A Simpler Time

It’s so easy to say: A memory of a simpler time. She/he lived in a simpler time. When that happened, life was different — back then, it was a simpler time.

I say that, too — but now I ask myself: What time was that? What long-lost Golden Age? What Garden of Eden? When? Who was the lucky observer who recorded that long-ago time?

Simpler.

When my grandfather died of a quite-curable-these-days illness, was that a simpler time? Was it a simpler time when his wife took her three children with her to meetings where she, with her eighth-grade education and undying love of learning, braved her shyness to stand for election as county recorder? When her brother left for the West, and news of his death reached their father only months later, crushing his hopes, was that a simpler time?

How many mothers grew up knowing their sons were likely to be called up to fight and daughters likely to die in childbirth? Their fears and hopes wore some of them down, and yet, some thrived. But who of them escaped the complex welter of emotions that permeates every human life?

When mankind fought for land or glitter with clubs or rifles and knew only that a tourniquet and a burning knife could —sometimes— heal a wound, and when survivors scrambled away and scrabbled through layers of soil to find edible roots and plants, what kind of life was that? What kind of time? Surely not simple. Wasn’t it a time of more challenge and inventiveness than most of us will ever know?

Perhaps it’s the loss of childhood — or perhaps the fact of birth— that marks the end of our golden age(s) and leaves us longing for “a simpler time.” So profoundly do we protect that delicious and deceptive myth.

I long for it, too. How many parts of that simpler life there are! The sun’s heat on already warm skin, the joy of running, or ice-skating, or dancing. The taste of an apple right from the tree, the milky-breath smell of a calf drinking from a pail. Days spent in Moscow with the Rostovs, and in Maryland reading on a bench overlooking a new-mown lawn. Happy exhaustion from a too-long walk. Bitter loss. Joy. So much, much, more.

Yes, those were beautiful, wonder-filled, glorious moments. Were things simpler? I’m dubious. Would I want to plunge into a simpler life? Doubtful. But I know that even as I repudiate the notion, part of me is looking for the ideal. And I sense that “simpler” is somehow similar to what memory does when it strips away details and leaves behind a sort of glimmering vision of what once was. Life? Rarely simple.