One day, oh about five years back I signed on the computer and I had a dictionary/word of the day application. The word of the day on that day was the phrase 'salad days.' The term comes from Shakespeare, who along with the Bible is responsible for so many idioms, phrases and sayings we still use. "My salad days, when I was green in judgment," wrote the Bard (in Antony and Cleopatra). That brought back a mini-flood of memories of what salad days means to me.
Wishing for the days when I first wore this suit. Baby has grown older, it's
no longer cute. Too many voices. They've made me mute. Baby has grown older.
It's no longer cute.
But I stay on, I stay on. Where do I get off? On to greener pastures. The
core has gotten soft.
Look at us today. We've gotten soft and fat. Waiting for the moment, it's
just not coming back. So serious about the stuff we lack. Dwell upon our
memories but there are no facts.
Recently I discovered a reunion page on a social networking site for former kids who were "hardcore/punk" and hung out at the hang-outs near where we grew up in the metropolitan area of a mid-sized Southern City. It was a bit of a unique situation. Since many of us were very few in number in our own respective high schools back then, we gravitated toward each other through our common love of the music and the other aspects of the punk/hardcore movement. There were a few places that brought us together and so we forged friendships with people beyond our own high school. In many cases, our own high school was not such a fun place for kids who were so different and provocative in their style, tastes and appearance. We sure had a lot of fun together, though. That's even where I met and fell in love with Big Daddy. I took a little honeymoon perusing the reunion board and its members, many people I knew only marginally or very little, and a few I remember knowing fairly well. Those were very formative years for me and my friends. But like all good things when it comes to youth culture and social movements, there was a dark side. I took off my rose coloured glasses shortly.
When I first met Big Daddy he was a skinhead. Wait! Before you throw rotten tomatoes at me, may I inform you that there was a time when being a skinhead was not interchangeable with being a racist or fascist, see here? It's true. Initially skinheads were just one other facet of the punk movement. Somehow the movement morphed and got hijacked into a white supremacist group, and that's all most people associate it with nowadays. There was a time when it was not so.
It was just a bunch of tough working class and middle class kids looking to express themselves through music and things that were important to them. From where I stood and where Big Daddy was back then, it looked like this: The burgeoning little skinhead scene in our area was primarily concerned with music hand having fun (Hey! we were kids after all); their own poverty, employment and future; being disdainful of arty pretension (they called it being an Art-Fag); and not "screwing" people over to get by - being true and loyal to your friends; having some kind of integrity when dealing with others.
The scales of that all tilted when a small group of their friends returned from another bigger scene in another state and where they became affiliated with the racist kind of skinhead-ism. They became the majority and that was that. We always hated racism, and we could just never come on board with that. For us, simply hating people for the way they were born and the traits they were born with was just pure evil.
Big Daddy and I gradually stopped hanging out and running around with that whole scene, as most of us were growing up and moving on to the other things in life one naturally moves on to.
As I looked over the reunion page recently, I wondered, where people stood on those issues today now that they are all grown up. Did they carry that same old baggage? Or did they grow and change? I wondered, and the answers do not seem clear or readily apparent.
The song Salad Days, and really the entire Salad Days EP became somewhat of a theme song for that time of our lives. The record was the band Minor Threat's swan song, and it signaled the end of an era for them and for us. Like a million other teenagers growing up who came before us and a million others afterward, we were questioning our youthful idealism and wondering if it could make it in the real world of adulthood.
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