My daughter bought me a Christmas ornament for my birthday. A tiny CorningWare casserole dish, complete with its unmistakable Cornflower Blue decoration.
I don’t believe there has ever been a more iconic piece of cookware.
If you grew up in the seventies, you know it. It was in your mother’s kitchen, your grandmother’s kitchen, your neighbours’ kitchens. It went into the oven, came out onto the table, and went into the refrigerator with the leftovers. There was nothing particularly remarkable about it, which is precisely what made it remarkable. It was everywhere.
I was delighted with the ornament. And it got me thinking about the world I grew up in.
A world in which I was apparently the only child in North America whose parents never bought Dixie cups. I remain traumatized by this deprivation.
A world where every bottle of Coca-Cola offered the possibility of winning another Coca-Cola. You peeled the liner from beneath the cap to see if you were a winner. And you won surprisingly often. I remember something like one in four.
Our candy was something else.
We had candy cigarettes, which taught us to smoke. Big League Chew, which encouraged us to imitate tobacco-chewing baseball players. Pop Rocks, which exploded in our mouths. Gobstoppers and jawbreakers, whose names were less descriptions than challenges.
An entire industry was apparently devoted to finding out what children would put in their mouths if nobody stopped them.
Our playgrounds were magnificent constructions of steel, asphalt, height and momentum. The slides could burn you in summer. The merry-go-rounds could throw you into the next postal code. Seesaws were an early introduction to the treachery of your fellow man. Fun always had some chance of lethality or it wasn’t fun.
I attended several bicycle rodeos before anyone, including Elmer the Safety Elephant, suggested I might want to wear a helmet.
I was thirty-five before I remember seeing someone wearing a helmet on a ski hill.
I took family vacations in the back of a Capri, a vehicle with more in common with a lawn mower than a modern automobile. I remember travelling on top of three layers of suitcases, a good seven feet from the nearest seatbelt.
I came home when the streetlights came on. I talked to strangers. I brought home stray dogs. More than one.
Dogs had houses. Outside. That was where dogs lived.
At eleven o’clock, television stations would ask parents if they knew where their children were. This was considered a public service, and apparently a necessary one.
I grew up knowing with absolute certainty that my next haircut would provide an opportunity to look at pornography. The barbershop was a peculiar institution where the open display of Playboy and Penthouse was just the way things were.
I smoked cigarettes on airplanes, in hospitals, and in grocery stores. I have absolutely no recollection of what we did with the butts.
I said goodbye to people at the gate as they boarded airplanes.
There were two kinds of gasoline, and choosing the wrong one could do terrible things to your car.
We had no airbags, no EpiPens, and considerably less enthusiasm for excuses or makeup tests.
And shops were closed on Sundays.
I sometimes suspect that if I’m not a Christian, at least twenty percent of the credit belongs to Ontario’s Sunday shopping laws.
Santa, the CNE, the Royal Winter Fair, Beavers and Harvey’s french fries all occupy the same little corner of my heart.
I served in the Roots versus Beaver Canoe wars. I knew Ocean Pacific and Vuarnet were aspirational.
It was a wonderful time to be a child.
Or was it?
I have become increasingly suspicious of nostalgia.
Not of memory. I love my memories. I wouldn’t surrender Cornflower Blue or the extraordinary pleasure of discovering a free Coke beneath a bottle cap.
But I am beginning to question what we do with those memories, and particularly what happens when we allow them to become arguments about the present.
I’ve been spending a great deal of time working with artificial intelligence, and it has taught me something unexpected about context.
Context is useful. Context is also expensive. And the troubling thing about its cost is that you often don’t appreciate it until you’ve accumulated far too much.
In AI, you can keep carrying everything forward. Every conversation, every instruction, every piece of information that might conceivably be useful again. Eventually the system slows down, becomes less effective, bleeds you financially, or all three.
The trick is learning what to keep.
The question I increasingly find myself asking is not how much context I can preserve, but how little I actually need to answer the next question.
I wonder whether we should think about our own memories in much the same way.
When you’re twenty, looking back on your teenage years makes perfect sense. There isn’t much history to carry, and you’re still making sense of it. The lessons haven’t settled yet. You’re still discovering what those experiences meant.
But the years accumulate. At some point, you have to start compressing the context. Preserve what you’ve learned. Clear the cache. Make room for what comes next.
When you ask me what I think about something, I can generally tell you. My answer is the product of a lifetime of experience. If you ask me why, I can retrieve representative examples that help explain my judgment.
But I don’t need to replay my entire childhood to arrive at that judgment.
The experiences have already done their work. Their lessons are part of me now.
And yet we keep returning to them.
We return to the familiar because it is comfortable. We mistake that comfort for insight. We convince ourselves that revisiting the past is somehow making us wiser, when whatever wisdom it had to offer should already be part of who we are.
Worse, we begin using those memories to judge a world that no longer resembles the one that produced them.
And this is where nostalgia becomes dangerous. And expensive.
That world was smaller. Much smaller.
Before the internet, before information became almost universally accessible, we lived inside the limits of our geography, our libraries, our families and our communities.
There was something comforting about that. There was also something terribly confining.
And I’ve come to suspect that many of the things I loved about that world were not easily separated from the things I wanted changed.
The freedom, the intimacy, the innocence, the danger, the ignorance. They lived together.
The picturesque little town could be a wonderful place to grow up. It could also be a hellscape if you happened to be the wrong person.
Consider “Smalltown Boy”, the Bronski Beat song from 1984.
It told the story of a young gay man leaving home because the world he had been born into had no place for him.
That wasn’t some obscure tragedy. It was a recognizable enough experience to become a popular song.
Today that same boy might become a cabinet minister, a corporate executive, or the leader of his country. Being gay got easier. The gains are bigger than the song and I sometimes have trouble remembering that.
That’s an extraordinary change.
U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” slays. As a song. But it was about The Troubles in Northern Ireland. I’m from an era when Catholics and Protestants couldn’t share a common street, and that was happening in a Western democracy, in a place not so different from our own. Bombings, soldiers, sectarian violence. A world in which the unthinkable was commonplace.
We remember the songs. We forget how much we wanted the worlds that inspired them to disappear.
And disappear they largely have, at least from the ordinary lives of people fortunate enough to live where I do.
We did that.
Not perfectly. Not everywhere. Not without setbacks. But the world I inhabit today is, in so many important ways, better than the one I grew up in.
And I have to accept that I cannot simply ask for the wonderful parts of yesterday back while expecting everything else to stay buried.
Some of the things I miss cannot exist in quite the same way today. And perhaps that’s the price of getting rid of the things I don’t miss at all.
I have what that world had to give me.
I don’t need the world itself anymore.
And here’s the uncomfortable part.
We old people are forever telling younger generations how much tougher we were.
We didn’t have helmets. We didn’t have accommodations. We didn’t have mental health days. We didn’t have anyone particularly interested in whether we were coping.
We had fear of failure riding beside us, and we learned to live with it.
I sometimes watch a young athlete take a mental health break during a Grand Slam tennis tournament and find myself shaking my head.
Really?
But then I have to ask myself what it is I’m actually objecting to.
My generation spent much of its adult life trying to dismantle the very things that made our childhoods so difficult.
We challenged prejudice, cruelty and arbitrary authority. We made workplaces safer. We made schools more accommodating. We made it possible for people to acknowledge their limitations without automatically surrendering their ambitions.
We spent our lives trying to take off the armour.
And now we criticize the next generation for walking around bare-skinned.
There’s something profoundly unfair about that.
Brecht gave us a wonderful exchange:
“Unhappy the land that has no heroes.”
“No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes.”
Perhaps we should stop mourning the disappearance of the toughness that our old world demanded and spend a little more time celebrating the fact that we made so much of it unnecessary.
We didn’t defeat those monsters so our children could learn to fight them too.
And yet.
There is something that continues to trouble me.
I wonder whether, in our understandable desire to protect children from suffering, we have become a little too enthusiastic about protecting them from the knowledge of suffering.
Could we show children Watership Down today? Of course we could. But would we? Would we be comfortable with its cruelty, its terror, its indifference to the comforting notion that everything must turn out well?
I suspect a film like that wouldn’t get made today. Those stories frightened us, and they made us deeper for it. They told us the truth about the world: that it is not always kind, and that things do not always turn out well. A generation raised on softer stories may be safer. But when we soften childhood, we risk forgetting what life is actually like, and we forget it at our peril.
Expecting everyone to show up with strength is out of fashion. We used to do the opposite. Is there a middle?
I learned something from failing. From losing. From discovering that the world could be indifferent to what I wanted, and that I would have to find some way to continue anyway.
I owe my bullies a lot.
There is something noble in endurance.
There is something valuable in discovering the limits of your own courage, and occasionally finding that those limits were farther away than you imagined.
Sometimes we need others to push us out the door. And we frown on that today.
I don’t believe suffering is a prerequisite for wisdom. I’ve seen too much suffering that produced nothing worthwhile to believe that.
But I keep coming back to what I’ve learned about context.
I have spent a lifetime compressing experience into judgment. I can discard much of the original experience because I’ve already extracted what I could from it.
My children cannot inherit that compression.
I can tell them what I’ve learned. I can explain my reasoning. I can offer them the benefit of my mistakes. But I cannot simply transfer the judgment those mistakes produced.
They have to build their own.
And this is where I find myself genuinely uncertain. An induction stove doesn’t have the teaching power of concentric circles of red heat.
If we remove the cruelty, the fear, the failure and the danger, what experiences will take their place? How much difficulty can we remove before we begin removing something necessary to the development of judgment itself?
I don’t want my children to have my bullies. I don’t want them to experience the prejudices or the arbitrary cruelties that were once accepted as part of growing up.
But I do want them to know what they’re capable of enduring. I want them to experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. I want them to discover that the world will not always accommodate them, and that they can still find a way forward.
Knowing you got through something hard is what makes you ready for whatever comes next. That’s what I’d want them to have. And I’d want them to know: you will be enough to meet it.
I don’t know how much of that requires adversity, or what kinds of adversity might be enough.
Nor am I convinced that young people today are less capable of courage than we were. They face challenges I never had to contemplate, and I have no particular authority to judge how well they’re meeting them.
Perhaps they’ll find their own way to acquire what we acquired. Perhaps they’ll acquire something better.
But I wonder whether the effort to make life safer can sometimes make it smaller in ways we haven’t fully appreciated.
And I don’t think we should be afraid to ask.
I have no desire to return to the seventies. I don’t want my children to live in the world I grew up in. I am grateful for the changes we made, and rather proud that we made them.
I have what that world had to give me. The lessons are mine now, and I don’t need to keep carrying the whole world around to preserve them.
So this is my farewell to that world. To the candy cigarettes, the bicycle rodeos, the Sunday afternoons when absolutely nothing was open.
All except the CorningWare. A two-inch version of it will hang on my tree every December, still Cornflower Blue, chosen by my daughter. It turns out an entire kitchen compresses rather well.
Thank you for the memories. I’ll keep what I need.