Morning. I am seated on a bench in downtown Thomasville with the ghost of someone’s granny beside me. I can feel her spirit, whoever she is. This is her town, where life still ambles slowly. Being here is like taking a trip into the 1950s.
“Not a bad town, huh?” says the ghost.
She wears a bell hat, and a floral dress. Nobody can see her but me.
“It’s nice,” I say.
“City of Roses,” she tells me.
“How about that.”
“It’s changed some,” she says.
The flawless storefronts, getting decorated for Christmas, catch the morning sunlight. Markets and cafés are opening. And the ghost is right, it’s perfect. All that’s missing is Opie Taylor.
“You from around here?” I ask the ghost.
She doesn’t answer.
It’s as though time has overlooked the City of Roses and its elderly patron saint. I look around and immediately travel backward into an earlier age. Her era.
An era when Americans were a little more innocent, and the highest technology we possessed was the KitchenAid mixer. A period before 5G wireless networks, before Netflix, and
before the advent of thong underwear.
On cue, a restored Chevy Bel Air passes us, rolling by slowly. Baby blue. White-walled tires. And I’m three quarters of a century away.
Truman is in office. Flags still wing from every post, pole, and porch. Ninety-seven percent of Americans still read a physical newspaper (whereas today it’s only 4 percent). Hitler’s War is long since over, our boys are home from hell. There are new possibilities in the wind.
The old woman is smiling now. We are back in her heyday.
This is the generation that features both the birth of rock and roll and the “Grand Ole Opry.” A time when mankind will begin producing Fords and Chevys with tail fins tall enough to slice low hanging telephone wires.
This historical period will also include the Cold War. American…