Time Markers

When I receive old magazines the first thing I seek as I flip through the pages, I find Are the advertisements that bring to my mind the brands, fads, and trends that found favor in bygone times. But now their days of popular appeal are but a memory of a former age Days where it was hep to use gelatine to serve salads and desserts in the form of transparent bundt cakes And to artfully find a way to inject a synchronized swimming scene into any kind of movie while ensuring the swimmers’ hair and lipstick remained in place. These old magazines feature once ubiquitous ads for liquor and cigarettes – each one in their own way a brand of class and success Defining the buyer with variously hard, smart, masculine, and feminine images My own favorite is the thin smoke with the floral-designed filter for women. There are ads for department stores now long gone declaring mock turtle-necks the must-have this season And car ads from promising automakers now obscure after progress left them in the footnotes of this future I love these ads because to me they are time-markers Like book marks, they hold a page in the passing of years with differing forms and designs for different ages. For it would be a shame for a page in time to not be flagged, then just fade into the rest, as gone as blue blazes. When I see these time markers in magazine ads for wall-to-wall carpeting, avocado-colored wall paneling, and organs, I sometimes laugh I don’t laugh of contempt, though – far from it I rather fondly chuckle at these reminders that the new and improved is neither the first nor the last of products of human ingenuity we continue to covet, Nor are they the last of the fads we latched on to then let go when they became old and passé, And I know we will come back for them in some way some day. Not in the same way, for progress does have its say But in seeking a new trend or an old friend, we remain quite the same And all I wonder is what we do today that the kids will chuckle at when grown and looking at old fads? Putting bacon in everything? Craft beer made to taste like Girl Scout cookies? Burlap in wedding décor or throw pillows galore? By the time this is read, these will probably no longer be in favor, something new surely took over once more But I imagine a donation door attendant in fifty, sixty, or seventy years when I’m gone Receiving a poster or a form of a recording of a once well-loved story or song. Or perhaps an old souvenir, or the once trending contents of gift bags from celebrations longtime forgotten And like I do, the attendant might smile and reflect On a world that’s never truly left And regret having to recycle it rather than take it home But being glad for the chance to remember it before sending it on down the road.