The good ole days

What do you think of when you are asked to recall the good ole days?  Do you think of your own childhood and lazy days just being a kid or do you go to a time before you were born; a time only known to you from the stories you were told. 

My parents definitely thought of their youth as the good ole days.  Why not?  After all they were part of the Greatest Generation and it was the time of their lives as eloquently depicted by Tom Brokaw.

It was easy for my brothers and I to be transfixed by the stories of my parent’s early years.  My dad talked about his days at the ice plant working alongside his father.  He would sometimes recall the hum of the machinery; cakes of ice in the storage room, the ice cans, the fillers, an ice pick and a pair of hooks were all as familiar to him as the steps at his back door.  He rode on the wagons and trucks as a “kid” and learned the routes and the public he served.  He worked as a peddler, a puller, a stacker, and as the engineer.  He was the bookkeeper and a general handy man for his father and would often say with fondness, “ I knew the ice business”.

My mother recalled living on the farm as a child.  She was a very active child and remember fondly climbing trees, turning hand springs, swimming, skating, all of the things that boys liked to do.  She considered herself a tomboy and she had a beautiful dog and a horse.  She followed her stepfather all over their 150 acres and often swam in the swimming hole. 

Her stepfather had a big garden where he grew beautiful tomatoes.  He planted cotton and corn and my mother remembered sitting in the wagon and driving the horses down the rows for him as he pulled the corn off the stalks.  He took her fishing and she would follow him around when he hunted squirrels and quail.

Her first Christmas on the farm her stepfather made her a beautiful little kitchen cabinet and a doll bed painted blue and her mother made a little pillow, sheets and quilt for it, also a doll table.  All these memories she cherished and recalled with such fondness.

My own good ole days are many. I fondly remember playing dolls under the coffee table with my mother or dressing up in homemade Halloween costumes and trick or treating with neighborhood friends.  I loved being caught in a leg hold by my father and being tickled unmercifully until I cried “Uncle”.  There were games of kick-the-can and hide n seek after dark and the giggles and pillow fights at sleep-overs.  I especially enjoyed playing at the creek with my best friend Karma.

What the good ole days were for me, and perhaps my parents as well, was that time when all we had to do was worry about what and where our next big adventure would be.  It was that blissful time when we were balancing between childhood and adulthood.  It was a time so fleeting that we remember it fondly and forever as “the good ole days”.