The Way We Never Were

Last week I found a short poem in a collection from 1937. It fits with today's post on the way we never were:

AS TO THE WEATHER
Anonymous

I remember, I remember,
Ere my childhood flitted by,
It was cold then in December,
And was warmer in July,
In the winter there were freezing--
In the summer there were thaws;
But the weather isn't now at all
Like what it used to was!

We sometimes get so hung up on our imagined recollections of the past, that we ignore the truth about the situations we lived through--like the weather, or Aunt Gert, who, if you thought about the way she tickled kids until they were in tears, you would have had to admit, she wasn't a nice old lady afterall!

We have a book in our collection called The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz [306.85 COO]. In the Introduction the author states:

My hope was that by exposing many "memories" of traditional family life as myths, I could help point the discussion of family change and family policy in a more constructive direction. I wanted to show that families have always been in flux, and often in crisis. Knowing that there was no golden age of family life, I believed, would enable people to deal more effectively with the problems facing today's families than if they continued to romanticize the "good old days."

Television, since the 1950s (think Leave It to Beaver), has had a great influence on the way we look at reality. For a fun look back, pick up As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s by Karal Ann Marling [973.92 MAR].

Today, even so-called "reality" shows are actually far from real, but that's a subject for another time.