Doomsday Coins

 

Chu-Bops

Sometime between 1980 and 1983, probably on a road trip with the family between Alberta and Manitoba, I picked up these two Chu-Bops. Each Chu-Bop was a 3x3-inch album sleeve reproduction containing a pink bubblegum record. I was never much of a gum guy, but at just 35 cents each, these were a cool little novelty. I really love that Blue Oyster Cult art! 

Hard Candy

Hard candy was never my favourite treat, but the colours are certainly festive. Hard candy feels like the echo of ancient relatives - great aunts and great uncles, grandparents in farmhouses, quarters handed out by wrinkled hands on green lawns with golden fields of wheat and sunflowers in the distance. 

There's Something About Mary Tyler Moore

A few weeks ago I picked up The Mary Tyler Moore Show on DVD. The price was right, and the show has a superb reputation on top of my fond memories of the few episodes I saw back in the 1970s in Leaf Rapids.

I've watched the first dozen episodes, and the show holds up; the comedy is organic, character-based, rarely cheap, and the dramatic moments are well-earned. Yes, there's an annoying laugh track, but that's part of the package for TV programming of this era.

For reasons I'm struggling to articulate, however, this show has struck a deeper chord than simply enjoying well-crafted entertainment. From the moment I started watching the pilot episode, which begins with the famous theme song played atop a montage of Mary's move to Minneapolis - her new beginning after a failed engagement - tears sprung to my eyes, despite the hopeful theme of both the music and the narrative. The show is about Mary building a new life for herself in an exciting environment, making new friends, and being free and single at 30. There shouldn't be anything sad about that, and yet as I watch the show I can't help but react strongly to everything that's been lost from that era; not just the surface things, like the fashion, the interior decor, the old analog technology, but also the sense that western civilization was not yet a dystopia. Decaying, perhaps, and ridden with crime, malaise, and poverty, but somehow still alive and vibrant and rich with the promise of better days to come.

This is of course not a true reflection of the show, but my own particular demons at this moment in time. I think I must be looking for escape to a simpler time, even if I know that, objectively, the 1970s was as fraught with existential threats as the 2020s.

I'd feel differently, I think, if the past wasn't sealed off; if we could visit once in a while, like we would another country, just for a month, a week, a day, even. Just to smell the air and rediscover things long forgotten. Maybe then I'd feel like we might just make it after all.