A beautiful day dawned and I was up and at it, just straining at the bit to get out and enjoy a nice long walk. I targeted my journey for the neighborhood streets instead of the Park, hoping to ward off any mosquito bites due to those pesky critters that might be lurking in the dense brush near the Ecorse Creek. As I walked along Fort Street, a Model T passed me up. It looked to be in excellent condition, and seemed to be tooling along at the same speed as the other cars. Well fancy that – a horseless carriage right before my very eyes! My guess is that Model T’s owner was probably scoping out potholes in advance of Saturday’s Cruisin’ Downriver event. I also saw several roadsters, some muscle cars and a few very old pick-up trucks. Ahhh … the prelude to the Cruise begins earlier and earlier every year. The good ol’ days and nostalgia make for big events and big bucks nowadays. Everyone wants to wax nostalgic about an era that might have been before their time, or maybe they just want to relive the “good old days”. We’ve all received those e-mails or Facebook posts that start out “remember when?” and they speak about a simpler life – a life devoid of electronic devices, sitting around the supper table with your family, playing outside with your friends or cruisin’ with your buddies because cars were king. There were no locked doors, one black-and-white television set which everyone crowded around and people respected one another. Everyone longs for the good ol’ days and it seems the phrases “back in the day”, “Throwback Thursday” or “Flashback Friday” have crept into our everyday vocabulary, almost too much sometimes. Do you and your social media pals post old-time pictures of yourself, family members or friends on “Throwback Thursday” or “TT” as it is sometimes called? I often reflect on good times growing up and like to choose pictures from my youth, or as a young woman, to accompany my posts. Most of the pictures are treasured family memories or glimpses of past events or places I have visited through the years. On one occasion, the former Community Editor of the hyper local news site “Patch” sent me an e-mail: “Linda, I just love when you use vintage pictures with your posts.” Ouch!! Well, Joanna is only 28 years old after all. Through gritted teeth I thanked her for the compliment, though I didn’t know whether to cringe or bristle at the word “vintage”. Now, I certainly don’t feel like vintage material and the photos were circa mid-1950s and beyond. Nonetheless, that comment, even though it was meant as a compliment, smarted somewhat and really didn’t sit too well with me. I had that same empty feeling I get when I take a survey and must plug in the year I was born. In that drop-down menu, now I must scroll down and keep scrolling and scrolling ad nauseum until I reach 1956. Well, as the saying goes “you are only as old as you feel” and I feel young at heart, so the word “vintage” does not apply to me. My interpretation of a vintage picture is some of those crinkled-up, creased, black-and-white photos of my great grandparents standing in front of the wagon they hitched up to their horse Mable to go to church every Sunday or maybe my grandparents on their wedding day. Those old photographs paint a picture of life on a farm or in a rural town. This picture that I’m using for this “Throwback Thursday” blog post is from a venue called “Frontier City” in Oklahoma where I visited with my parents back in the mid-60s. Frontier City was a town recreated from right out of the Old West and you could watch a gunfight, take in a rodeo, sip a sarsaparilla in the saloon with some cowboys and their cronies, or have a go on the “bucking” bronco. The photographer, decked out in such garb as an old-fashioned morning coat and high-buttoned boots, took this vintage-style picture above, using a huge box camera à la Matthew Brady. It was all great fun. That photographer tinted the picture in sepia tones to make it look old and rustic – no Photoshop or Pic Monkey to enhance photos back in in those days. Ride ‘em cowgirl!