Lorna and I took a short trip away from the cottage this
past week end. The purpose of the trip
was to visit St Mary’s Anglican Church in Summerside PEI. The Rector/priest-in-charge was a student in
our Parish here a few years ago.
We had a positive experience worshipping there on Sunday
which offered us a choice of using the more modern way of following the service
on the screen at the front of the church or using the traditional way of having
prayer and hymn books. I chose the
screen and Lorna chose the books. That
is something I may explore at another time.
However, I want to talk about our experience having breakfast before the
service.
We had breakfast at the Starlite Café and Dairy Bar in
Summerside near our motel. I was a trip
down memory lane with the café being a blast from the past, specifically the
nineteen fifties. The décor which except
for its pristine state could have been original. There was a juke box consul at every table
with appropriate song selections for 25 cents (on reflection I don’t think a
juke boxes would have cost that much in 1950’s but that’s a quibble). There
were adds for Fanta Orange and Grape sodas (we both had forgotten about Fanta
Grape). There was the mandatory poster
of Elvis in the army and much more.
There was also two 1950’s gas pumps which neither of us were old enough
to have operated back when they were new.
I believe the price for the gas was 67 cents a gallon which was too high
but still ridiculously low by today’s standards. One source I checked on-line (certainly not
available in the 1950’s) quoted the price at 18 cents a gallon which sounds
more like it. I would not have been surprized
to see the Fonz from Happy Days in the next booth.
In any case it was a trip down memory lane for both of us (there
wasn’t the other infamous kind of a trip generally available until a decade
later). Memory lane was well travelled by
almost all of the customers being of an age that would have grown up in the
1950’s and Lorna and I certainly enjoyed reminiscences of the past. I think we were both a bit nostalgic about
those times. They were idyllic in many
ways when fathers worked in jobs that supported the family and enabled us to
live a comfortable lifestyle and mothers stayed at home raising the children
and you could go out and play in the neighbourhood with friends and not come
home until it was time for lunch or dinner.
Who would not want to go back to those times when everything was great
or at least seemed that way to those of us lucky to be in the right
circumstances.
However, we are also having a viewing experience which gives
us another perspective on those times.
We are currently watching the first season on Mad Men on DVD. Neither of us have seen the series and we
purchased the DVD’s of the first season for our cottage viewing, now that we
have updated from VHS and have a DVD player which was purchased last year.
This presents a very different view of these times. It is actually set in the early 1960’s. However, most of the cultural values were
what can be classed as the 1950s. The
only people of colour are elevator operators or cleaners or serving in similar
jobs. The series is about advertising
men (mad men as they called themselves) and it was truly all men. They women were secretaries, telephone
operators and women did stay home and raised the children in suburbia and gave
up any thoughts of careers when they got married. The Mad Men are portrayed with all the worst
characteristics of the male; they drink excessively and drive after drinking,
they viewed woman as potential sex partners and tried to ensure that the
potential did not go unfulfilled. Gay
men were definitely in the closet and lesbian women were also deep undercover. And everyone seemed to smoke all the
time. It was not something that
encouraged nostalgia in either of us.
Both views are, of course, not true reflections of
reality. They are viewed through the distorting
lenses of time and selected memories.
However, both perspectives could be something that does make some people
hanker for the good old days. Why can’t
we have a time when men were men and women were women and everyone knew their place
and accepted it without question. Why
can’t America and even Canada be great again?
There is a great danger is longing for our fantasies of what
life was like and wishing we could remake the world in the image of our
selective and distorted memories. That
was what the Israelites experienced on their journey to the Promised Land. They murmured against the hardships of their
journey with the monotony of manna from heaven and the pined for the fleshpots
of their former lives in Egypt with its security and familiarity. They conveniently forgot about the hardship
and cruelty they had experienced under the slave masters. Yes, the grass did look greener back along
the banks of the Nile.
Of course, they blamed Moses who had (mis)led them out of
Egypt. The hero had become the
villain. It seems to be our nature to
look for someone who will save us and has the answers to all our problems. Someone who will point the finger away from
us and at the Other who is the source of our problems. That was what many followers of Jesus was
looking for; someone who would feed their bodies if not their souls, someone
who would defeat the Romans; someone who would cast out their demons and cure their
leprosy. However, his early promise seemed to be a bust. The triumph of Palm Sunday turned into the
despair of Good Friday. We are still
hoping for someone who will take us directly to that triumph.
The nineteen fifties of our imagination never were but we
are still looking for someone to lead us back to the fleshpots of Egypt. The journey to the Promised Land is long and
there are no short cuts but the journey is worth it.
Those fleshpots never were that good, were they?
Blessings on your journey
