Real Limits As To How Sweet It Was

I have no fond memories of the Volkswagen Beetle.

I’ve ridden in one only once. Back in school, Linda Hayes had an orange one and she drove us to Burbank to see a TV taping. My overriding memory is of being the least significant thing on the road, legs scrunched up beneath me, cringing in fear that some semi would crush us like, well … a Bug, and never even know we were there.

So you’ll forgive me if I stand aside from the wave of hoopla that attends the reintroduction of Vee-Dub’s signature vehicle. No confetti or champagne for me, thanks. And no common ground with misty-eyed boomers who are lining up to buy this new version of their fondly remembered first car.

Indeed, I don’t mind telling you that I feel a little out of step with this whole nostalgia craze. You’ve got Business Week magazine touting the return of Charlie Tuna, Burma Shave and other ghosts of consumerism past. You’ve got The Washington Post reporting that sizable numbers of Americans are pining for a return to the sex roles of the 1950s: dad at work, mom in the kitchen getting dinner. As Gladys Knight once put it in a song, “Everybody’s talking about the good ol’ days, the good ol’ days.”

Now, I’m the last guy in the world to scratch someone else’s rose-colored lenses. As regular visitors to this space can attest, your humble correspondent has major rose-colored lenses of his own; I believe in the ability of the past to inform the present.

But isn’t it weird that at a time of economic prosperity, a falling crime rate and peace, we are experiencing such a deep longing for vanished yesterdays?

We always imagine the past to have been better, somehow. And it ain’t necessarily so.

My first car wasn’t a Beetle, but a 1967 Pontiac LeMans, 10 years old when I bought it. It was dirty blue, rattled like a box of dominoes, belched brown smoke. It was the space station Mir with bald tires.

I can never forget - and believe me, I’ve tried - the time I drove it to cover some big ceremony out in L.A.’s tonier-than-thou Century City. Afterward, I’m standing among the glittering people watching the valets retrieve their cars. Up roll shining, soundless Cadillacs, Mercedeses and Lincolns, bright lights reflecting off acres of gleaming metal beauty.

Then up chugs my blue bomb. The valet stands there, holding the key. And I don’t move. It’s as if I’m seeing the car for the first time. I’m wishing someone else had to claim it. Wishing the valet at least had the decency to take it to a dark corner where I might crawl in unseen. Suddenly, it hits me: I’m driving a piece of … Well, let’s just say “candy” wasn’t the word.

I sprinted out to take the keys like a man trying to get out of the rain. Took off fast, leaving a cloud of brown smoke to cover my escape.

I have no ‘stalgia for that car.

Similarly, I doubt that Beetle-buying boomers are really ready to fold aging limbs under a Bug’s dashboard again. Nor, I suspect, is anyone that eager to see women return to the Formica gulag.

What we miss, I think, is less the past than what the past represents: comfort. A known entity. It’s the reason children watch the same Disney tape ad infinitum. They know how it’s going to come out. There’s a reassurance in that. A sense of order.

And let’s face it: Ours is an exceedingly disorderly world filled with jagged edges, harsh challenges, dizzying change. In memory, the past had none of that.

Of course, memory’s tricky. It changes the past so that it shimmers on the far horizon like a slab of asphalt on summer’s hottest day. Shimmers till you can’t make out details anymore, just a vague and pleasing outline. And you forget that those times had disorder, too.

I love the past, man. Love Motown songs, Cracker Jack and “Speed Racer”. But I also love the fact that I no longer drive a landfill on wheels.

All past is prologue. These are the good old days.

xxxx