Gloria J. Schramm of North Bellmore reflects on rituals, freedoms and what we've lost

One night long ago, my friends from the old neighborhood in Elmont and I got together to watch old family films that our fathers labored to create 40 years before, which were converted to videocassettes from the original reel-to-reel film wheel on a projector for our viewing pleasure.

Thirty seconds into the film, we all came to one conclusion: Everyone’s family in the 1950s looked the same. Everyone’s father wore the same white shirt, black tie, fedora hat and coat. All the women wore fancy Sunday clothes and had stiff bouffant hairdos that stood erect. And cars had wing-like appendages and houses were tiny and dark. We returned to a place of church processions and merriment of our parents’ dinner dance and costume parties that seemed so corny.

Our parents are gone and so are most of the aunts and uncles, too. It’s fun to see how we looked back then and how we look today. Luckily, for ladies, with today’s wide array of cosmetics and hair colors, we don’t look half bad. Even recognizable, if I may speak for me and my friends!

After we finished laughing, I realized something else the memories evoke of somewhere in time, long ago and faraway, as if from another planet: Life was simple and stable.

It is the amazing lost world of family and friends that once bound us together in protocol and propriety. If the school principal called a kid into his office, it would have been a nightmare akin to having been captured a prisoner of war by the enemy. One had a sacred pride to the ritual and familiar at home, in school, house of worship, everywhere. One knew what was expected of oneself and what to expect of others.

In the ’60s and ’70s, we became a prospering, rebelling, individualistic, consumer-awakening society that viewed the ’50s as a plastic time. It was impossible to see it back then, but as an older person now, I see it was exactly those rituals of Sunday dinners with family and parades on national holidays that took months of dedicated preparation — those ceremonies of close-knit structures made up the network that kept us together.

Once we broke free to do our own thing and not be stifled, what did we break out to? We saw every ill of society proliferate, magnify and mutate into even more horrific forms. We blame the internet and divorce, but it was the underlying intent or motivation to be “free” of predetermined constraints that ultimately caused isolation, alienation and separateness.

The films stopped rolling. We couldn’t splice together what ran off the wheel.

In deciding not to “be” there for one another, we collectively did not hold onto what was dear. We threw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We could have had the best of both worlds. If only we could bring our contemporary intellect and naturalness of heart together and recreate the network that once seemed so plastic — not to smother one another in dysfunction or neuroses, but to restore in us mutual respect, a sense of well-being, centeredness, wholeness in our worlds, and a sense of belonging we so utterly mourn the loss of.

It is as sad as it is fun to watch old family films. Seeing them reminds me that the once familiar predictability of yesteryear calmed and reassured us. We were safe and at home.

Gloria J. Schramm

North Bellmore