I was watching game 4 of the 1977 World Series, for some reason they’re not playing these days, and I was struck by a remarkable though: Wasn’t that just yesterday? I was alive then, I remember it… Oh, yeah, it was 43 years ago. I guess that explains why Ron Guidry looked so young.
If I’d been asked in 1977 to imagine life 43 years prior to that, 1934, I have had you talk to my grandfather, who was a young man then. To me, that was akin to the middle ages: How would I know?
Ah, to be young!
Now, having cruised through 60 years, I can see that I had it all wrong, or something. Maybe part of it is the ubiquity of that which brings the past to mind, which is a convoluted way of saying, it’s all on TV. As the above baseball reference shows, the recording and archiving of events past, brings them right back into our consciousness, often in living color. Keeping with baseball, I recently caught up with some games I missed in the late 70s and early 80’s because at the time I thought joining the Navy was the thing to do.
(I don’t regret it.)
Yet, it doesn’t seem that long ago. But it is. 30, 40, 50 years have passed since much of it was new. And it doesn’t help that you, or I should say I, hear the same music from across that time still being used in films and TV and ads, as if it was the new thing. Ironically, when many of those songs came out, had you suggested to the artists that they monetize their music into revenue streams, they have gone all apoplectic on you.
Now it’s good business sense.
For most of my life, and to a extent still, I was not big on reminiscing about the good old days. Often it turns people into angry cranks wounded that they’re no longer young and the “punks”, who oddly are their kids, aren’t duly awed and reverent of a past they didn’t experience and, sadly, know nothing about. But it is strange to be transported back in time, to re-witness events and shows with a older lense, and hopefully an appreciation of a time taken for granted because, at the time, we had all the time in the world.
The gist of which is this: the passage of time is perhaps the oddest thing we deal with in our lives, simply because it is there, like the air around us. It is being. And as anyone will confess, mentally, you never age. In your head you’re any age you choose because you feel no different. Only tired, weary, or in stark contrast to the face looking back at you when you dare to look into a mirror.
The past, however, remains young, like Ron Guidry and Thurman Munson back in 1977.
And yours truly.
©2020 David William Pearce
David William Pearce, Writer 