I’m not sure what sixty years-old is supposed to feel like but, as of December 24, 2024, I’m 60 years old. That’s super weird. I feel like Rutger Howard at the end of Bladerunner, lamenting that all my experiences are fading away like tears in the rain. Of course, it’s nothing that dramatic, but sixty years is a long time even if I don’t feel like I’m 60. I don’t know what sixty is supposed to feel like, but this is not it.
A 60-year-old was pretty damn old when I was a kid, all wrinkly and frail. Do you remember Wilford Brimley in Cocoon? Well, since it was a 1980s movie, many of you don’t. If you do, note that Wilford Brimley was 49 when he did that role. He looked like he was going on 79. I certainly don’t look like that, and I guess people don’t age the way they used to. I was on two deployments, spent years in the sun as a kid because when I was a kid because we actually played outside, and I ran for decades. I eat whatever and didn’t wear sunscreen. I don’t know what it is. Maybe I do look sixty to 20-year-olds. Whatever.
The best thing about sixty is that I’ve got to do a lot of stuff, been to many places, and seen a lot of things. The past is an alien world from the perspective of 2024. I remember the 1960s. Oh, not well. I was born the last week of the baby boom, so I just turned five when it became the 1970s. But I remember running my Matchbox car on the edge of the dinner table in my parents’ cramped apartment in Cincinnati. I have vague recollections of watching moon landing stuff. It’s the seventies when I became conscious. I remember Nixon winning reelection in 1972. I remember the Vietnam War on TV because we all used to watch the evening news on one of three networks. Oddly enough, that was the beginning of my conservatism. I remember a news report about medical evacuation helicopters in ‘Nam not being armed anymore, and I remember thinking that was stupid because the communists wouldn’t care if a chopper had a big red cross on it and would shoot it whether it was armed or not. I’m proud to say I’ve been based since about six.
While I am technically a boomer by one week, I’m really Gen X. It’s my generation that remembers the glory of growing up in elementary school and middle school in the 1970s. There is a sense of freedom we took for granted that the kids today can’t really understand. There were no parents around, not video games to suck up our attention. We went outside and played. We disappeared until the streetlights came on, and maybe we didn’t come in then. There were kids everywhere, and kids were outside all the time. We didn’t have play dates. You went across the street, knocked on the door, and asked Mrs. Sullivan if Torrey and Mikey could come out and play. And they did.
I don’t want to pretend it was perfect because it wasn’t. I think, over time, I’ve just forgotten a lot of the crappiness of the 1970s. Everything was cheap and tacky. The clothes were awful – the fun disco clothes you see weren’t what we wore to school. It was Garanimals, Sears jeans, and cheap T-shirts. The color palette would make you nauseous. Everybody’s parents seem to be getting divorced, except mine. And the hair – yikes.
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Our family didn’t have any money, but that was okay. I never felt poor except when Dad insisted on using a swatch of green shag carpet to cover up the torn bench seat in his 1971 Dodge Scamp. There was not much to buy compared to today. There were no fancy supermarkets. There were no bespoke butchers – I didn’t know the difference between a ribeye and a New York steak, and my mom just bought whatever was cheapest. On my birthday, we would go to Sizzler, and I thought that was the height of awesome. Today, I probably eat out more than I eat in, but it was a big deal when I was a kid. I heard once someone say something to the effect that your average Applebee’s has better food than 95% of the restaurants in the 1970s, and that’s no doubt true. It’s hard to explain the total mediocrity of things we now take for granted. I didn’t see a Kiwi fruit until the 1980s, and then it was a big exotic deal.
On the plus side, the music was awesome. We had an amazing soundtrack. That’s especially true in the eighties. What an awesome decade! The malaise of Jimmy Carter gave way to the glory of Ronald Reagan, and America came back and overcame the Soviets. Things just got better and better. You had to be there to understand. To be a college student then was amazing. Then the nineties came and things started downhill. The fact is that no one under forty-five really understands what living as an adult in a functioning America is like because they never have – too many black swans.
Oh, the joy of nostalgia, but you can indulge me. Sixty years old – I think that’s pretty cool. I’ve gotten to do a lot of things. I’ve seen technology change. I wasn’t just there before cell phones and computers. I was there when they first had calculators. I’ve seen history happen. I’ve lived overseas, gone to war, been a stand-up comic, written bestsellers, gotten married, had kids, and been on TV and radio. I used to listen to talk radio as a teen, and I get to host radio shows as an adult. I saw things happen with my own eyes that I later read about in history books.
I’m just a suburban kid from San Mateo, California (we moved there in the early seventies), and yet I could do pretty much everything I’ve wanted to do. That’s what I want to see happen again for the people who are twenty now. I want them to look back forty years on and be able to say they got to do what they wanted to do because that’s the America I grew up in. That’s the America I want back. That optimism, that excitement, that glory – that’s the America I want to leave behind. And thankfully, we now have a President coming in who wants those things, too. Don’t make any mistakes – what guys of my generation are fighting for is not to return to yesterday. It’s to build a great tomorrow that beats yesterday. It’s for you guys who are coming behind us.
Enjoy the ride. I’m going to keep enjoying mine.
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