Get Your "Ephemera Now!"

Here is a blog that really is a treat. I stumbled upon it while searching for pictures of houses decorated in the Retro-Fifties style, hoping for some bright ideas on what to do with my own house. www.ephemeranow.com has all of that and more.

There are ads from the midcentury Golden Age of advertising art: pretty people (okay, girls), mouthwatering food, heartwarming, "Ozzie and Harriet" type domestic scenes, and now-classic cars to die for. A lot of humor, some high drama, some early-Sixties Christmas photos of a family that evidently has something to do with the webmaster, and even a few frights (check out the bean-eating "Demonic Tot" on yesterday's posting). Oh, and all the Retro-Fifties-decor you could ever want or need.

I don't know exactly what it is about this blog that keeps me coming back, but rarely does a day go by that I don't check in to see what's new. (It's the "New" selection that gets you into the actual, daily postings.) And I find myself frequently revisiting the old ads. Those from the late Fifties and Camelot-Era Sixties, I find especially beguiling. I was born during the Kennedy years, and the way things look in the advertising of the period is the way they look in my earliest, most-misty memories.

My dad passed away just four months ago, after a lengthy and debilitating illness. And my mom is now confined to the dementia ward of an elder-care facility, in an advanced state of Alzheimer's. It's been a long, long haul from the days when they looked like they do in the photos I looked through while compiling the collage for Dad's memorial. Mom looked a heckuva lot like Jackie Kennedy in those days, and Dad was a tall, Nordic, movie-star-handsome fellow. When the memorial service was over, I didn't have the heart to take the collage apart and put those pictures away.

As to why I spend so much of my blog-surfing time at Ephemera Now, I guess I just answered my own question. The memories of the folks in those pictures aren't merely "America's memories," in some vague and symbolic sense. They belong to ALL of us. Even those of the webmaster, and of the bean-eating Demon Child.