When I picture my childhood, back in the 80’s, I often remember long summer days spent at the beach. Like, the whole day. My brother and I would build sand forts, go swimming, dig holes, rest in the sun, and then repeat, for hours on end. We’d get horribly sunburned, of course. A few days later we’d peel the dead skin off in sheets. I hold these memories with unalloyed delight.
I also, sometimes, consider those days with something akin to horror: my modern self, equipped with the greater wisdom of adulthood and a few advances in scientific understanding, contemplates those sunburns and realizes I’ve got a fair to middling chance of eventually dying from skin cancer. Whoopsie.
But I hold fast to the joy, and frankly I prefer to reflect upon those memories with joy rather than horror, so I do. I mean, the damage was done. Still, trying to convey that joy to someone else – particularly someone younger than I, who grew up with sunscreen – is difficult. Without any point of contact to the innocence/ignorance of my youth, they surely would first react with horror, and then have to override it to understand the fondness of my reminiscences.
In a similar way, I tend to react to another person’s stories first as myself, my modern adult self, equipped with my current understanding. I think we all do. I mean, what other frame do we have? And the 1950’s, particularly the canned and artificially-sweetened version memorialized in sitcoms, do not benefit from our hindsight.
In placid picket-fence suburbia, I have learned to see redlining and segregation. In “everyone spoke English,” I now see ghettos like Chinatown created to trap those who did not. In “nobody was gay/trans” I see ostracism and repression. In peaceful race relations, I see the lynching of those people brave enough to speak out. In lower divorce rates I see powerless women. In higher church attendance I see compulsion and weaponized guilt. In the gleeful hedonism of consumption, I witness the seeds of environmental destruction. These visions are upsetting enough on their own. It is infuriating to hear someone recall them with fondness. Fondness! For that?
It itched, the dead skin. It felt good when I peeled it off. If I put it on my tongue – sorry, gross in hindsight – it would stick and almost fizzle a bit, very strange. I treasured those bonding moments with my brother; we fought often enough.
I don’t really blame Boomers for holding their joy, the innocence/ignorance of their childhoods, separate from the grim reality that so much of that was built on the bones of the oppressed and a mortgaged future. You were kids. You didn’t know.
But you know now. Don’t you?
You know we can never, must never, go back.
Don’t you?