Things I Couldn’t Conserve

C onservatives are easily accused of nostalgia. And what follows here will only make the accusation more tempting for the reader.­ So be it.

I try to be a conscientious father and think through the experiences my children have, to think of their formative effect. And in thinking through this, I feel I’ve tallied up seven thousand things I knew, or saw, or tasted in my childhood that my children can never know.

Much of what we have now is better. Of course. My kids don’t need to taste a can of Crystal Pepsi (1992–1994), which, little snot that I was, I would angrily claim to be the best soda for years after it was gone. They don’t have to watch their mother suffer, as I did, the indignities of car-repair-shop chauvinism and gouging as it existed in the 1980s. That whole field, and its exploitations, has been reformed by the dealer–service center revolution.

But so much of what we’ve lost seems good. The most obvious is the boredom I knew in childhood, a boredom of scarcity. Boredom can still exist now, but it is different and must almost be conjured by artifice. Home video-game systems and portable screen entertainment all came into my childhood late as expensive novelties. My children, born in the age of the internet, have every episode of every children’s-television show and movie available at every hour of the day, a few clicks away, and maybe a swipe of the digital credit card on file. The latchkey kid of a single mother, I used to remain bored for hours on end. Board games remained unplayed. Boredom was just the way of the world for me. For my kids, it’s something their parents choose to inflict on them by means of conscious deprivation.

Of course, the internet by disaggregating and presenting all information instantly has either destroyed or irrevocably changed the meaning of every other bundled and edited experience that I once treasured: SportsCenter on ESPN, newspapers in the morning, waiting for your school’s snow day to be announced on morning radio, even magazines.

My children will never know what a real phone call is, on a phone that has a real bell inside it, and is connected to the others by copper wire. Because of this, I think they will never believe there was a time when a phone call wasn’t the annoying, old-fashioned, discourteous alternative to a text message. The quality of sound over those old copper networks was such that when the other person fell silent, you could hear something of the ambient room noise on their end and still feel their presence and, somehow, their silent attention. My first girlfriend and I would just sit in silence, two miles apart, phone to ear, and feel totally present to the other. Now when someone is quiet even for a few seconds, on any cellphone, it feels like they’ve dropped off entirely. The pay phones are gone. Collect calls. I remember going to parts of rural Maine where there was still no phone service. Restaurants could take reservations by radio.

Someday I’ll take my children to England to visit my friends, the way my mother visited her best friend and my godmother. But my children won’t, as I did, run downstairs from the upper flat each morning to collect the wire basket with glass bottles of fresh milk, delivered by a milkman. I’ve taken my children to Ireland, but they’ll never see, as I did, a driver in the west of Ireland sincerely and unselfconsciously make the sign of the cross upon passing a Catholic church. These things are small and yet, the milkman and the driver somehow conveyed to me the reality of life in this world, attended by hard workers and angels both.

They’ll never know the feeling of the heaving tribe I was born into. My First Communion party was in 1989. And the ingathering of relatives was massive. The generation in their 70s and 80s had been born into families of ten to 13 children. And most had gone on to have families of their own, five, six, seven children each. And I could not squeeze past their swaying hips, shaking bellies. I could barely deliver my grandmother’s cookies to the distant cousins playing guitar — ones who’d soon have a real career pioneering Americana music in Nashville. This tribe had stories of performing in Vaudeville theater, of fistfights with British soldiers in Belgium during the war, of relatives who blew themselves up during the construction of the Lincoln Tunnel, of endless kiddie-gang wars in the 1950s with the Italian-American families whose kids were harassing me in those days. We had teachers, lawyers, architects, musicians, construction workers, federal officers, ne’er-do-wells, lace-curtain types, brawlers, and entrepreneurs in this loud, funny, don’t-f***-with-us tribe. We even had a few Republicans, too. Being a kid in a tribe like that felt like driving a scooter, with a motorcade of bulldozers clearing the path ahead of you.

Irish differential fertility wasn’t meant to last. I can get a tenth of that many people for my kids’ First Communion. The truth is, our tribe was growing during the Irish Famine. It is shrinking in the post–Murphy Brown era of prosperity.

My kids won’t hear half of those old legends, because I barely remember them. And those who carried them died in the 1990s and 2000s before I had the adult sense to get the stories written down or recorded.

I just hope that along the way, the things in their world that I didn’t make, and wouldn’t choose for them, zap into their little imaginations, filling them with wonder and gratitude for the great long chain of lost people, and lost worlds, that brought them to this one.