The more distant they become, the more we miss our childhood memories. We do this unintentionally even to the extent that definitely the most painful and hard times of our lives spent for searching ourselves while trying to keep up and put up with all this physical and mental “coming of age thing” are forever covered under a pink veil of a certain king of will: The will to remember those days as a timeless safe haven where we can hide in case of trouble or whenever we want to hit the escapist button and praise good old times for the sake of their perceived innocence and comfort.

Well, this being my blog my fellow readers, let me escape (or to be more accurate have a glimpse or two) to my own childhood from the window of cinema. Now I can explain the title. “Old Yeller” was a Sunday routine for Turkish public TV channels on Sundays mornings, for the kids. I was fortunate enough to be a child growing up on the Coastal Aegean Region. Namely; I had a bike that I could ride on dirt roads going through cotton fields, I almost had my own olive yard (of course it belonged to my granddad yet he had never interfered with my hobby of climbing to olive trees and trying to build tree houses there) and I had a dog. Hence, I was able to “relate” to the movie I watched on Sunday mornings.

I do not want to contradict myself, at least not in the public. So, I am also in the vein of glorifying my early years and actually I began to do so in the previous paragraph. But man, those were the days and ways… Let’s not rock the boat, we all have more than our share for today thus let us take refuge to our very own yesterdays.

The TV’s had less channels yet we have more friends. We did not need computer games or hours of animation overdose in order to entertain ourselves. A stick was a horse, a bike was a spaceship, and some marbles were billiard balls. On second thought, I think we may be the last generation of our country that was really brought up outdoors. I have an evidence your honors by the way: I asked one of my little cousins to describe a chicken and startlingly discovered that she had difficulty since she has been living nearly all four years of her life in a small flat and she has probably never seen one alive.

There was no cell phone yet everybody was able to meet on a specific location at a predetermined time quite punctually. Nowadays we all have phones which are not dumb as the adjective “smart” preceding them foreshadows. However, technology seems to harm mutual respect in this particular case since whenever people gather today they prefer to play with their gadgets to catch up with the latest uploads to Facebook, twitter, etc. during times of eye contact, ice breaking or small talk. In this case, social media leads to anti socialization.

The houses were a bit smaller but the homes were larger; sleepover guests were part of daily routine. We were like a great one family. As a child, I was aware of the fact that there were other homes where uncles, aunties, cousins, friends lived where I could feel as protected as I felt at home.

Similarly, the menu was modest yet the dinners were ceremonial in the good sense. We sit together, ate together, and talked together on the same table during lovely evening hours of the days. Today, apart from eating, even sitting together on the same family table is a privilege peculiar to some Sunday mornings. Because homes evolved into boarding places/hostels to a certain degree.

Anyway, let us glorify the past not demonize today.

Enough is enough.

The wheel of time cannot and should not be reversed.

But watching “Old Yeller” from time to time may a give all of us a chance to pass over at least some flags.