It Was An Age When

It was an age when bread was delivered by a baker in a horse and cart and carried to the house in big wicker basket, and the milkman left bottled milk on the doorstep before the sun was up, and old men kept an eye on the street and raced out with a bucket to shovel up the manure prized for giving a backyard vegie patch a jolt. It was an age when the rabbitoh would come along the street with rabbits hung in rows in the back of his beat up truck and women in pinnies would come out with a plate to take a bunny or two to bake that night. It was an age when groceries were delivered once a week in a wooden box shouldered in by the grocer and placed on the kitchen table to be unpacked over a cup of tea and bit of banter. It was an age when lollies and biscuits were sold unpacked and children walked to school, when serials and quiz shows kept families huddled around radios on cold winter nights and held a generation of kids captive to the Saturday night countdown on the top 10 hit parade show. All said, the age no longer matters yet seems to find its way back here. We all carry our own, ingrained like play dirt in the hard to reach places of the soul. Perhaps that's what poetry is about, or at least that part of it that some say points more towards a pedestrian end, the sad preservation of the oddities of an age by an ever diminishing few and before memories flicker and finally go out.