As I approach Death and watch Death approach me, I find my mind wandering to gentler kinder days.
Back goes the wheel and it stops in the 1950s when I was a child.
It was a time when you could let your children out to play without worrying about monsters on every block trying to molest them.
It was a time when all children went trick-or-treating with no worries about poison candy
Or ground glass inserted into the candy. No adults allowed for sure.
I got .30 cents allowance a week in those days and had to do a chore or two to collect,
Saturday was my favorite day as me and my companions would sojourn to movies, for the major part of my allowance .25 I would see, 3 feature films, usually the scary kind,
About 7 cartoons and 2 installment of a serial usually flash Gordon or some such laugh fest that I took as real then.
We all used to walk together, arrive at the movies about 10 am and sit there till 6 pm or so, These were the days when it was IMPORTANT to sit in the very first row, although for the life of me I cannot say why.
The “show” was the biggest single baby sitter in our neighborhood holding a few hundred screaming kids for hours on end.
My mother used to pack me a couple p and j sammiches yes not sandwich but sammiches they were much better than just plain sandwiches.
I wonder how they all are, if any are still alive, I came from a rough neighborhood, where kids grew up fast and hard or they did not grow at all.
I miss the 50s, the I like Ike buttons, and the egg creams the real malts, the way cool cars.
Most of all I miss the innocence of America and my own innocence too.