When I was just a kid, I had this sense of time that ended with the second millennium. I was born at the first quarter of the 20th Century and thought that if I made it to end of that century it would be a signal achievement. My grandparents died young and with the First World War behind me and the Second just beginning, long life did not seem to be promising. 75 years is nothing to be sneezed at and back when I was a kid, it seemed ancient and respectable.
When I reached my tenth year, I figured I had reached a significant landmark, a tenth of a century. With the passage of time and in the haste to learn how to live I put these ideas aside but still kept the goal in the back of my mind. Hitting the barriers of 20, 30, 40 and 50 were not the emotional let-down I expected. I barely noticed them while trying on new physical aspects of loss of agility, arthritis, new prescriptions and the up and down roller coaster of diet with weight gain and loss.
I never was able to dance although I fancied myself to be somewhat of a singer - of the folk song variety. Most of the popular enthusiasm in music and entertainment were not for me. I have had a life-long preference of early to bed and early to rise. While others were humming the latest melodies and rhythms, I sneered at Sinatra, Mathis and barely noticed Elvis, the Beatles and the rock and rollers. All of these defined our culture at critical points, made their mark and I knew them not.
On the other side of the millennium I am a stranger here myself. I find I have the aged individual’s lack of concern with what is the latest and extreme. I think taste has lowered from the intellect somewhat down and to the rear. I deplore the lack of good manners, taste and reverence for the icons of the past that have met and bested the test of time.
As each new generation raises its voice to be heard, the preceding one closes its ears against the din and finds there is no synchronicity. I say to you truly, I do not regret my loss of hearing for there is much out there that I do not and cannot recognize. It is hard to think that youth and age are related in this generation. That may be the inevitability of age taking its toll as the younger generation overcomes the tastes and proprieties of the older. I have become an anachronism and am often irrelevant, overlooked and dismissed.
And, so it goes and here I am a stranger where I once believed I was a mover and shaker with the best of them. This is yet, again, an illusion for I did not want to sing the popular songs and never could dance.