Best Laid Plans
Well…
As you may have read in this space, my intentions were to blog every day in July.
The real world has a funny way of changing intentions such as those. Long story short, other more important things got in the way. So, here I am early on a Sunday morning, iPad at the ready as I tell the tale to fill this space.
Had a chance to head back to the summer of 1970, when my family made the change from, as my mom called it, “a Charlie Brown” tract house neighborhood where we knew most of the people in Mountain View to the other side of the San Francisco Bay and the rural living in Walnut Creek. A brand new house in an area without streetlights or sidewalks in unincorporated Contra Costa County.
Today the tract house we have such fond memories of is just one of many with concrete replacing the front lawn and a conversion to house a large family under one roof. The trees have prospered along the streets that were safe and secure in the neighborhood. But all the families we knew are gone now, the last member having left for a board and care facility two years ago. Now she too has passed and a well remembered part of those wonder years becomes a treasured memory.
As I type this, I am listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong sing some of the best tunes from those years ago. Yes, another case of terminal nostalgia comes to rest…
in retrospect, that tract of homes may have been sheltered from things going on elsewhere in the world. But young parents of that time tended to have their own worlds to focus on. Young children created their own brand of challenges. School, sports, Scouting for girls and boys, church and all of the things that made up life. Working mothers were making their starts while dads brought home the bacon after the 40-hour work week and the daily commute.
it wasn’t that the issues of the day were not important, but dealing with the latest visit from the measles, come home from school and visiting all family members at the same time were of greater import.
Courtesy of the US Army, my parents saw how life in the late 50’s Alabama differed from that of California. Segregation was the way of life to the point that young soldiers had to be reminded not get involved in things they may have seen as wrong. It would take time and the passage of Federal laws to see things change and begrudgingly for many.
Looking back on those days, I can see how the parents of those days helped shape the young men and women we were to become. The basic respect for each other was not just a simple platitude, it was expected and not out of the ordinary. I honestly can say that I never once heard a deragatory term for anyone from the parents in that neighborhood.
Civility today is something that has been in the minds of many. From the top down, it is indeed something I don’t understand. Either as a way to excite others or draw attention to the differences between us all, no one should have an expectation that civility should not be an expectation in society around the world.
As a child of the mass media age, I have always believed in a simple concept that came from a 1960’s television show – infinite diversity in infinite combinations. In that we should all celebrate what makes us different from one another is what makes us all the same. People, living on a planet, small and alone in the Milky Way galaxy, all trying to get through today, in search of tomorrow. Some days may be harder than others, but by respecting those differences, we see how we are more alike than not. Each one as deserving to be here as the other.
The lesson that came from that neighborhood so many years ago, it still rings true today. The people in this country still believe and treasure the words that declared our freedom in the summer of 1776.
“… We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. … “
Okay, that’s enough from the soapbox. Time to step down and move forward.
Back with more of the usual as the days come along.