On the 1950s and Not Fading Away

This might sound crazy, but I feel like I somehow traveled back in time to the 1950s and returned home safely to 2017 at some point during this year, reaching the conclusion that I like things way better the way they are today.

As a Millennial, I'm not averse to admitting how much cultural appropriation that sentence contains. These days, everything is feeling like a mashup of something else. Originality seems more desirable than ever. 

I sometimes wonder if people won't look back on our generation and perceive us as the ones who had history at our fingertips and could revisit any period if only we weren't so distracted by our computers and phones. We're like the people who visited the moon but couldn't step off the spaceship.

As a child of the 1980s (I was born in 1984), I know as much about the '50s as the following decade, and my parents aren't talking (What was it the flower children always said? "If you remember anything, you weren't there?")

When I say I feel like I traveled back, I don't mean I woke up one morning in a poodle skirt, listened to the Ronettes and hung out with my friends at the drive-in eating hamburgers and drinking milk shakes while honking for curb service, although that does sound pretty fun.

Nor am I referring to President Trump or the rumors that to "Make America Great Again," he meant opening the vault of one of the most misogynistic, racist and materialistic periods in American history and making it now.

What I mean is that in my mind, the 1950s offer an eternal perspective – the midcentury blitz that will always be preserved in people's minds as a time when life moved in stereo, when we didn't just have good but great fun with our friends in fabulous cars on sunset boulevards.

In this sense, the 1950s were retro before they even happened, as much a style or essence as a period in time.

I enjoy hearing stories from people who survived the decade. Lately, my husband has been practicing the Buddy Holly song "Not Fade Away" on electric guitar, and today, I looked up some of the lyrics to the famous song:

"My love a-bigger than a Cadillac

I try to show you and you drive a-me back.

Your love for me a-got to be real

For you to know just how I feel

A love for real not fade away."

I noticed that this is one of the most hopeful and cynical songs I've heard. Not only is Buddy Holly comparing his love to a Cadillac, there's an undertone that the love might not survive, while the Cadillac will. The song is hopeful in that it's about love, but it's also very materialistic.

That's how I imagine the 1950s actually were. They set a standard based on materialism and then challenged people to transcend it by love alone. 

Could that be done?

Yes, but for how long? The '50s lasted only a decade. Not very long in the grand scheme of things, and since I tend to think we measure history not by decades, but by centuries and millennia, the years probably felt much smaller when they were happening.

Why is this?

I think it's because they're tangible through an ever-growing nostalgia – the kind that helps keep drive-in diners like the Bun 'N' Barrel on Austin Highway popular in 2017. It's also a way of commemorating the past while keeping it accessible and current.

The Bun 'N' Barrel has been offering burgers and barbecue to San Antonio patrons since 1950s from its location at 1150 Austin Highway.

Does it really matter what time we're traveling back to – or if we ever actually go on the trip – if we know we can go there anytime?

I think technology has taken this idea a step further. I think we might be witnessing a key moment when we can actually glimpse another time period and decide if we want to venture there. 

Skipping ahead to the '60s – a time when people seemed to try to forget everything they learned 10 years earlier.

From what I've heard (not much,) the '60s counterculture might actually have been as spectacular as people who were there say it was. The free love, walking around barefoot and not caring about showing up to work wearing the previous night were real.

In the '50s, when people said you looked tired, it was a euphemism for "You look like shit." In the '60s, no one cared. You could show up to work with tangled hair and dilated pupils. It didn't matter. You were a living, breathing, organism. You had roots and a history, and every day you were growing, expanding, into an even more organic being.

It's no wonder that when we watch TV shows like "Mad Men" that pay homage to the '50s, they're doused in alcohol. Alcohol is an antiseptic, and the '50s were defined by cleanliness, bright, gleaming surfaces and interior lighting.

People couldn't help getting in touch with their grittier side a decade letter. They wanted to discover what they'd suppressed or forgotten about by aspiring to such rigid ideals.

When I looked up the word "decade," I learned that its Latin root, beyond the Greek meaning "the root of ten," is literally "a falling away," a decay.

I wonder if when Buddy Holly wrote "Not Fade Away," he was heeding the inevitable decline of certain ideals to follow. Is the song an antidote not only to the decadence of the era, but decay itself – the tumult of the '60s and the events of the previous decade that led to them?

In America, we go through many iterations of history. Our values change constantly. We've often seen things in black and white and transcended the racism and vitriol that marks our history, only to revisit it all over again.

Why does this happen? Why revisit a period that we'd supposedly put behind us?

I didn't travel back to the 1950s, but I have my answer. We all want the best of both worlds. We don't want to fade away.

So why am I afraid that now it's going to come at a higher cost?

Featured photo: Oil painting, "Burger in the Clouds," 20 x 32" on canvas. (Photo and painting copyright Undercover San Antonio.)

The Dog at the San Antonio Missions

During a recent Sunday trip to the San Antonio Missions National Historic Park, I stopped at Mission Concepción. I'd come to take some pictures of the light at sunset – practice for a series of paintings I was completing – and since it was still too early in the evening, I killed time by ambling along the walkways and reading the information tablets.

Dragonflies buzzed in the ambience, their long bodies zigzagging across the deep sky overhead. A man walked on the sidewalk, listening to music through headphones. A young couple made out on a blanket spread in the grass. Nothing too out of the ordinary seemed to be happening.

Suddenly, I saw a dog approaching from Mission Road. The dog ran across the street, peering around nervously, and he sat down in the grass next to where I stood. The dog was slender, with fine black fur and burning red-orange eyes. Since he wasn't wearing a collar or name tag, I couldn't determine if he was a stray.

I debated whether to call Animal Care Services to report him before realizing it was 6:30 and that the organization closed at 5 p.m. on Sundays. I looked around, wondering if someone would be coming for the dog.

As we stood together, the driver of an SUV pulled into the parking lot. Four people climbed out, along with two dogs of their own on leashes. They started up the sidewalk, taking in the scenery excitedly, as if it were their first time there.

When the visitors saw me with the dog, they started toward me, the dogs in the lead with their tails wagging. One of the dogs came up to the one sitting next to me and sat beside him like they were instant companions.

"Aww, he wants to be friends," one of the women said. I offered a wan smile. 

"He isn't mine," I said. "He came over here from that neighborhood."

She looked surprised.

"Oh."

"Have you ever seen him?" I asked.

"No, I haven't."

"I think he might belong to someone. If so, they're letting him run loose. That doesn't seem right. He could get hit by a car."

"Sorry," the woman said, shrugging as she walked away to rejoin her friends.

I stayed at Mission Concepción for another hour until the light began streaming across the field, throwing blue and violet shadows against the limestone – the colors I'd made the drive to the South side to see. I lifted my camera and began taking photos, and at one point, the dog sat in the grass as if he'd posed for a similar picture countless times before.

Though I've never owned a dog and don't know much about their behavior, I know there's a reason they're referred to as man's best friend. As I walked around the perimeter of the Mission snapping photographs, the dog followed me, stopping where I stopped and staying close behind.

When I finished, the sun was going down and everyone else had left but me and the dog. I looked into its eyes, glowing amber-red. I wished I could adopt him and take him home with me. Still, we had a cat at home, and no experience taking care of dogs.

Sometimes I wish things were different – that there weren't stray cats and dogs without owners wandering the streets of San Antonio having to be taken to clinics to be euthanized. Then, I try to think back to a time when human beings and their pets were undomesticated and roamed the earth like beetles, armadillos and coyotes. Animal control and neutering wasn't an issue then. Life and death overflowed. The idea that death was a part of life was less an idea than a reality, as it is in nature.

Since moving to San Antonio, we've taken in a cat whose previous owner died. Though the owner lived at the apartment complex for 20 years and fed her, the cat, 'Annie,' roamed outdoors during the day. I spoke to the woman a few times, and she claimed the cat had another owner before her. I remember the April morning four years ago when I first saw Annie's face appear outside our window.

This made me realize that even with a safe home, the cat often went outside during the day and at night. Rather than being a strictly indoor cat that ate canned or dried food and sunned itself on window ledges, Annie, given the option, wanted to be an indoor and an outdoor cat.

After taking care of Annie for the last six months, I know that some animals won't ever be domesticated. I read in a book that a feline's environment in the first six months will determine its behavior for the rest of its life, and with multiple owners, it's more accurate to say she lives at the apartment complex rather than in any one apartment.

Still, I know it's morally wrong to let Annie be an indoor and an outdoor cat. She's a threat to the local avian population. Since cats are predators, they kill for sport as much as for survival, and I feel irresponsible for the birds, beetles and moths that have died on my doorstep.

On the other hand, it seems equally wrong to force a wild animal to live indoors. The room would be torn to shreds, and since I consider it insane to remove a cat's claws, much less, neuter it, we've struck a kind of harmony in letting her go outside during the day and hoping the steady supply of cat food will dissuade her from killing birds.

Though this may sound irresponsible, it's the truth. There is no way we could domesticate Annie, and I'm honestly happier knowing she's content.

Still, standing there with the dog that night, I seemed to face the consequences of my decision in not knowing where the dog came from. I felt bad leaving it there alone, and even considered asking someone who lived at one of the neighboring houses if they'd seen the dog before or knew who took care of it. Glancing around, however, I realized it was almost dark and that I had to be getting home.

As I walked back to my car, I was surprised to see the man in the headphones whom I'd noticed walking around the grounds earlier. Though it was twilight, I could make out the features of his face. He was tall and wore a t-shirt with a space ship traveling to Jupiter printed on the front.

I watched in disbelief as the dog whom I'd befriended in the last hour ran over to him, lowering itself on its haunches into the grass right next to him.

"Is that your dog?" I asked.

The man removed one of his earbuds and peered toward me.

"Yes," he said.

"You let him run around?" I asked. "Aren't you afraid someone will take him?"

The man shrugged.

"No one will take him," he said. "He's mine."

"He's supposed to be on a leash," I scolded. "You're not supposed to let dogs run loose. I thought he was a stray. He could get impounded, or worse."

The man shrugged again, looking a little ashamed.

"I live nearby," he said.

"Don't you have a yard?" I pressed.

"I don't have a yard," he said. "He likes to run around. He hasn't got anywhere else."

I watched as the man started across Mission Street again, the dog following in his footsteps. The man seemed to sense that I was watching him, and he turned on his heels, glancing back in my direction.

We stared at each other across a seemingly endless divide that hadn't existed a few moments before.

"It will be OK," he said.