I turned to the guy standing next to me in the trading office last week and said, “It’s crazy. I can remember things from fifty years ago clear as day.”
That is when it hit me. Fifty years ago tomorrow is when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Lake Superior. I remember Fahey Flynn reporting about it on Channel 7. That is how I learned where Lake Superior was on the map, tracing it with a little kid finger above the lake that wasn't far from my front door, Lake Michigan. I remember the Bears had a rookie running back named Walter Payton. Within those cold months of late 1975, I learned about shipwrecks and greatness. Not much later a new poster of Sweetness hung above my dresser. I wish I still had that poster.
But that’s the thing. In your head, fifty years ago is Prohibition and the Depression, not Watergate.
Not Billy Beer.
Not "Jaws" or "The Bad News Bears."
Not my first trip up the Sears Tower.
Not the Christmas I got “The Duke” football from Santa. That ball was as hard as a cannonball. If you landed on it wrong during smear-the-queer, you would have a bruise in the shape of Texas for a week. So we beat the hell out of each other with a Nerf instead. That new lime colored foam thing that could survive a war at the neighborhood playground.
Fifty years ago was also the time that I started noticing boobies. Turns out Marcia Brady had them the whole time, I just finally noticed once "The Brady Bunch" went into syndication. Carly Simon had banana ones, Raquel Welch watermelon ones. That is what sucks about being a grown up...
... you can't compare breast to fruit anymore.
Back to why this came up. Twenty-nine men met Heaven’s Gate seventeen miles north of Whitefish Point, Michigan. I can still see my Oldman explaining the whole thing to my Ma in the living room. They were ancient to me then, maybe late thirties. My gramma, who ended up living to 106, was only sixty-nine at the time.
And in that same era, my bedroom was being painted red, white, and blue for the Bicentennial coming up in 1976. My dresser, my walls, even the plywood flag my father cut by hand. America was everywhere.
But fifty years moves fast.
The Fitzgerald is just a footnote now. The people who raised me are gone. Walter ran for touchdowns until 1987, and his poster eventually was replaced by Farrah Fawcett. Staring down at me like a sun you couldn’t stare at too long.
One day you are throwing wobbly passes at the playground. Next thing, you’re the guy in the trading office telling stories from the olden days.
Those twenty-nine seamen have been strolling in eternal rest for half a century. Maybe when I get there, I’ll see Farrah? I'm sure Walter is still breaking tackles.
My parents who ended up divorced are spending eternity together. Which means that I will end up in the same place with the mother of the Shepkids. The joke is on us Chalkheads. Maybe instead of watching the timer, we need to love more, hate less and forgive one another?!?!
Snow is starting to fall lightly in the Divorced Dad District. The Bears are home on a cold, stubborn November afternoon. Veterans Day is this week, the day the world agreed to stop killing each other. Lest we forget.
Put the scraper back in your car. See the beauty in the first blast of winter.
And remember...
...fifty years ago, we were the kids skitching behind the bumper of a car.
Time flies. It always has.
