Kitschy Comforts

I think I may be hitting some new phase of midlife crisis. Recently, to comfort myself, I've started to look at pictures from the 70s. When I'm anxious or depressed, I'll Google images of kitschy 1970s stuff and look for things my mom or grandma owned. I'll think about it and get a little less sad.

Mind you, this doesn't mean I want that stuff in my house. I do not. I still think it's tacky and fugly. However, it does hearken back to the time of my life when I still had a measure of innocence and hope for the future. Even when things were bad, I still felt there was some security.  Because I was just a little kid, I still believed the world was far more good than it truly was. That illusion was shattered rather quickly, but for a small time, it was there.

Case in point. When I was really little, there was an item that many women carried that I saw as the mark of sophisticated womanhood. This item happened to be the cigarette cases that my mom and her friends would carry. For those of you who don't know what these are, it was somewhat like a coin purse, only big enough to hold a pack of smokes. It usually had a pocket for your lighter. Some of them were plain, but others were adorably decorated. To my little girl mind, nothing said 'well accessorized' like a cigarette case.

When I would play Grownup, I would always have a job, a couple of baby dolls who were my kids, a pretend husband (who looked like Mark from G-Force), and my various dress up items, including one of my mom's discarded cigarette cases. It was green. And see, to me, smoking wasn't an Unhealthy Thing. It was a Bad Thing because my grandmother didn't approve of it, but she didn't approve of a lot of things.

Of course, these days, you rarely see women with cigarette cases. Smoking isn't as common as it used to be, and even when people do smoke, it's less socially acceptable. People tend not to set their gear out in front of others.

This is an interesting thing though. Even though I felt that way as a kid, I didn't become a smoker as an adult. I experimented from time to time, as I've written about before, but it never became a day to day part of my life. The things of childhood may leave an impression, but often not the one we would expect. Sometimes it just gives us comfort.