YESTERDAY WHEN I WAS YOUNG
By Veronica Breen Hogle
Yesterday, when I was young, the world was exciting. Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Kathryn Hepburn, Gregory Peck, Clarke Gable and Rock Hudson were as familiar as Sunday visitors as we watched their big love stories unfold through a curtain of cigarette smoke on the big silver screens in the dark cinemas.
Princess Margaret gave the royal family a run for its money when she ran around London at night. But photographers always found her under a headscarf, wearing dark sunglasses in a place where the sun seldom shines. She fell in love with a divorced man, but to please Mama, she married someone else and lived unhappily ever after.
Magazines were full of haute couture fashions and the art of French cuisine. Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest. Bill Haley broke the sound wave in music with “Rock Around The Clock,” Then the Beetles, Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones appeared overnight. American and British rock ‘n roll took over the world. Televisions and telephones sprouted like mushrooms in homes. It became easy to fly from one country to another. Just about every family saved all year to go “away” on vacation.
Mandy Rice Davis and Christine Keeler, two young British girls, used their sexy ways to topple the British Government. African countries became independent. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected the first American President who was not a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. He was shot in Dallas on November 22, in 1963, while I was at a dance in Dublin. Lyndon Baynes Johnson took over and initiated a war on poverty in America. I went to live in France and without planning it; I ended up in Houston, Texas. Jobs were so plentiful I got a job in just one day as a dietician’s assistance in a large hospital. Dr. Michael deBakey performed the first heart transplant. The birth control pill came on the market.
I married and moved to Buffalo, New York. My son was born the year Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were shot and killed. In spite of the birth control pill, I had three children in less than two years. I was busy being a wife and mother. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw people take to the streets to protest the Vietnam War. There were flower children, love fests, and prison riots. Men bounced around on the moon. The women’s movement started and I became involved in it. I took college courses.
I clearly remember the great stars portrayed in movies, the effects of television and phones, and major events that took place in the world. Oh, I almost forgot about the changes in relationships. Relationships were not called relationships then. Because most people got married, I never heard a woman or a man asking for a commitment in a relationship. Committed used to mean hospitalization. Over time, I became uncommitted myself. I went back to work. Children grew up. Grandchildren were born. From living in the second poorest city in America, I have watched all the manufacturing jobs leave and young people leave after them. Apart from the Internet, there has not been much excitement in the world in a long time.
So why did I find the world more exciting when I was young? I experienced changes in music, air travel, and television that connected people all over the world. I saw advancement in medicine. But for a long time now, life in these United States has been flat as a pancake.
Still, lately, I feel a new stirring growing within me. This morning, I woke up and felt more of the excitement I experienced when I was young.
That feeling comes from a man named Obama. He gives me hope that the country and people’s lives will improve. Let him bring renewed hope into the White House, spread it out to the people who choose to live in America, and give hope to needy people in poor countries all over the world.
P.S. November 4, 2008. I've just watched Barack Obama's acceptance speech to become president of the United States. Once again, I feel the energy and excitement I used to feel when I was young.
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