Boomers, is it me or has time been speeding up significantly since we crossed that threshold into middle-age (albeit years ago)? I’m not talking about the typical Monday through Friday workweek that skips two days and then starts again before you even realize that there was a weekend in between. I am talking about years advancing faster than a PowerPoint presentation on automatic timing. Do you follow me? Well, I’m glad you do, because you know what they say about misery. Come take at trip with me down memory lane, and I’ll show you what I mean about fleeting time.
There I am, a scrawny, four year old girl, clogging around in a long skirt and mother’s old high heel shoes, and playing grown up with my miniature dolls who live inside their tin doll house. There was no Pre-Kindergarten back then, so I am enjoying my last year of freedom before starting school. I wish I could tell you that my childhood was spent doing exciting things like children of affluent people do, but my family was poor and we didn’t roll like that, so let’s get back to my own monotonous history.
Moving forward a few years, you’ll see that I have learned to love reading and writing, but don’t care much for arithmetic. The school day has ended and I am doing homework and then chores. Afterward, I rush outside and join my friends. We jump Double Dutch or play pickup sticks or hide and seek until sunset, and then I must go inside. When the weather is bad, I sit in our cozy apartment with my parents and siblings and we watch The Lone Ranger, I Love Lucy, or some other family program on our old black and white television — that is until dad bought a spanking new color set! Oh, happy day.
I have turned sweet sixteen and even as I blow out the candles on my birthday cake the scene advances several months, and there I am walking across the stage, beaming in my cap and gown during high school graduation as my proud parents look on from the audience.
Imagine now that someone suddenly presses the fast-forward button on the remote controlling my life and the decades are flipping like book pages as I move through courtships, marriage, children, career, divorce, and grandchildren. Throughout this time, I occasionally encounter people I knew who were children when I was a teenager and I am amazed to see that they have grown up and have children of their own, although I know full well that is the natural order of things. In the meantime, at intervals, my grandparents and some other older relatives are taking that final step over the threshold into eternity, as we all will do one day. Now push the play button in your head and bring us back to the present.
As our generation was aging, technology was reinventing every aspect of our world and changing everything around us. Satellites, computers, wireless phones, hidden cameras, robots, numerous futuristic contraptions, some of which I read about in old sci-fi novels are now a reality. No longer do I view as implausible the plots in books and movies like George Orwell’s 1984 and Stephen King tales about machines taking over the earth.
We Boomers know that our age is showing when we have more friends who are retired than working, and more dead than alive. But regardless of the fast advancing years and unstoppable changes, some of us have favorite things that we will hold on to ’til the end. Mine is music. I love it! Not that hip-hop, rap-a-tap, contemporary noise, but tunes from the 60s, 70s, and a sprinkling of 80s hits. Of course technology has intruded in the music world just as it has every place else. Compact discs replaced cassette tapes, 8 tracks, and vinyl records, and CD’s are being trumped by iPods and other portable media devices. Nevertheless, for the time being I can still sit back and enjoy some old school music like Steve Miller’s Fly Like an Eagle as “Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future.”