Side of the times.....

I don’t suppose it’s any secret that things look differently depending upon how you look at them. I think they call that perspective. Several years ago, when I was attending Millville Grade School, our bus driver, Howard Tucker, gave each one of the students on his route a box of chocolate covered cherries when we headed home on the last day of school before our Christmas break. It was back in the day when a pound of candy weighed a pound, instead of eleven ounces.

             I was in the third grade at the time, and outside of the occasional candy bar from Kelly’s Ranch Market in Millville, or Saffer’s General Store in Mooreland, most of the candy I had consumed up until that time consisted of the Circus Peanuts that Mom got when the Jewel Tea man stopped by. And sometimes Dad would get a box of chocolate from a place called Lowery’s up in Muncie, but he always kept it hidden where us kids couldn’t find it, and rationed the pieces out like we were still caught up in the war effort.

             At any rate, a pound of chocolate covered cherries looked pretty good to a third grader, and I was fully aware that when I carried them in the house, Mom would insist that I share them with my six brothers and sisters, or Dad would confiscate them and then hand them out one at a time, just like he did with the expensive candy from Muncie, and no doubt sharing it with my siblings just as Mom suggested. I decided I had two miles to eat the contents of the box and stop that from happening.

            For as good as that box of chocolate covered cherries looked when I got on that bus, it was several years before I could stand to even look at one again. I have never thought they looked as good again as I thought they looked that fateful December afternoon.

            When I started driving, gasoline was about a quarter a gallon. The price increased slowly over the next fifteen years, until it finally reached the unimaginable plateau of a dollar a gallon. A lot of old time filling stations had to change out their pumps because the old ones weren’t capable of displaying a cost of more than ninety nine cents per gallon. And once the stations had the capability of three digit gas, all bets were off.

            Shortly after the turn of the century, gasoline reached 2 dollars a gallon, another unimaginable level. Drivers were concerned. People started carpooling. Businesses started adding fuel surcharges trying to offset the increased cost. And on and on.

            According to some reports, we are approaching two dollar a gallon gas again, and while most of us dreaded reaching that price ten years ago, we’re actually looking forward to it now.  Perspective again, I suppose. It all depends on which side you’re looking at it from.

             Aging is similar, I think. Sixty seemed pretty old when I was thirty. It doesn’t seem quite so old. Come to think of it, sixty-five doesn’t seem quite so old anymore, either. Or seventy.

             But however we feel about chocolate covered cherries, or the price of gas, or getting older, we’re right in the middle of the Christmas season now, and for some reason, people who celebrate Christmas seem to look forward to it no matter how many or how few Christmases they have had. A different perspective on things, I suppose.

            Merry Christmas.