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Were the Good Old Days Ever Good?

 My family and I were watching The Twilight Zone the other day—a Season Two episode called “Static.” It featured an old grouch named Ed who can’t understand why all his housemates schedule their lives around the television—and indeed, they appear to mindlessly watch whatever might be on.

He winds up hauling his old, huge radio up to his room, and while twisting the dials he finds a station that airs programming that he first heard 25 years ago: Tommy Dorsey’s Big Band, an old game show, one of FDR’s fireside chats. But is Ed listening to a real broadcast? Or is his old radio catching transmissions from … The Twilight Zone? (Cue theme music.)

“Static” deals with the concepts of love and lost time—a man trying to reclaim the promise of youth though his “best” days are behind him. The premise hinges on viewers’ shared sense of nostalgia—that things, back in the day, were better than they are now.

The theme recurs frequently in The Twilight Zone, oddly enough. Just a couple of weeks ago, my daughter and I watched another episode, “A Stop at Willoughby.” There an ad executive, frazzled by the pressures of modern-day (circa 1960) life, begins seeing an idyllic turn-of-the-century town called Willoughby through his train window. One day, he decides to get off and stay. He’s found dead beside the train and is hauled away to a funeral parlor called (wait for it) Willoughby.

I suspect the writers were having particularly trying weeks when these themes arose.

Because, really, nostalgia can be sort of a default coping mechanism, can’t it? It can be for me. When things are difficult in our own present-day lives, I think many of us escape to the past. We think about the times when things seemed to make sense. I think about my college days. Or high school. Or to my dimly remembered childhood, when all my needs were taken care of and I had all the time in the world.

‘Course, if I’m honest with myself, I was bored half the time and really wanted to take care of things on my own. I was kind of a mess in high school. In college, I was poor, stressed, bored and confused.

Don’t get me wrong: I had a lot of fun in all those periods of my life. Part of me would love to go back and relive some of those moments. But not all. And the stresses we feel today may magically, mysteriously morph into treasured memories 20 years from now.

It’s funny, watching The Twilight Zone idealize the past. For many of us, The Twilight Zone is part of the idealized past—a relic from a more innocent, less complicated time. These shows aired almost a decade before I was born, and when I think of the early 1960s, I think of my parents at a sock hop dancing to the Everly Brothers. It’s an era almost universally thought of now as quintessential, innocent America. If that ad exec visited Willoughby now, he might see a town from 1960—a place where the men wore thin ties and the ladies wore poodle skirts and the children played with hula hoops all day.

Of course, sometimes nostalgia is warranted. I reviewed Hannibal this week, and it sure ain’t no Twilight Zone. Let’s all hope that, 30 years from now, Hannibal reruns don’t look like quaint, family friendly larks.

But I do think that we can be too quick to dub the past as the good ol’ days. Things change, for sure. Some things get better. Others get worse. But it’s only when our memories are run through our mind’s mysterious carwash that they truly get buffed and polished into glittering nostalgia, to drive along our brain’s superhighway and into … The Twilight Zone.