I want to go back to the fifties. I want to turn back time to when the world was a simpler place. I want to put my hair in a ponytail and roll up the legs of my jeans. I want to play music on a turntable and dance to rock and roll. I want to wear penny loafers and bobby socks and big skirts with can-can petticoats.
I want to have a slumber party and giggle with my friends. I want to cruise down Main Street and wave at the boys. I want to go to a drive-in restaurant and have a hamburger and fries without worrying about cholesterol. I want to drink root beer from a real glass mug. I want my biggest problem to be whether or not Elvis wriggles too much when he performs and whether Suzie really fell asleep at the drive-in movie.
I want to go steady. I want to wear a fellow’s class ring and put tape on the back of it to make it fit. I want to worry about homework and final exams, acne and after school activities. I want things to be simple like television in black and white.
Funny, how I thought the teachers were all too hard, that I’d never graduate and that only my parents and a high school diploma stood between me and living happily ever after. I worried about things like college scholarships and if I’d ever get married or whether I would be an “old maid.” I didn’t know about women’s rights, or civil rights, or right to life, or right to death.
Then I grew up.
There were riots, demonstrations, and rockets to outer space. There were babies and bills. There was social movement and political awareness and something called responsible citizenship. Cold wars became memories and real wars became headlines. I found out about lies, political assassination, and buying on credit.
I want to default on the problems of the world. I want to live in a time before designer drugs, credit cards, and computer viruses. I want to renege on the present and go back to way things were.
We have come so far. We have gained so little.
I want to go to a football game and cheer for the home team. I want to turn in my marriage license, my driver’s license, my voter’s registration, my social security card, and my cell phone. I want to return to the malt shop, to drive-in movies, to virginity, to an age of innocence.
I want to tease my hair and watch American Bandstand.
©2000
Humor Columnist Blog 
Sometimes I want to go back to the 50’s too. Seems life was simpler and we were happy and satisfied with so much less than what people today feel they must have to keep them stimulated and entertained. One bad memory was how we would have drills to hide under our desks and be away from windows at school in case Russia sent missiles with atomic bombs. Like hiding under a desk was going to make any difference.
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Well said. Sometimes it’s tempting. I like the medical advances we now have. And, less racial discrimination. sd
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I wasn’t around in the 1950s and barely made it into the 1960s. (I didn’t decide to show up until 1967.) The early 1970s were idyllic for me. The biggest problem in my world at that time was the plastic tail snapping off my toy horse. Luckily, my mother came to the rescue by making a new one with several bits of string tied together.
It came as a bit of a shock when I got older and began reading about the Khmer Rouge, the Oil Crisis, Watergate and the Vietnam War. Remarkably, it turned out that for a lot of people, the 1970s really wasn’t such a blissful period of peace and joy after all.
I’m not sure, but perhaps life is always like that.
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Me too!!
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This post almost made me cry. I’d love to go back to. I’d love to hug my Mom and go to a family reunion. I want to feel cool with my friend Bonnie and have nothing to do but dream. I want the innocence those days had but we can’t get that back, can we?
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Thanks for your comment. It made my day. Unfortunately, we so often fail to appreciate what we have until it is gone.
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I keep trying to focus on that now but sometimes we forget when we are “in the moment.”
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