A time machine of sorts

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Added: Wed. Aug 25, 2010 10:10am
Posted in: Lifelong Learning

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 It was in the movie, Back to the Future, where Marty McFly drove Dr. Emmett Brown's special car back in time.  Of course there have been many movies about time travel, both into the future as well as into the past.  Most of them didn't have a car but rather some kind of complicated machine. 

Even now, reputable scientists explore the possibility of time travel.  They postulate the idea of using a worm hole or black hole though given what is known about the latter that seems doubtful to me.  I suspect if you were to take a survey, more people would rather travel into the past as opposed to the future, especially if that travel was non-reversible.  Who wants to speed up the end of their life?

But for all that, I ran into a time machine of sorts that transported me into the past.  Actually it was into the 1950s when I was in high school (I graduated in 1954.)  It didn't take a special car or a complicated machine to get there.  All it took was PBS.

I flipped on the TV and it happened to be tuned to a local PBS station.  There was a special on; it was the music of the 1950s with many of the singers from that era singing their signature songs.  Granted they are much older now but then aren't we all.  It only took one song, Old Cape Cod, by Patti Page and I was back.  The non-commercial commercials for donations for PBS aside, it was song after song that kept me there. 

I found myself singing along.  The words I didn't think I knew were flowing from my lips.  Songs I hadn't thought about in a few years filled the room and my mind.  Granted I have the CDs of those 1950s songs, but I haven't played them in quite a while.  It was hearing that music which reminded me just how great that decade was.  Great songs sung by the Four Tops, the Four Lads, the Four Freshmen, just to name a few.  Singing groups were big back then.  But then so were solo artists.

So for two hours my time machine, the music of the 1950s, transported me and I was there.  Maybe it just a phenomena of being old or maybe just me, but a tear or two of joy was shed as well.  Maybe they were just tears for what once was and never will be again.  The days of my youth and the music that went with it are gone; the train has left the station never to return again.

I keep hoping that someday in the distant future, some generation will rediscover the music of the 1950s and enjoy once again the pleasure it brought me.  Sadly though, I suspect it is slowing going the same way as the music of the 1930s and 1940s are going - away.  The golden oldies and that golden era of my youth are receding in time and someday in the not too distant future will be lost. 

When the music ended, I returned to today and reality.  But like a lingering perfume, the echoes of those songs and the memories of those times remained - and I smiled.