Grandma's Been There

Could it be possible that a fountain of youth exists? Not a spring filled with water that reverses the aging process when we drink it or bathe in it, but a state of mind, an attitude, a way of looking at ourselves. Are old age and childhood more connected than we know? This episode is dedicated to the memory of George Clayton Johnson.

Nowadays, when most businesses are open on Sundays and we can shop on line twenty-four hours a day, it must be impossible for younger people to understand what it was like for nearly every single business in the neighborhood to be closed for an entire day. But kids of my generation couldn’t imagine Sunday any other way.

How’d you like to visit your childhood home only to find out your old address no longer exists?

Lots of things have changed since I was a kid, but there’s one question American kids have been asking every day since the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. “What are we having for supper?”

I became a podcaster because I love podcasts. They’re entertaining, educational and sometimes even inspirational. This week, I’d like to tell you about a handful of my favorites in case you’re looking for something new to listen to. 

By the time we were sixth graders, we were used to our teachers’ theatrics. The antiquated flowery language, trite worn out proverbs and dumb expressions meant to showcase their superior intelligence while illustrating our stupidity. They had a million of them. Is this what our parents were paying tuition for?

In the mid-1960s, our teachers warned us we would someday suffer from something called “future shock.” Our world would change so drastically and so rapidly that we wouldn’t be able to keep up with it all.  It would cause distress, anxiety, even disorientation and confusion. Maybe for the older generation, but not for us. We kids couldn’t wait to be bombarded by the future. We were ready. Bring it on.

The first few weeks of a new school year were always a rather frenetic period of readjustment and settling in. Get used to a new teacher. Get the right notebooks. Cover all those textbooks. For me personally, the hardest thing to adjust to every September was being back in school while the weather was still summer-like. It felt wrong, unnatural—like we’d been kidnapped.

In the late 1960s, you didn’t have to be fully aligned with the counterculture to enjoy a visit to a psychedelic shop. You just had to be open to new ideas and have a willingness to recapture some of that childhood sense of wonder, whether you were an adult or a kid.

Mary Quant, the fashion designer whose creations defined the 1960s “mod” era said she spent her thirteenth birthday crying because in her words, “old age had struck.” All she had to look forward to now were below the knee-length dresses, high heeled shoes, corsets, nylons and garter belts, stiff beehive hairdos, artificial nails…  I totally understood. Before I became a teenager, I had been dreading being sentenced to a lifetime of that as well.