OXFORD — It’s almost like being in a time warp from my teenage years when drive-in movies were in their heyday and Mississippi families grew their own vegetables and had a few chickens to produce eggs and an occasional chicken dinner.
With the coronavirus shutting down movie houses across the country, drive-in theaters are reported to be doing a booming business.
Some are using LED screens to show movies during the day, unlike the old days when they only operated at night.
One movie theater in Utah is showing outdoor movies on a temporary screen set up on a parking lot near its building.
The advantage of a drive-in is that families can see a movie on a big screen while maintaining social distancing. Couples with babies and toddlers don’t have to hire a sitter if they are of a mind to take the kids.
When I was in high school, there were at least three — maybe four — drive-in theaters in the Hattiesburg area where I lived.
However, teenagers and young adults, on dates with the opposite gender, didn’t always go to the drive-ins to see a movie. For them, there was no social distancing.
In addition to a spike in drive-in movie attendance, there are some other items, aside from toilet paper and hand sanitizer, that are hot sellers and a reminder of bygone eras.
Among them are baby chickens.
My kids got one that grew up to be a mean rooster that eventually was farmed out to my mother-in-law. When he attacked one of her grandchildren, he ended up being in chicken and dumplings.
But this year, according to reports, more people are buying baby chicks to start their own flocks to produce eggs, which have been in short supply lately at supermarkets.
Also, judging from seed purchases, more people are planning to plant gardens this year than in the recent past.
One other similarity between today’s virus outbreak and my childhood and teenage years is that a crippling and sometimes deadly disease was going around then.
As a kid, I worried more about catching polio than I now do about coming down with COVID-19, although I am not taking that prospect lightly and am doing what I can to prevent it.
Thanks to Jonas Salk and medical science, polio has been wiped out in most of the world, but there are still people my age and younger dealing with the long-term effects of the disease.
It’s safe to predict that eventually there will be a vaccine against the coronavirus.
Dunagin, who lives in Oxford, is a retired longtime Mississippi newspaperman.
