Filmstrips of an Absent World - June 27 2026

 

Filmstrips of an Absent World

June 27 2026

When I recall my childhood

enough time has passed

that all the colour

has bled from it.

I’m watching filmstrips, in black and white

of an absent world

I can’t imagine I was part of.

The cars, the clothes, the houses,

the clunky technology,

and the all-white faces

of a provincial town

that was complacently insular.

It’s startling how much has changed.

But also how much hasn’t.

Because while it’s easy to patronize the past

as well as romanticize

  —  laughing at the fashion

while presuming an innocence

we could only wish we had  —

the human experience 

doesn’t change.

We have the same loves and hates

fears and desires

wants and needs

as people have through history;

even our nostalgia 

for a mythic golden age

we were sadly born too late for.

Yes, I was alive

way back then.

But don’t ask me to remember

the great events of the day,

the geopolitics

nuclear fallout

and gee-whiz technology,

the prejudice

and toxic air.

I was a child, and my world was small;

a suburban street

of single family homes

with one car in the driveway and a weedy backyard

that seemed enormous to us,

and where fun

was something we made ourselves. 

They say childhood has changed.

For the better, one would expect,

because progress

is in our DNA.

But a septuagenarian 

who remembers in black and white

has his doubts.

Because more

hasn’t made us happier.

And while we also wished to grow up fast

  —  as all kids do  —

we had to take it slow;

some of us, even slower.

Which isn’t a bad way to live;

not “go fast and break things”,

but take your time

and treasure what you have.

YouTube has short video vignettes of every era since moving pictures. When I watch mid 20th century Toronto, I can imagine young people today seeing that time the way I see the jumpy scratchy film of the early 1900s. But living in it didn’t feel as primitive as it looks; things felt normal, modern, even futuristic! The age in which we live is the water in which we swim, and like fish, it’s just how things are  . . . as well as how they’ve always been.

One effect of watching these things is that they subconsciously bleed into my memory. I actually do start to visualize in black and white; do start to feel we were deprived compared to the way we live today. The “colour bleeding out” not just a poetic device. 

Watching also makes my childhood seem even longer ago. This is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, we shake our heads at how primitive things were. And on the other, imagine it as some golden age. Not just my contemporaries because that was our youth, but today’s young people as well. Because from this distance, that seems to have been so much simpler and innocent a time. (Doesn’t it always, looking back?)

“Go fast and break things” was Mark Zuckerberg’s notorious catchphrase for Facebook (Meta, if you prefer.). I think very apt here, since the worst thing about modern childhood are social media and the smartphone. Technology has created an anxious, dependent, and socially isolated generation of young people. …Not to mention, of course, all the good reasons there are to feel anxious:  Donald Trump, climate change, bad economies, and a profusion of horrible pointless wars.