They no longer do it on roller skates, but they still bring the order to your car. It’s the Sonic Drive-In, of course, one of the few commercial entities from my younger adult years that made it to the 21st Century.
Before the Saturday shopping I would meet my girl friends at the local Sonic. We’d get in one car, and with the drive-in’s jukebox belting out Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Supremes, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, we would thrash through the challenges in our young lives.
We agonized over our in-laws, our husbands, our jobs, our bosses. We told each other our dreams, our hopes, our fears. All while chowing down on those fabulous onion rings and cherry limeades.
Being able to vent our frustrations and bounce off each other all our thoughts, ideas, and speculations about just what life was all about helped us through many, many, challenges, be it marital, financial, or growing up in those turbulent times.
Those years were the 60s, you see, touted as the age of youth, when 70 million children from the post-war baby boom became young adults and teenagers. The conservative fifties were behind us, and ahead were revolutionary ways of thinking and real change in the cultural fabric of our American life.
Discussions of “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson and “Valley of the Dolls” by Jacqueline Susann made us realize there was a whole other world out there.
We cried over the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, and we were afraid of what it meant.
Waving little flags, we cheered and went totally silly when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren walked on the moon.
Grief and despair about friends and family lost in the seemingly pointless Vietnam War made us question our government.
We struggled with the traditional role for women of happy homemaking wife and mother, while yearning for something more, to do, to be something more.
And so it was, through this entire exhilarating, magnificent, and dreadful decade, we young-marrieds gathered at the Sonic Drive-In to escape, to just be friends together, and survive. Our times at the Sonic helped us cope. We survived.