Make Life Great Again? The Past Isn't What It Used to Be.

“Those were the days my friend,  we thought they'd never end, we'd sing and dance forever and a day, we’d live the life we choose, we'd fight and never lose, For we were young and sure to have our way.”   --sung by Mary Hopkin, 1968

Those were the days. Those were the good old days. Right?

From the ages of 12 to 16, I was a newspaper boy. That’s a long since mostly forgotten job for young boys and girls to make spending money before they got to have a real grown-up job.  How I remember those many mornings. I folded and then loaded upwards of 60 copies of the Springfield Morning Union into a canvas bag slung around my neck, and then I set out on my trusty bike in the hours before dawn.

I get nostalgic when I remember that first job.

Arising at 4 am before anyone else in the house and neighborhood and how I loved that feeling of independence and the quiet of the world at that hour. How I rode along the still sleepy  suburban streets, watched the sun begin to peak above the horizon, while I tossed papers up onto stoops and porches and driveways.  I remember Christmas mornings when I would be on my paper route and how I could see lit up trees and colored lights in the windows, how I imagined those families being so excited for the day to come.  I remember coming home and on warm days, sitting in the driveway, leaning against the garage door, and reading the paper, cover to cover. It was then I fell in love with journalism and newspapers.

Those were the days. Or maybe not so much.

Because I also recall many mornings when I would keep hitting the snooze control on the old clock radio and then roll over, five, ten times, willing myself to sleep just a few more minutes.  I didn’t want to get up because I knew how cold out it was on frigid February mornings, or I heard the slap of heavy raindrops against my bedroom window and who wants to deliver papers in the rain? I remember that at 7:30 am or so, the phone would start ringing and Dad would take that call from a cranky customer of mine. “Where’s my paper! It’s not here!!” And then I heard Dad’s angry footsteps echoing up the staircase. He’d swing the bedroom door open and bark at me. “Hey. HEY! Outta bed. You’re late again.  GO! I don’t want any more phone calls.” SLAM! And then I’d struggle into wrinkled clothes picked up off the floor, mope downstairs, get on my bike and do my job, for $7.50, on a good week.

Yup. Those were the days.

Sometimes good. Sometimes bad.  Most of the time somewhere in between. Yet when I fall I to the trap of getting all nostalgic and misty-eyed about the magical past, I forget one truth about days. About a life. About all human lives.  About our country and world.

The past isn’t what it used to be. The past wasn’t ever actually how we remember it.  That’s the thing about memory and nostalgia and reminiscing. How tempting it is to recall the old days as always the good days and the better days.  As I age and enter my later years that’s my sin: I often sugarcoat all things yesterday. 

For when we humans remember something, some time, some event, some feeling, some emotion, some episode that happened to us in the past, we often edit or just leave out the parts that aren’t so idyllic or happy.  That were instead messy or bumpy or difficult or sad or complicated. 

It’s a very common thing to do.  To idealize and idolize, even worship the past. 

It’s not just individuals that do this.  Leaders and politicians and houses of worship and communities can do it too.  Fall in love with the notion that only if we go back, if only we could turn back the hands of time, if only things were what they once were, well, then life would be great again. Right? America would be great again.  For so many the future lies not in tomorrow but instead, in yesterday.   

I don’t think so.

For me the truth is that the past, when viewed with clear eyes and looked at objectively: it was great, and it was awful. The past was filled with good times and great leaders and the past was filled with hard times and terrible leaders. 

I’d love to get all nostalgic and recall just how wonderful my newspaper boy childhood and budding adolescence was, but along with delivering the morning news and playing youth football and having what seemed like endless summer days to play was this. I was also bullied all through middle school.  We had to move because my father lost his job. I had no best friend until finally I went to high school church youth group and thank God, I made friends.

I look back with fondness to those years. I look back with sadness too.

This life that God gifts to us is always a mixed experience.  We don’t live in fairy tales. Only fictional characters do. In real life, children of God like you and me have days when we feel so blessed and we have days when we feel so crushed, and we have days when we feel so ho hum. 

I think Charles Dickens was right when he wrote, as the opening lines to “A Tale of Two Cities”, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” Those were the days. These are the days. Don’t forget the days to come too.

Thank you, God, for all the days. Every single one.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.