It was one of those nights. I must have gone to bed way too early. It was 1:49 AM and I was wide awake. I cuddled my wife with on one side and petted my cats with the other. I couldn’t go back to sleep. While I wanted to go back to sleep, there was also some good. I had no worries and I was comfortable. Life was basically good. So, my thoughts wandered and I dreamed even though I wasn’t asleep.

I wished I could waste a day in Margaritaville, listening to the Piano Man, as he sang and played about his love, the Uptown Girl. While it might have been a Rainy Night in Georgia, things were good in Missouri. Maybe I could get the Ole Hound Dog and hop aboard the Continental Trailways bus to Winslow, Arizona. Once there I could stand on the corner and hope the girl in the flatbed Ford would stop and give me a ride to the Hotel California. The next day I could sit on the Dock of the Bay with Otis and hope The Little Old Lady From Pasadena could take me to Surf City where we could have fun, fun, fun ’til her daddy took the T-Bird away. And after the fun ended, I caught the Midnight Train to Georgia where I spent many days with Memories of the trip.

This was probably just a waste of time but it did allow me to go back to sleep and when I awoke I thought more about my childhood where things were so much better, or were they really. If my parents were still with us, their views might be different but as a child the memories that linger are mostly good. My big worries seemed to be whether there was air in my bicycle tires and if it was going to rain. I was too young to know anything about the war in Korea and Viet Nam was far in the future. Important things were which friends would be able to play, and with what, later that day or early evening. Before bed time we usually sat on the front porch of my grandparent’s home and listened to baseball on the radio – spring, summer, and fall – or sat near the wood heater and talked about when the weather would be warm again if it was winter.

My family was by no means rich but we also never went hungry. When I was about three or four, my father built a house next door to my grandparents where we lived until I was out of college and they continued to live until their health made it impossible. Not a large house but one that met our needs. Costs were low but so were wages. There were no gangs, at least outside large cities like New York or Los Angeles, no drive by shootings, and minimal crimes. As children, we learned respect, courtesy, sharing, and cooperation. We learned that not everyone was a winner and for each winner there was a loser. But the loser could come back and might be the next day’s winner. Memories of that time are good.

I wish our children could have experienced the same but somewhere along the way we failed them. Perhaps it was when entitlement became the important thing. Maybe it was when toys took the place of reality. Maybe it was something else. One can hope that one day we return to the past but somehow I think that moving back to that world is no longer possible. It is a shame.