Thursday, May 10, 2018

Age

I've been young most of my life. That's strange to say, I know, but it's true. In my immediate family I am the youngest, and the youngest by a decade with siblings almost 20 years older. In my cousins I am the youngest, though only by a year and a month, but my closest in age cousin was a lot more worldly than I was, having grown up across the border in Chicago and being deep into the punk scene in the late 80s, taking buses to The Alley and the free bus to Golf Mill while I was riding my bike two blocks away to play in the South Park parking lot or go to 7-11. And on the other side of the family I am the youngest of the cousins by more than a decade, and again I have cousins on that side more than 20 years older than me. My parents and aunts and uncles grew up in the 30s and 40s. I was like an entire two generations younger. So I had a weird perspective of being really young and also knowing that old people weren't really that old, and realizing classmates who thought our grade school teachers in their 20s and 30s were old were just wrong  A lot of those teachers were younger than my brothers and sisters. I would marvel at friends who came to my house and asked how to turn on the piano as if it were a Casio keyboard, or couldn't bear to watch a classic movie because it wasn't in color, or didn't want to watch the presidential debate on tv because they thought it was boring.

I'm pretty sure this directly ties in with Einstein's major theories, right? I knew a lot about growing up in the pre and post WWII era because my parents did that and talked about it. Ration books and ice trucks for ice boxes and baseball games in empty lots and winning a jar of peanut butter or a bicycle at the movie theatre where you'd go all day to sit in the rare air conditioning and watch Westerns trailored by newsreels, and taking the streetcars and pre-Vatican 2 Mass and dressing up for everything and the newness of airplane travel and giant television sets with tiny screens powered by tubes and all of that felt familiar to me, even as I longed for, and occasionally got, faux paint spattered sweatshirts with one giant button, enormous hot pink and neon blue Swatch watches with pop out faces, rock star Barbie dolls, a super long teal earring paired with a small diamond stud, oversized sweaters paired with cuffed up jeans and jellies... The 80s were really far from the 50s. Blondie was really far from The Andrews Sisters. I liked them all and felt safe being young but knowing about those older things, having firsthand knowledge of full service gas stations (one of my brother's worked at Ollie's, before it became Amaco or Standard or something) and whole milk and drinking pop out of glass bottles and then returning it to the store for a deposit. I felt, weirdly, nostalgic for a past I never lived in but remembered fondly. And I felt nostalgic for it's counter-culture rival, the 1960s, too. I just desperately wanted to preserve all those times and the people who lived in them and keep them as part of my present as well.

And now, now for the first time in my life I am legitimately getting old. And now I feel old too, maybe a lot older, because I do intimately know those WWII and Hippy eras even though I really wasn't alive in them. And people who were alive then are disappearing fast and that says something about me and my place in this hierarchy of age. Now, for the first time in my life, I'm really not young, and I wish I knew a little more about the 80s than about the 50s, and I do appreciate the future. It certainly is strange to get older.