For the Living of These Days

“When in 1907 the Statler Hotel in Buffalo, New York for the first time in history offered every guest a room and private bath, one rustic occupant wrote home:  ‘The bathroom is so wonderful that I can hardly wait till Saturday night’”  (Harry Emerson Fosdick, For The Living of These Days).

One of the gifts of having lived through “these days” that have been mine  (World War II to the present) is the gift of recollection.  I cannot remember, as Fosdick did, when cuspidors (sometimes called “spittoons”) were necessary in public places as well as in many private homes.  I cannot remember oil lamps and the new-fangled gas lamps that replaced them—or the first electrical lights which soon replaced the gas ones as part of my memory-trek into the past.  I can remember a few outhouses still in use, and steam engines pulling trains, and black and white television, and telephone party-lines, and using a hand pump to get water, and collecting “tin foil” from discarded cigarette packages and rolling the foil into balls.  I can recall, too, the separate bathrooms and restaurants that were designated “white” and “colored.”  Yes, I remember “Those Days" and cannot imagine ever returning to them.  They are “gone with the wind” of time.  We cannot return to Those Days. 

There are those who say they would like to return to that time.  There are those who say it was a “good life” back then—and a “simple life.”  Not me!  I remember my mother hovering over the stove and kitchen table canning vegetables and fruits on hot summer days when the only air-conditioning was an open window.  I recall my father shoveling coal into the basement furnace on cold winter days and nights and the chore of disposing the cold ashes left over, usually by spreading them over the driveway when the winter snow came.  Those were not simple days—they were days of hard work.

No, I like “The Living of These Days” much better.  No outhouses, no coal to shovel, no summer canning!  I can take a bath or even a shower two or three times a day if I want to do so, and the water will be hot.  I can simply turn up the thermostat in the winter to keep warm, and turn it down in the summer to produce coolness on a hot summer’s day.  I can go to the grocery store and buy canned (or frozen) vegetables and fruits without standing over a hot stove on a hot summer’s day (and I can buy those canned goods for pennies).  Why, I can even eat tomatoes, oranges, bananas and lettuce in the winter time.  What a life it is!  I have no hankering to go back to “Those Days.”  It is “For the Living of These Days” that is of utmost importance.  We must live these days--while it is day.

I prefer real pools, "these days!"