SIMPLER DAYS, SMALLER DREAMS

By MICHAEL PERKINS

SMALL TOWNS ARE OFTEN ROMANTICIZED as places “where time stands still”, a label which speaks more of sentiment than reality. Our desire for a return to our personal Edens, the cradles of our formation, fires the imagination with a flurry of “what ifs” and “if onlys”, creating a fond longing for the impossible little burgs where such fantasy havens reside. Photographers, like the rest of us, hunger to capture signs that there might be a realm where the insane clock of progress is at least slightly slowed. It doesn’t take a lot to sell us the illusion.

Hence the strange compact pocket of commerce seen here, found in a corner of a little pharmacy in Ojai, California, encompassing the store’s entire “toy department”. And what toys; the lowest-tech collection of kid stuff to be found this side of 1958, pastimes and playthings that seem to have rocketed from the heyday of Dennis The Menace to the microchip era by magically leap-frogging past the Nintendos and pocket screens of the ‘70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. I mean, paddle balls? Bottled bubbles? Cap guns? “Go fish” card games? Holy Cold War, Batman, where did I put my skate key?

This image completely composed itself, as framing it just a few inches in any direction would have placed the viewer back in the land of contemporary meds and nostrums, unmistakably dreamless totems of the 21st century. The result is a strange kind of border region; a perimeter of “Adult” junk, cheek by jowl with a portal to simpler days and smaller dreams, a place where you measured a kid’s value by how well Suzie could negotiate the gyrations of a jump rope or whether Bobby could make it to his “fivesies” with a set of jacks. A world in which all the grand dreams of childhood could reside in one small corner of the local drugstore, snugly stored between innocence and awe.