…ONLY – I’M MORE EXCITED
THAN THEY ARE!
I have, in the past few years, come across some great things from my youth. For example, BLACK JACK chewing gum and Raspberry filled hard candies. I mean, these are treats that I mooned over in my brain until, one day, I got a catalog called THE VERMONT COUNTRY STORE, and, lo and behold, right there in its pages were BLACK JACK chewing gum and Raspberry filled hard candies!
Wellllll, needless to say, I placed my order and prepared some very special packages for Christmas – – giving each of my grandchildren a goodly supply of each. I waited anxiously to see what they thought, and the most exuberant reaction I got was, “Oh, nice. Thank you!”
And then there’s SUPERMAN. You know, the one where George Reeves played the Man of Steel! I recently discovered that re-runs from the ‘50s and ‘60s play every Saturday morning on local TV. Excited almost beyond belief, I made arrangements for my two oldest grandsons to watch a couple of episodes with me. Ohhhh, and they were dandy episodes, too! When they were finished, the boys thanked me and headed home. While they said nothing of the sort, I could read in their eyes that they were thinking, “You mean you got us up early on a Saturday morning for this?”
I could go on and on with other examples, but I won’t. The point I want to make is this: When the manifestation of all of my memories came into existence, I discovered that while my grandkids were game to do as I asked, I most definitely was far more excited than they were about it! Well, you know me, I took this knowledge and started cogitating on it a bit and came up with several interesting insights.
First of all, maybe the adage “you never can go home!” is accurate after all. The warm and fuzzy feeling that SUPERMAN and BLACK JACK chewing gum creates within me has more to do with the days that I enjoyed them than having intrinsic value of their own.
Though not exactly a revelation or an epiphany, I began to realize that maybe “the good old days” weren’t so good after all! If I am gut-level honest, SUPERMAN is a little hokey!
Finally, perhaps we magnify the value of the things in our youth to unrealistic proportions. Maybe the candy wasn’t that good, the TV shows not that entertaining, and I didn’t have to walk five miles to school, uphill both ways!
THE GOOD NEWS that I discovered was, while the grandkids weren’t particularly ecstatic about the treats or the TV viewing, they are always crazy about spending time with Grandma and me. I feel that, perhaps someday, they will tell their grandchildren how great watching SUPERMAN with Grandpa had been, and it will have nothing to do with George Reeves!