That was the world that was

“The days of our years are threescore and ten…” Psalm 90:10

Threescore and ten ,,, less one. Happy birthday to me.

It’s a thought provoking moment entering into what the Psalmist surmises to be my final trip around the sun. Even if I complete the circuit and, like the old Timex commercial, “take a licking, but keep on ticking” one more milestone will have been passed … driver’s license at 16; draft card at 18; legal liquor at 21; colonoscopy at 50; Medicare at 65; hide and seek with the Grim Reaper from now on.

It does get a guy to thinkin’.

Now for a guy who’s safely out of adolescence I’m feeling pretty good. Oh, there’s the occasional hemorrhoid, and that’s a pain in the … well, you know. There’s the line up of little brown pill bottles on the bathroom vanity and the floor seems to have gotten a lot lower since I was a sprout, but for the most part, anything I could do during the Nixon administration I can do now … only more slowly and less frequently.

But even if my shoe size and social security number have stayed the same, looking back, it’s amazing how much has changed, in addition to my belt size, that is.

It doesn’t take much thinking to realize that I was born into a whole different world. It was a world that lived by pencil and paper – I’d be toddling around Mom’s kitchen before the world had 100 computers slowly crunching numbers far from where ordinary people lived. Making a phone call outside the city limits was a noteworthy event and a costly one at that. To find air conditioning in the summer, most people had to go to the movies.

When we got hungry, home was where the dinner was. Eating out was reserved for special occasions or when you were too far from home to make it for supper and there were no relatives nearby to sponge a meal from. There was no such thing as vegan, paleo, or gluten-free. What landed on the table was likely some improbable concoction based on Campbell’s Soup, Jello or some kind of canned fruit. Bread was white and Wonder. If you weren’t an organic chemist, you’d never heard of cholesterol.

Get four people together, odds were that at least two of them smoked, so there’d best be an ashtray handy – be it in the doctor’s waiting room or the school principal’s office. Of course, cars, houses, trains and factories also smoked and city people were wont to quip that they liked to see the air before they breathed it.

All in all it was a far more hazardous time. Cars had no seatbelts, kids were sprayed down with DDT to keep the headlice out of their classrooms. OSHA was two decades into the future and the only helmets to be found were for football players and infantrymen.

It could be nasty too. LGBTQ folks were in jail, in the closet or in dirty jokes. A woman’s place was in the home. People of color were colored people and they’d better know their place if they knew what was good for them. As for Indians, they were in cowboy movies or on reservations. Custer had the right idea and Columbus was a hero.

Nobody gave a thought to saving the whales.

That was the world I started my growing up in. The world of Joe McCarthy, polio epidemics and staticky black and white TV. It was a world so different that most of us wouldn’t know how to live in it and, for the most part, wouldn’t want to, no matter what the professional nostalgists and doomsayers insist. Looking back and looking ahead, it looks like, for the most part, we’ve been on the right track. We’ve dodged some bullets and, on too many occasions, screwed up royally, but for dang near everyone life now is a whole lot richer, safer and just plain better than it was when I got a start on mine. We’ve come a long way. Let’s not forget that.