A LOOK BACK AT WHAT WE WILL MISS FROM THE PAST AND WHAT WE WILL BRING WITH US TO THE NEW YEAR

Like most of us, I've had plenty of time to say goodbye to the previous year--to decide what I'll miss most about it and what I won't and to brace myself for the coming new year.
Some of my old and treasured ways will make the journey with me; others are destined to be left behind. I can't stop change, I tell myself again and again, as if repetition will somehow lessen the shock.

I suppose I feel this way because I was born into a generation keenly connected to the past. My grandparents, like many of America's ancestors, came to this country during the great immigration. Like millions of immigrants, they came in search of freedom and a new way of life for their families.

My grandparents spared no adjectives when they described the crowded ships that brought them to America, their stay at Ellis Island with ailing parents and the long train ride across the country to San Jose.

I've learned that each passing generation, despite its quickening pace, has a role to play in the great scheme of things, a part in an ongoing history.

Like most of my generation, I've always felt a connection to our immigrant ancestors and their profound story. A lot has been written of it before my time, and I hope to pass some of that on to the next generation for it to complete.
Such are the workings of time and history. Moments come and go, and memories fade and reappear, some shining brighter and clearer than others.

As a kid who grew up in the 1940s, I sometimes wonder whether I'm getting too old and set in my ways to embrace the oncoming changes that await me. I wonder if I shouldn't just collect my memories and relish them, instead of forging ahead to the coming millennium in search of new ones. But, inevitably, I remember my grandparents' courage and how they made that brave voyage from Italy to America. I recall how we walked together among their prolific backyard vegetable gardens, observing the young bean sprouts bursting through the crusty earth, the way they pointed out the young seedlings that were destined to grow and the ones that would die.

In Italian, they would say to me: "That which does not grow, dies." They applied that philosophy to their daily lives as well. Change and growth uplifts us and generates life. Like Grandma's garden, the essentials for living are nourishment, growth and love. It is my hope that we will find all three in the new millennium.

However, there is a part of me that approaches the coming of a modern mechanized world with mixed feelings. My instinct tells me to be cautious in the face of change, especially when it threatens my established traditions, such as old-fashioned communications. Judging by the many answering machines, email addresses and cell phones now in service, I fear that we are becoming recorded message centers and that eye-to-eye contact during communication is slowly becoming a thing of the past.

As an irrepressible traditionalist, I worry that we will become a nation less verbal and more visual. I hope I'm wrong, because I value the oral tradition.
Technology is great, but it's no substitute for the ingredients of human gestures, the sound of laughter, the feeling of a hug, and that quality of love poured into a generational story.

I've already said goodbye to some of my favorite sights and sounds from the passing century: the sight of our Santa Clara Valley shrouded in a spring halo of white prune blossoms; the gentle sound of icy milk bottles clinking together in the early morning hours, as the milkman made his rounds; the familiar aroma of prunes wafting in from the Valley View Packing Plant during drying season; the mysterious mechanics of a colorful Wurlitzer jukebox as it played my selected records (remember those shiny, black vinyl discs with the holes in the center?); the smell of coffee percolating in an aluminum coffee pot on a gas stove; the noisy clicking of a TV channel tuner in the 1960s, before remote control came along and we viewers had to get off our big fat sofas to change the channel; the actual "brrring" of telephone bells before the touch-tone phone was invented; and the aroma of yard leaves burning in gathered bunches, before we became concerned with the ozone layer and ecology.

I worry, as Grandma did, that we may be losing too much of our past too soon. With the advent of microwave cookery, we've already lost the enticing kitchen aromas associated with the dinner ritual. Food is prepared silently and devoid of odor inside a microwave oven, so there are no mouthwatering aromas simmering on the stove to whet our appetites, and few kitchens are still warmed by the whistle of an old-fashioned teakettle.

But, as I've learned from generations past, there's no holding on to things or to people, and sometimes we have to let go in order to go on. Each moment replaces the one before it, and so on. There will be voids and spaces left behind, but they're meant to be filled with new people, new experiences and new beginnings. Perhaps, the closer I come to understanding all of this, the more easily I'll be able to accept the changing world of the 21st century.

Every age and generation has its goals and its dreams. My wish, as I enter the new year, is to change the things I want to do into the things that I have done.

 

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