No one seems to be talking about these days as the “good ol’ days,” but I wonder if back in the days of Carly Simon if people would’ve said the same thing about the 1970s. Or would everyone agree that whenever you’re alive on this earth, those really are the good ol’ days.

Plenty of people who around now can remember back to all the troubles over any of the decades past and find something that would make them seem less than perfect. But you can probably pick out a certain chunk of time when you were flying high. Maybe we’ll call those your glory days. They’ve written songs about those days too.

But if you’ve been around as many years as I have, you know what’s good for everybody else isn’t always the best for you. So my good ol’ days might not be yours.

I guess you never know what’s coming up next, so even though we’ve gone through some trying times recently, who knows if the next few years will all be sunny or if something even more foreboding is just around the corner. You can think of droughts, wars, diseases or any number of troubles that could surface. Then again, with the right positive attitude you could see smooth sailing ahead and a return to peace and prosperity for all. Maybe it’s that glass half full or half empty idea of how we look ahead to the future.

These are really the good ol’ days if things get worse. I’m not inclined to believe that everything is going to be bad looking ahead, so I’ll consider the good ol’ days back when I was a kid and was as carefree as I could be. Then I’ll look to my glory days as being in the last of my teenage years just before things got serious with a full-time job, full-time wife and trying to keep my head above water without full-time strife.

One other thing about looking back is we’ve had a lot of cool inventions that come along to make life so much easier than it was before. I won’t mention all of them, but you can imagine some that might rise to the top of the list, according to what they’ve done to make things go along so much smoother than before someone came up with them.

Surely somebody is tinkering away at something right now that will make everything easier in the future than we could even imagine. But there’s always that little problem of unintended consequences from new inventions, such as more pollution or people’s jobs being eliminated when some new process comes along. If we can at least get things to even out, maybe that will be the best way to carry on. And then we’ll stop talking about the good ol’ days past and call each new day the best of days.

 

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I didn’t always listen to country music back when I was thinking about the good ol’ days, but I did always seem to like David Allan Coe’s music. I went back this week and clicked on a few of his tunes and hummed along just to see if I could really remember all the words to that perfect country song that he recorded.

You couldn’t always repeat his lyrics in mixed company, but he did have a way of turning a phrase in the country music way of doing it.

Some of his songs could bring a tear to my eye as easily as “Cats in the Cradle” if I was in the right mood, or even “Delta Dawn,” for that matter.

But I always wonder what prompts such looks back in time instead of just tuning in to what’s popular these days in the music world. And then I wake up and remind myself that, oh yeah, music is youth’s passion.

Young folks don’t get to enjoy passing a 34th wedding anniversary like I just did — or wake up to some new creaks and groans to contend with.

So I’ll stick with my tunes from a few decades ago and leave the new stuff to the Spotify generation. Maybe one day we’ll catch up with Salisbury’s own Stunna 4 Vegas and he can fill me in on what I’ve been missing in the younger generations’ music.

Paris Goodnight is editor of the Salisbury Post.