I am entering week three of social distancing. The isolation can get a bit overwhelming at times but it also brings out the opportunity to do things you always thought about but never followed through on. We have all been finding time to do some of the things we never found time to do before coronavirus, or Covid-19 as it has come to be known. I still find it interesting that its original designation had to be changed. In the meantime, the “safer at home” rules have created an opportunity for binge watching TV and in my case some nostalgic surfing.

Earlier tonight we enjoyed our third “stay at home virtual get together”. If anything good has come out of this pandemic, it might be that baby boomers have gotten comfortable with live streaming and that we figured out that we could get together with friends for whom the distance between us, had gotten in the way. After spending a night reminiscing with a friend from Arkansas for whom I hold many fond work memories, I found myself longing for just a little more nostalgia.

Enter any one of a host of cable TV apps. I am a child of the sixties. For those of my readers too young to remember those times, think the birth of Star Trek, Bonanza and I Spy. Think the birth of technicolor! The creation of color TV. It was an era of innovation for the baby boomers. We had cut our teeth on Gun Smoke, Have Gun Will Travel and Lassie, all presented in stunning black and white. Suddenly our world exploded with color and our movies gave us something breathtaking, something called Living Technicolor. It was as if God had recreated creation for us right there on the big screen.

I was eleven years old in 1962. I was impressionable and yes naive. Girls were just entering my sphere of awareness and I admit, I had begun writing notes to many of them. This might in fact have been the moment I fantasied myself as a writer. At the very least I was pouring my poetic self into those notes. For you in the world of texting, tweeting and Instagram, I can only express pity for the joy you missed out on in the creation of writing a note and then finding a way to secretly pass it through what was then our crude version of the internet. It was, back then, the friend to friend to friend net. And we never signed a privacy agreement, ever.

It was at this time that a movie came along that to this day remains one of my favorites. I am sure it was not for the acting, though it starred Jimmie Stewart and Maureen O’Hara. It wasn’t for the plot, after all they all followed pretty much the same story line, Jimmie the easy going dad with the mixed up kids trying to define the perfect family. It wasn’t necessarily the acting. What it actually turned out to be was the setting and the girl. The setting was always somewhere you had never been and only imagined you might one day be, and all brought to you in the splendor of “living technicolor”, somehow brighter and clearer than your actual life. The movies took me to a Hollywood Eden and beckoned me to follow. And then there was the girl. She was always the perfect girl, the one you knew one day you would eventually meet, fall in love with and then magically end up with in one of those perfect movie scenes. She was cute, borderline beautiful or as beautiful as an eleven year old could envision, and somehow available if only you knew the right lines. You had to compete with Fabian or Paul Anka but then they were no match for the charm you were imagining you could muster.

My movie was Mr Hobbs Takes a Vacation. I probably had seen it half a dozen times already and each and every time I fell for the daughter. In my defense, she was only a couple years older than me and she checked all the boxes, cute, sophisticated and looking for her true love, aka, me. The fact that Jimmie Stewart was her dad only enhanced the relationship. Who wouldn’t want Jimmie Stewart as your dad?

So I have definitely digressed, but you needed the background, whether you wanted it or not. I had just ended our virtual get together, I had enjoyed a scotch or two, and I was waxing nostalgic. When my wife suggested we find a good movie with which to end our evening, who was I to let the opportunity pass me by. She had never heard of the movie, deprived childhood I suspect, and she trusted my opinion. After all, she loved Jimmie Stewart and I convinced her it was a classic. To my sheer delight, two phenomena occurred, it turned out she loved the movie and my memory and expectations were not disappointed. My wife enjoyed the nostalgia that only a Jimmie Stewart movie can bring and my crush was still as idyllic as I remembered her to be.

There is a point here. Coronavirus has forced us into isolation. You would be lying if you weren’t longing for at least a bit of the old normal. I needed an escape. We all need an escape. For me, tonight was all about that escape. The virtual get together gave me a sense of being with my friends even if it was only virtual. Mr Hobbs took me back to a time when life was simple. No work to stress about. No virus for me to worry about. No crashing market and no isolation. Just a moment in time when an eleven year old could imagine a life beyond their everyday existence and a future where the boy meets the girl of his dreams and spends a lifetime getting to woo her. And all in living technicolor.