"It was Better Then"

I was paging through the October Smithsonian Magazine and came upon a black and white snapshot and accompanying essay, "Salad Days" by Gore Vidal. The photo was by Karl Bissinger, taken in 1949 in a Manhattan cafe garden of five up-and-coming young artists: a ballerina, two novelists, a painter and a playwright. Besides giving background on each of the five, Vidal explicates photographer Bissinger's genius at depicting America's cultural arts rise when we weren't at war for a few years after WWII. The urban literati as photographed in 1949 "perfectly evokes an optimistic time in our history that we are not apt to see again soon."

It seems as though each generation has a time of young optimism that, when they look back at that time and tell the next generation "My generation's time was golden, times will never shine quite as brightly again."

Soon after I finished college and moved to Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska to teach, I was hosting in my little rental log cabin, a crafts buyer from Anchorage. He who was in the village to purchase the handcrafted Anaktuvuk masks to take back to Anchorage to sell. The middle aged man was talking about Alaska, pre-statehood and was lamenting that those wilder frontier-like days were gone for good. As he talked on I had the thought, which I kept to myself, that he was actually grieving the loss of his youth more than the disappearance of the frontier. For me, the Great Land of Alaska was wilderness frontier. In my youth it was all new to me and I was just starting to make my way in creating a life and identity there. Though I listened to this craft buyer and learned a bit about life from a generation before me, I didn't grieve over what was lost from before.
Now, as I look at the future I see an increasingly dismal picture: a middle class that is diminished, a planet that is growing increasingly polluted and crowded, and changes that are bleak. Life looked better to me in the past. Then I look at my children and many other young people who are starting out in young adulthood, I see that spark of fire in their eye and optimistic energy that recalls that time when I was young and only looking forward to life's challenges; and not having any of an older Alaskan generation's swan-song about "the (better) good 'ol days."