Ever feel like you were born in the wrong time and place? More specifically, in the wrong era? I sure do. Having just watched an old "Cold Case" episode that took place in 1943, dead center of World War II, I found myself longing for that time, ardently wishing I could have been a part of it.
There are some who believe that identifying with a specific time and place means that you lived it in another life. May be, who knows? It's not exactly deja vu, but rather a will-o'-the wisp daydream that results in one's heart pining for the simplicity and innocence of what came before you.
The fashions, the hair styles, the music, the dances...oh what a time it was! Victory Gardens, the emergence of "Rosie the Riveter" and women, most for the first time, working outside the home, our "boys" fighting the good war overseas, people pulling together for the greater good, it was a time in America's history that, sadly, will never be repeated.
Of course, it was a time of hardship, too, and of heartache for all the families who suffered the unspeakable loss of one (or more) of their own in a foreign land. And it forever changed America, robbing it of its righteousness and chastity, paving the way for the cynicism and distrust that followed the "last necessary war" as Ken Burns' documentary interpreted it many years later. Before the powers-that-be of this country realized that war = money and turned us into a nation of all war, all the time.
But I stray from the original reason for this piece. I was born one year after the official end of World War II and fully embraced my own generation's joy and angst that accompanied the sea changes following that war. I loved rock & roll, identified with disenfranchised youth (Marlon Brando, James Dean) and celebrated the Sixties' social revolution that upended every belief of the generation before mine. And now that I am older, and wiser, I have come to understand the distress and enormous loss that earlier generation must have felt as their simple and innocent world slowly disappeared. Much like the relative innocence of the Fifties faded as compared to the deeply troubled times of today.
I may continue to leap up and dance to my generation's music, but I'd much rather do the Lindy (or the Jitterbug) to the sweet sounds of the Big Band music that personified a wonderful era, now all but forgotten except by those who remember it, even if they weren't part of it...
