Lost in the Fifties

When I was a little boy, in Royal Oak, Michigan, more than half a century ago, I remember one certain December, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you which exact year it was. I may have been seven or eight; my sister Kathy and I were home from school, maybe because it was snowing hard outside.



I'd recently learned that every snowflake has its own unique pattern -- a fact that astonished me then and continues to astonish me now. My nose was pushed up against a window as I watched these delicate crystals hit the outside pane, their beauty intact for a microsecond, then devolving to water, dripping downward, often part of the icycles that were forming below.



Our big sister, Nancy, gave us activity books courtesy of her friend Stan, who was home from Army duty overseas. I remember especially the tiddly wink game embedded within the book. Soon I was playing fantasy games between imaginary rivals, and (no doubt) keeping records of the results, all of which have long since been lost to time, space, and almost (but not quite) even to memory.

Many years later, in Mill Valley, I played in a tiddly wink "league" with my oldest son, Peter -- a competition that lasted years, and generated many more records, also no doubt lost to time and space, if not yet to memory.

This is a season for nostalgia. I always felt safe and warm inside my parents' house, never alone or scared. Putting up the annual Christmas tree was a family ritual. We played piano and sang Christmas songs. We greeted our favorite ornaments as old friends when they emerged each December from their wrappings of the year before.

Some of the bulbs had stories, and my sisters and I knew them. Others generated fantasies, with their small painted scenes of a pre-WW2 world that was already disappearing before our eyes.

When I grew older and became politically conscious, literate, and traveled, I developed a sort of worldly (if still relatively naive) "sophistication" that was unimaginable in my childhood. Probably for a while, I ignored my memories of a happy childhood, as I pursued an adult career that required qualities I didn't even know I possessed -- aggression, persistence, courage, and the ability to give speeches, raise money, and inspire listeners to action.

Much time has passed since both of those eras. There have been so many ups and downs, including recently, that the thread of my life is often hard to follow, at least for me. This Christmas, I'm choosing to remember the oldest of days, and the joy we once felt, in my family, so far away and in such a different place.

Today we hung ornaments on our Christmas tree. I have no illusions that my youngest kids experience anything like my childhood in their post-modern, post-divorce, discontinuous age. But the boys and I have recently discovered a mutual imaginary world, playing video basketball, that represents a kind of parallel to those lonely tiddly wink tournaments of so many decades ago.

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