Hop On Board for a Blast Into the Past

  Sub-head: Reflections on Childhood Through My Grandparents' Eyes

  Time goes by so quickly. It doesn’t seem to at first, but you find yourself looking back every few months wonder where the days went. My childhood seems so far away, and I know that what I liked back then, most kids these days wouldn’t know those shows or who those bands were, but if I’m lucky, they’ll know what a novel is. Technology has advanced so much, I doubt many kids sit down and read from ink-and-paper books anymore, instead of on a computer or cell phone screen. It’s distressing, though I know I don’t have much to complain about. I can’t imagine how an older generation feels – nearly frozen in time, I might guess. Like the youth of today were an entirely different species, seems a bit closer to the mark.

  My grandparents, Mary and Burt Gordon, allowed me to pick their 70-year-old brains – just to see what they thought about this crazy, ever-changing world of ours—on a drive from Peterborough to Cobourg, one winter evening earlier this year as they took me to the train station.

 The road to Cobourg’s VIA Rail train station unfolded in the growing twilight, timeless; seeming to materialize out of the darkness wherever the headlights touched. There was something nostalgic about this – waiting to take one of the oldest modes of transportation back to school. Having been on and off trains since the start of the year, I must admit I still half-expected there to be a wooden platform and windows you could push down for tear-filled, hanky-waving goodbyes, like in some old black-and-white film. So it was not entirely surprising when the conversation turned to things long since dubbed The Good Old Days. It seemed like I wasn’t the only one with the past on my mind.

 My grandmother, Mary Gordon (nee Simpson), born in 1938, reminisced on the changing times, starting with the trains (and no, this isn’t leading into a “When I was your age…” joke). “There used to be a passenger train that ran from Campbellford all the way down into Hoard’s Station and Belleville,” she said, her eyes squinted at the road.  “You could get on at any point from there all the way in and only pay a dollar or so.” It seems unreal; especially when comparing it to the money you would have to spend on a ticket these days – sometimes it can cost over 100 dollars! 

 When I asked what else had changed since she was growing up, Mary was quick to say, “Plenty.” She laughed, “So many things have changed; there are big things, like the leaps in technology – which is unbelievable, by the way-- and there are small things- like the fact that there used to be no school buses going out to Buckhorn, so the high-school students would have to board in Peterborough if they wanted to go and get their education. And that’s another thing – if you didn’t finish high-school back when I was growing up, there wasn’t such a stigma involved – jobs were still there for you, is what I’m saying. You could still find work without a diploma, and a lot of people did.”

 I realized that hearing about the world from her point of view made everything seem smaller somehow. There were the neighbourhood kids you hung out with when you had time. You went to school when you could, and you worked on the farm –my grandfather was raised on a farm, and my grandmother had her fair share of chores, too—and from what I gather, for fun you played a lot of baseball. Or any sport, really.

 

 “We worked hard, and we played hard,” said Burt, grinning a little. It seemed that for every season, there was a sport, or some sort of outdoor activity to be doing. With no computer, no television or PlayStation to suck kids in, they had to entertain themselves somehow. Winter was for skating and sledding all day as well as the always popular Canadian pastime, hockey. The summer brought swimming in the pond, cutting hay and riding horses, while in the spring time, my grandmother would pick flowers in the fields near her home. “Work and play overlapped a lot,” my grandfather told me. “We were always busy, and we didn’t begrudge any of the work – it was just something we did. We kids would weed the garden, cut corn with sickles, chop and stack wood in the springtime; we’d drive cattle from field to field, then back to the barn – and then, when the chores were done, we’d gather up the neighbourhood kids and play a couple of games or baseball, or hockey, or whatever game we could.”

 But it wasn’t like that all over; my grandmother grew up in Sterling, a town near Campbellford, and things were a bit different there. That could be because of the gender differences. Mary spent time dressing up, listening to the radio, and playing cards. She’d still have her chores and the swimming hole, the sled and skating, but things were more hands-off. She recalled fondly the school dances and country fairs, but remembered church socials and neighbourhood parties as wonderful occasions.

 “I remember back when I was a child, my parents set up a bandstand in our front yard, running boards from tree to tree in the pine grove out front to make a little stage. We’d get the Salvation Army band to come and play, and there’d be ice cream off to one side, and we’d keep it cold with dry ice. It was always a huge celebration, and everyone – the whole neighbourhood – came.  And of course there was always the gathering of church ladies. I used to go when I was old enough, just for the social aspect – and the lemonade, of course. But I don’t think those things happen much anymore, for whatever reason. A lot of churches in the area closed eventually, maybe that’s it.”

 I remember thinking how strange that scene sounded, how out of place as I checked my phone for new texts. Summer concerts in the front yard. It was like something out of a film. The wheels of time just kept turning, clacking down the track towards ever-elusive progress. What else would be thrown to the wayside in the name of the future, I wondered.

 The sentiment both my grandparents seemed to share was simple: “It used to be safer.” Mary and Burt meant that people used to be more trustworthy. For example, hitchhiking wasn’t a big deal in their time. There was a sense of trust between hiker and driver. It was understood that when kids stuck out their thumbs on the side of the road, they were putting their safety into a stranger’s hands. And the stranger – the wild card and unknown -- would respect that trust, and take the kid wherever they needed to go, so long as it was on the way. Today, you wouldn’t dream of sticking out your thumb on the highway to get a lift. But if you do, there is always the fear you’ll end up rolled in a carpet and dumped in a ditch somewhere, miles from where you want to go. Back then, there was none of the paranoia, none of the constant fear. “Today, things are more dangerous, and people are more isolated,” Burt concluded.

 When I asked about what he meant by “isolated”, it was Mary who continued, “The technology you grew up with is phenomenal, absolutely unbelievable – you can talk to some lady on the other side of the world, if you want to, or look up the 13th President of the United States, and the fourth King of England in about three seconds. But the drawback is that it shut down communication in neighbourhoods and communities like that,” she snapped her fingers for emphasis. “Everyone’s isolated, and speaking through screens; kids and adults alike draw in on themselves, hiding behind the iPods and the laptops and the Blackberries. There aren’t neighbourhood get-togethers much anymore, since everyone seems so busy and caught up in themselves."

  The train station’s glowing sign looms up on the right, and the car slows. The interview, as brief as it was, has given me plenty to think about on the ride back to school, from the flux of technology in recent years to the simple, connected nature of the world 40, 50 years ago.  Hearing those stories about places that don’t exist anymore and churches that have closed, almost makes me wish I could have tasted that era. Things were simpler and though any history text could tell you that period of time had its problems, it seems glossed over by the tales I’ve heard. And it’s hard to be anything but nostalgic for that sort of idyllic wholesomeness.

  To our left, a train bullets past, sleek and gleaming in the rain-wet dark. It is progress at its finest, made in the past and streaking into the future.