, Giant Step, Hide n' Seek, Ringoleavio, stick ball, punch ball, stoop ball and all of the other games we could conceive...

In our minds we could do anything as long as we were at the dinner table at 6:00 PM and in bed watching the Long Ranger at 7:00.

Those were the days...

In those days, we'd all rather be someplace else than school although school wasn't all that bad...

It was homework we hated; but aside from that, nobody really cared that we went into the haunted house, or we played snowballs outside or got into a fight with the kid down the block...

Nobody seemed to care what we did as long as we were at the dinner table on time....

Most of us were carried along after the Second World War
that America was the best place in the world where anything could and did happen.
We played 45 records...
Television was just coming into its own--even though you needed a magnifier to see the screen...and
if you wanted color, you had to mount this piece of plastic over the screen that made everything at the top blue and everything in the middle green...
It didn't bother us that our favorite actress looked green half the time...
Or that you had to squint--we were living the American life.
We would go to the movies, eat Chinese food out on Sunday and buy fried fish on Friday...
Everybody did the same thing but wasn't that what America was all about.
In the summer, we would have barbecues, go to the beach and fry but life was good.
With optimism, anything was possible.
At that time, we all went to school. We all got decent jobs.
And we all got to buy the things we wanted.
Most of us had bought our first cars.
And we were mobile because now there was in place a national highway system.
You could even take the train or fly, if you felt like it.
The country was great and we were learning about what a really wonderful place we lived in.
You could go to Horn and Hardart and eat like a king for under a buck.
How could you argue with that.
And what did we have to look forward to?
Well, the big companies were telling us that in the future, we would have machines that would automatically prepare our meals and robots to do the hard work. The really tough part would be having to figure what to do with all of that leisure time.
You could go bowling in the morning, see a movie in the afternoon and
play tennis in the evening on your own home court.
Or if you didn't like that, you could take your own private jet and fly over to see friends at the shore or go to the mountains to go skiing. The world was our oyster.
People really believed in all of this. They started buying leisure time stocks.
And others started to think that maybe they would have second careers instead of collecting a watch after twenty years.... That was considered pretty cutting edge.
In the meantime, the TV's got bigger and we went to the movies more
and thought that the dream would last forever....
And then Russia developed the atomic bomb.
And kids were asked to hide under desks.
And then there was Korea.
And the assasination of President Kennedy and things started to change.
But none of us from that generation will ever forget the hope, the promise
of those simple days that infused our youth and gave us reason to believe
that anything was possible.
That was thin and this is now.
My wish for all of us is that we could return once again
to enjoy those carefree years of youth...
And when I see my grandkids wearing helmets and having every movement
supervised and none of the freedom that we had, I yearn for those times...
Maybe if we all wished hard enough, it could happen
and we could turn back the hands of time and remember
things the way they were.
I could think of a lot worse things....

Les Aaron