This article is as much the product of rampant nostalgia as it is anything else. Our nation’s Independence Day is one of those calendar events that gets you looking backwards. This summer is the centennial of Gallipoli and the first use of poison gas on the Western Front. Summer itself causes retrospection as parents think back to their own lazy, hazy days and try to (re-) capture those for their own children.
Marcel Proust perhaps most famously made much of nostalgia, when he allowed a tea-soaked cake to transport his protagonist across seven volumes in the search of things past.