Word Back: Let’s Make America Again Again

Again.

Make America Great Again

I’ve been exploring this phrase as it has taken over conversations, rallies, bots, blather, mind games, etc.

It’s a work of genius, really. It gets everyone on the same page. It does, if you are a true believer in Trumpism. That’s what 70-some million people voted for, right? America is no longer great so we needed to fix it. And we will put in place a supervisor who really has never done anything I could call great. But let’s pretend he has and see what magic time in our recent history he wants to return to, revisit, make great again.

So many T voters were elderly as am I. They remember a time when a middle-class suburban lifestyle ruled lives and airwaves. Our Southwest Denver neighborhood was mostly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or WASP. Not the kind of WASP who grew up in suburban New York City or Chicago. Our Dads made less money than yours. I say Dads because that’s who left the house to work.

Mom was a housewife or householder – she held the place together. Dad was a contract something-or-other for the Martin Company in Lakewood. I never really know what Dad did for a living. Martin eventually merged with American-Marietta and then Lockheed to become part of aerospace and defense work. Martin got his start building airplanes and so did Lockheed. Martin ranked 14^th among defense contractors and built the B-26 Marauder bomber and the B-29 Superfortress that dropped The Big Ones on Japan. Lockheed was most famous for building the P-38 Lightning, the twin-tailed warplane that all of us kids bought in model kits.

We knew our warplanes in the fifties. We were fed by movies, TV,  and comic books. We heard some stories from our fathers but nothing of great import because that’s the way it was. Dad was an infantryman, a Signal Corps radioman who marched through Europe with the rest of the grunts. His unit was lost in the Ardennes during the Bulge but eventually made it back to American lines. I wondered what it was like, being lost in a war zone, but he never elaborated on it. I saw the fellow vets huddled around the patio bar at or the grill during parties and knew they were telling war stories but we were never invited in. So we had to read about them in books or imagine them.

Most of the neighbor men were soldiers and sailors. No fighter pilots on our street and we would have known if there were any. The dad of the kid next door was a plumber. The kid’s name was John and last name Lennon. He went on to become famous as one of the Beatles. Just kidding. I don’t know what happened to him. On our other side lived an older childless couple. They were nice enough. What I wonder about is what they thought about living next to us, one of the largest families on the street. We were a rowdy bunch. Loud. They complained when Dad installed a set of monkey bars in the backyard. It was perilously close to the older neighbors’ fence and it apparently gave them nightmares about one of us swinging wildly on the bars and breaking our backs on their fence. Looking back, we think it hilarious but, older now, we have our own nightmares about injured children and grandchildren.

The man who lived behind us was an army mess sergeant. An FBI agent lived down the street. Across from, him was the only Hispanic family on the block and Catholics like us. One of the boys was the age of me and my brother and we rode bikes together. He took a spill and was impaled by his handlebars. They rushed him to the hospital. When he reappeared, he showed us his stitches and said his spleen was removed. A spleen? Who knew we had one?

We rode our bikes to Bear Creek and played war. Firecracker wars! No danger there. The creek tumbled from the high peaks but was tame by the time it reached the flatlands. Our father once pole-vaulted across the creek and we thought it amazing. Dad showed us how to skip rocks. We rode our bikes down steep hills and crashed in a cloud of dust and rocks. We explored the mall digs, daring each other to ride down into the holes.

We walked to school four blocks away. It was rare, even when it snowed, to see Moms bundle the kids into station wagons and shuttle them to school. I drive past my local elementary school at the end of the day and there is a traffic jam of SUVs idling on the street. Maybe that’s what MAGA people want? Make schools close enough to walk to! Well, that would mean more schools and more taxes to pay for them and the school library might have a book about two dads or a boy who wants to be a girl and all hell would break loose at PTA meetings.

Why can’t we go back to the days of PTA meetings where the only squabble was how many cakes to bake for the Halloween Walk? You remember that, right? Kind of like musical chairs but if you win you get to take a cake home and hope you are there early enough, dressed in your Popeye costume, to win a chocolate one and not one of those yucky coconut ones. A coconut cake! That mom must be a commie!

Ah, those good ol’ days.

Note to my son: Thank you for sending me the book “Dad, I Want to Hear Your Story: A Father’s Guided Journal to Share His Life and Love.” I will fill out some of the pages but most memories can be found on these pages which I’ve been keeping for 20 years. Most stories are true, although I have been known to take liberties. If I still covered high school sports for A Major Metropolitan Newspaper, I would be much more careful in my reporting. I would take time for better fact-checking and less snark. Enjoy!