Tuesday, July 20, 2010
W and I were talking about passing time yesterday, how already, 1996 was “a long time ago,” another era, to our kids. He talked of how he was realizing how soon after World War II we were born. He said that if “Back to the Future” were made today, it would go back in time to… the time the movie really was made. I remember going to see that in Columbus — I think I was expecting Sarah then. I was thinking of how music of “our” era — the ’60s and ’70s — that music today is as old as music of the Roaring Twenties was to us!
It’s all too mind-boggling. To me, the ’90s are still today’s times. But then I realize how much has changed since then. I can still remember so clearly what it was like going to England in 1992 — it shouldn’t be nearly 20 years ago. In the mid-nineties, which still sounds so contemporary to me, we were actually in a completely different phase of life. We were in the thick of raising kids — in the prime of family life, the kids in elementary school. Lots of busyness with ferrying kids to music lessons, sports, Scouts. Now these young parents, 15 years younger than I, are doing that. In 1996 we got our first internet connection at home and signed up for Prodigy. I posted to my first discussion board, which was about Keanu Reeves (I was smitten with him, having just seen “Speed.”) Message boards were run on Delphi. It was the beginning of a technology that changed our lives so dramatically. A while after Prodigy, we got America Online. But that phase ended long ago.
I think of Baby Kate — it’s still so clear to me — and her napping in my arms the way Neko does now. And baby Sarah in Columbus in her array of Oshkosh overalls.
I don’t want to live in the past. But it makes me want to cry, how it whizzes by, how you can’t go back and do it right. That there’s no rough draft of life that you get to perfect. The challenge now is to make life vibrant today. Because someday this will sound like a relatively young, vital time of life that I’ll want to have lived fully.
