Make Them Reminisce

So earlier I mentioned that my mother had a subscription to Reminisce magazine. It's the perfect fit for her, as pretty much all she enjoys talking about is the past. The magazine deals with memories and events from the 1920s - 1950s and has many sections almost solely devoted to people writing in and talking about the past. I'm sure this is actually a beneficial service to humanity, since that generation is talking amongst itself about how they all walked uphill in the snow both ways to the one room school house rather than barraging their children and grandchildren with those stories.

Not that the magazine isn't interesting -- it really is. There are sections about how people dealt with and experienced World War 2 or the Great Depression. The photos are incredible -- there was one that sticks out in my mind of a teenage girl in a pink dress made from flour sacks; you wouldn't know by looking. There are recipes for the food of that era. The advertisements and propaganda are fascinating. There is an upcoming section on remedies of the past that people are glad stayed in the past (like having to drink cod liver oil, for example).

It's also a reminder to us younger folks (like me, thank you very much) that there were a great deal of skills that used to exist in the past that are no longer with us, for good or for bad. My generation usually has to search online for ways of making ice cream by hand, for example. I can't sew for shit (except for buttons, I can put those back on) -- I considered it a useless skill given the changes in manufacturing. I can't can tomatoes or pickle cucumbers. I could figure out how -- but ...

... it's also a reminder that the lives we've evolved into don't really allow us to practice those sorts of skills anymore, again, for good or for bad. We have to carve out space and time to devote to canning, which is a long and involved process. And hot. At least what I remember of my mother doing it. And based on what I know now, I'm not sure I want to be responsible for poisoning other people with my canned goods that might really be canned "bads." I don't have time to make clothes for Dante from scratch. I like gardening, but I grew up on a farm in the mountains, and I know just how much work goes into raising a big garden, one that does more than provide the occasional salad. It's neat that milkmen used to put the bottled milk at your door in the morning like newspaper delivery -- but I'm glad I can run to the store and get milk whenever I need it. The original "ice box" is a beautiful and effective cabinet (basically). But I would hate to have to plan on meeting the ice man to get it restocked so the food didn't spoil.

The magazine seems to dwell almost exclusively on a certain way of remembering. Its tag line is "The magazine that brings back the good times." So that should tell you right there it's about glossing the past and remembering what you liked while conveniently overlooking the bad parts about the past. There aren't any stories about mothers who had to be given their "pin money" for the week as an allowance; no stories about how difficult it was for Mom to go into business by herself in the first place. No comments about how the lack of technology and the cultural mindset actually necessitated having someone at home to make sure the mending and cooking and cleaning happened. All mothers in this magazine happily baked pies and cookies and whatevers for their little darlings who wore clothes made from cloth from the general store that Mom also had made from scratch. A nice idea. But certainly a very purposefully exclusive way of remembering the past.

I also made an interesting observation in the five issues I thumbed through over Thanksgiving break, which covered around a year's worth of contributions. There are very few black people in Reminisce magazine. Much less Asians or Hispanics. I think it probably ought to be renamed White People Remember Life Without Minorities. The current issue has an article called "Neighborly Fun: The Jewish family next door kept things interesting." So clearly, the magazine is not for reminiscing about being Jewish in the 1920s - 1950s, but rather having experienced being around Jews during that time.

Those histories would likely look quite different. Black readers would likely tell stories of mom going away to do the cooking and baking and washing and sewing at white folks' homes, then coming back to their own kids and having to do it all over again. They would tell stories of fathers who got paid less for the same work, if they could find work at all. They would talk about Jim Crow laws. Most immigrants and non "white" residents (as it was defined at the time) in urban areas would tell stories of overcrowding in poor housing, being charged exorbitant rent for a dirty space, being pushed into meat packing or sewing industries where labor standards were nonexistent, or being pushed into certain neighborhoods and ghettoes -- that would apply to Jewish families and Irish families and Polish families and black families and people other than "WASPs", depending on the year; war remembrances would include the German-American rallies in the US hailing (heiling?) support for Hitler. And so on.

And so I always come away with mixed feelings when I look at those magazines or people's representations of their own history. El Hijo's father was on a tear this Thanksgiving about his grandmother's bread & butter pickles and the way life was back then. He was going on about how the (black) woman who came and cleaned for his mother was from a family of fantastic cooks. He went on and on about what great cooks they were, and how that's what they did around town and how famous they were for it. While that's true, neither El Hijo nor I had the heart to raise the issue of whether they had any choice in the matter. Was there any other kind of work available to them in Harlan County, Kentucky? Would the court house have hired them on in the late 1930s? Could they have gone and worked for the lawyers in the area? Could they have gone to school and gotten a degree and opened up a practice in town as a black doctor? Did he know any black woman who did work around town other than clean or cook -- for white people? It's hard sometimes to hear someone go on about what a "great" time that was without thinking, "Yeah -- for you!"

As a nation, we have "white bias" constantly in our remembering of things. I'm all for remembering bottled milk and looking at photos and hearing stories. Sometimes it just seems that the stories we want to hear and print are those that conveniently overlook the nasty parts of the past that we'd rather just as soon forget. It certainly is worth remembering, though, that one of the reasons we moved past those activities is because life got a lot more expensive. A college student used to be able to work summers and weekends and completely pay for school. Now that same student would have to work 50 hours a week all year long to pay for school. The cost of everything from milk and eggs to cars and homes has outpaced wages consistently since the early 1970s. It is very difficult for the average family to live on one person's salary, even for the cost conscious. It's difficult to fund retirement and pay for college (which more people have to have now in order to get jobs that used to be considered educated enough at the high school level) on one salary that also has to care for a mortgage, food, utilities, etc. And as our lives changed, so did our advertising, so that now we think some things are necessary that really aren't or that we did just fine without earlier.

It's worth stopping and thinking from time to time about the lifestyles we've decided to embrace. Do we need new technological gadgets every year? Why don't we have machines that last ten to fifteen years instead of ones that seem to break down every one to three years? Do we really need that much house? That much car? How many cars? Should we really be buying that prepacked prepared frozen dinner crap? When was the last time we all had dinner together? When was the last time we read the paper and just listened to the radio? How often and for how long is the TV on? How many more of our friends are IRL or simply on AOL?

Flashbacks are worth the modern day reality check -- even if sometimes our memories are selective.

-- DV