Steam
shovels. Choo-choo trains. Horses and wagons. The stories of my childhood
happened in Olden Days settings full of quaint technologies. The Little Engine that Could was a steam
locomotive. The Berenstain Bears
drove an old touring car. Even Mike
Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, a book about an old technology becoming
obsolete, was full of romantic elements of the Olden Days. Alongside pictures
of rusting steam shovels put out of work by the shiny new gasoline and electric
and diesel shovels were pictures of horse-drawn buggies, a milkman's cart, and
a horse-drawn fire engine with a clanging bell.
Stories
from my own culture were even more removed from the reality I knew. These were
invariably stories of life in the shtetle
(the small rural towns of Eastern Europe), tales of rubles and poretzes and innkeepers. A ruble, I
gathered, was some kind of money, and a poretz
was a landlord who was mean just because. I had no notion of the transitions
from slavery to serfdom to tenancy that had produced the social conditions of
rural nineteenth-century Russia. Nor did I have any notion that these stories
were limited in time and place, products of the accidents of history that had
produced the Pale of Settlement. To me, all of it was the Olden Days: a blurry
monolithic mass that encompassed everything that had happened before I was
born.
The
stories in all my favorites books were set in some sort of Olden Days. The
magical worlds of the fourteen Oz books, the Chronicles of Narnia, The Chestromanci
books, the universe of The Five Children
and It by E Nesbitt and Edward Eager's excellent imitation. The
semi-magical worlds of the haunted mansion at Green Knowe and the anthropomorphized
animals of the Redwall series. Historical fiction, like The Little House on the Prairie series. And the classics, Little Women, The Secret Garden, Tom Sawyer,
Hans Brinker, and all the rest. All were
set in the Olden Days.
These
stories were removed from mundane everyday life. In the Olden Days, anything
was possible. I expected stories to happen in the magical past, and was mildly
surprised when one was set in the present.
I grew
up, and I realized that there were no Olden Days, only earlier eras, populated
by people not much different than me. Fantasy stories still occupied a world
where anything was possible, but stories set in the real world had to conform
to the same rules that I was subject to. It's one thing for Dorothy to travel
by magical silver slippers. It's another for someone in the real world to
magically travel to a far-away town.
Mike Mulligan and his Steam
Shovel was written in 1939, when steam shovels were fading into the past.
When I was a kid, everything it described was part of the Olden Days. Not
anymore. There are no more quaint steam shovels. Only backhoes.
