A Quick Trip Down Memory Lane - Add Yours to the List

by Skip Cohen

​It's Sunday morning, and as usual, I'm jumping the track from marketing and business topics but headed right down Memory Lane. 

I've written before about a Facebook group, "If You Grew Up in Painesville, Ohio You Remember..." We all have time on our hands, and I'm not sure how I found the group, but I know in part, it was thanks to PT (pandemic time). Yesterday I posted a picture of our family doctor when I was a kid - within minutes, there were dozens of responses from other patients, and the memories just started to flow. 

Then somebody posted a picture of a snow-covered turn on one of Painesville's roads, and it took me back to my kid days. That led me right to where I am this morning. Life seems like it was so much simpler then - get ready, I'm about to sound like an old fart!

• We rarely locked our front door, and nobody had an alarm on their house, or for that matter, their car.
• The milkman delivered milk twice a week to a side chute on the garage, which opened inside as well. 
  
• We said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning at school.
• If you were truly a rotten kid and did something bad, there's a good chance you got a swat from the principle's paddle...and you knew you deserved it.
• In the wintertime, my Dad would tie a rope to the car's bumper and pull all of us on our sleds around the block. Today, he'd be arrested for child endangerment.
• We never wore bicycle helmets, but we also had just plain old bikes. I remember winning an "English Racer" in a Cleveland Plain Dealer paperboy contest. It was a three-speed!
• From age six on, we played outside with friends, rarely telling our parents where we were. The neighborhood was safe, and all the kids hung out together.
• Nobody inspected our Halloween candy - there was no need.
• My mother worked, helping my Dad in his business and often got home after dark, but always in time for dinner. The point is, kids were home alone for a short time, and CPS was NEVER called.
• Kool-aid, jello, chocolate pudding with a "skin" on it - all with sugar and all made by Mom - these were staples. LOL
• Nobody had food allergies that restricted anything we ever ate, especially peanuts.
• I had a BB-gun and never put my eye out.
• We had tents and often slept out with friends in the summertime, again, with no supervision and safe in our backyards.

Feel free to add to my list. But here's the point - Taking a walk down Memory Lane is great therapy for what we're all dealing with now. And even if you're just going back to January or February, these memories are all based on a foundation of freedom, at times when we did whatever we wanted. 

I get that the world has changed, but I also enjoy the fact that I've got great memories, and the 12,000+ members of my hometown Facebook group have helped bring so many of them back!

Wishing everybody a terrific Sunday and time with family or friends, whether it's on Skype, Zoom, the phone, or physically distant in person. I've got a favorite quote from Alfred Lord Tennyson I've used a lot over the years,

​"I am a part of all that I have met." 

Well, it's everyone you've met and everything you've done in the past that's made you, who you are today.

We'll weather the storm of Corona, just like any other crisis in our lifetime and when it's over we just might appreciate everything in our life, including our freedom, just a little more.