Look Behind You

While looking forward

Go outside. It’s a beautiful place to be. Photo: Me :)

I’m going to come full circle from my last column.

I’m going to start at the beginning, which may be familiar territory for some of you.

I recognize a number of my readers are younger and some of what I write may not necessarily be applicable at this time, but it will be.

How many of you remember when you were five years old? Were you thinking then about being twenty, fifty? Not even a blink of thought.

I lived in a modest home in Pasadena. I remember enough to know we had dinner as a family every night. The dining room was the kitchen. I clearly recall having to sit in the dark for hours on end until I ate my vegetables. My parents did not relent which now I respect.

The evenings we spent as a family in the living room watching a twenty-four-inch black and white tv. It had thirteen channels on a knob you had to manually turn, but there were only 12 available channels since the number one did not exist. Reception came via a set of “rabbit years.” I recall my father taking me to some retail store to look at the first color tv’s coming out. The picture had a reddish tint and not very pretty. I was fine with black and white.

TV shows were much different. Sunday night was the best. We had the Wonderful World of Disney captivate us, with Walt himself sitting on the edge of his desk opening every show. Then there was Bonanza and the Cartwright’s. My favorite of all, which I had to cry to be allowed to watch past my 7pm bedtime, was Zorro.

The shows were clean, family oriented, heartwarming and unified the nuclear family together.

We moved to Santa Barbara when I was in the third grade. I entered San Roque School where I was taught catechism, went to church every day and we prayed in the classroom. We stood before the American flag each morning, covered our hearts, and said the pledge of allegiance.

We had recess and the kids played. We interacted. We talked to each other. And when we went home, after homework, we dashed outside to play. We never stayed in the house except for Saturday morning cartoons. Outdoors was the hub of activity. Climbing trees, making lousy skateboards using a hundred nails to hold steel skates on a piece of plywood. We ran around in parks and went to our friends’ homes to play.

I ordered a .22 rifle from Sears and would hike, alone, for miles up San Roque creek shooting squirrels, or trying to. No one thought it strange a ten-year-old carrying a rifle.

I was never good at group sports and discovered surfing. I could do it alone. I liked surfing more than school, but it saved my life. I had been severely bullied for reasons unknown to me. The entire neighborhood would encircle me throwing small stones and sending in girls to take punches at me. It was rough for a while. Surfing gave me my independence, a purpose and I didn’t need anyone else.

Santa Barbara was much different then, as I imagine many other small cities around the country. State Street turned to dirt at Five Points leading out to the lemon orchards. My mom would get stuck in the mud on Las Positas taking us to school.

For a period of time I lived with my third-grade teacher. I would take a city bus from San Roque to downtown State Street and get a milkshake at Woolworths five and dime, a long-time forgotten department store. From there I would either walk miles to Oak Park where my teacher lived or take the bus.

Flash to the future: Families don’t eat together anymore. Moms are gone all day working. TV shows are infused with political correctness. Kids don’t play outside. They have their heads buried in their phones. There are no PE classes. You would not feel it safe to allow a ten-year-old to travel across town on a city bus. The American flag has become a political punching bag. It’s lost respect among way too many Americans. And if a kid was spotted with a rifle walking through your neighborhood, SWAT and helicopters would descend upon the child and have him locked up before he could give his name.

There were no school shootings. Kids respected the teachers. There was no cursing in class. Even though I was a bit of rebel, ok, a rebel, I still didn’t do things that would harm anyone. I was teenage boy trying to cross the line from a kid to a (young) man.

Many of my classmates got married during high school or soon thereafter. And many of us are still married. It will be 52 years for my wife and I. My father gave us six months.

When you look back on the world, it couldn’t have changed more.

Is it for the better? I would guess we all have our own thoughts on that. There’s no way we could have prevented or stymied where we are today. For many, climbing trees, playing in a park and eating as a family will be lost to the memories of a time gone by.

Even religion has taken a back seat. Whether you’re religious or not, the benefit of having a faith and going to Church has played huge roles in people’s lives. Churches used to bulge with parishioners. Families would gather afterwards and socialize. Christmas and Easter brought out Christians in droves. I’m not familiar with the Jewish religion so I can’t speak to that, but like the Jews, Christians have been increasingly become more persecuted. Liberal ideology has been painting people of faith as bad and we’ve witnessed it in our colleges; supporting terrorists, you get a pass. The youth are being taught it’s acceptable to attack religious beliefs; hate is okay.

I for one harken the days of building a cheesy skateboard, climbing a tree and watching Disney before it went woke, as a family. Not staring at a mind warper all day.