Thoughts on Growing Older: A Generation X Perspective

Last night I was waiting for my husband to come to bed, laying there in the half-dark room listening to him ramble around the house, drinking a glass of chocolate almond milk, turning off lights, brushing his teeth. Instead of getting cranky with his futzing around, I did something I had not done in years, yet in my youth had done every night for decades.

I turned the radio "sleep" button on.

For those unfamiliar with the 20th Century, this button turns the radio on for 60 minutes and then automatically turns it off during your slumber. For all of my childhood I fell asleep this way, listening to Chicago stations, WJMK "Magic 104", "the Loop", WLUP, the Dr Demento Show on Sunday nights.
Drifting into dreamland by the analog crackle of the airwaves.



In fact, I have the very same clock radio I fell asleep listening to as a child. One of my most precious possessions is this Realistic Chronomatic 230 which I got in 1982, as a Christmas gift from my grandparents. My brother got a matching one. Gram and Gramps were definitely trying to teach us to be responsible, wake up on our own, and quit being such a burden to our Mom. "Grow up, kids!", was the message.

We have a long history. It's been a part of every bedroom I ever lived in, from my childhood home on Chicago's Northwest side, to college, the dorms, the boarding house in DeKalb Illinois where I met Chad, to our youthful move west 25 years ago, to Flagstaff, to Jerome to Clarkdale, AZ.
This clock radio has awakened me for every important day of my life since, graduations and birthdays and funerals and new jobs and weddings and flights. It continues to do so.

But I quit running the sleep button after getting married, because my husband wasn't a fan.

Last night, after a long hiatus, the sleep button returned to my routine, and Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters" chimed to life. There in the dark, straight as a log, my dogs nestled along my side. A long thread ran through me as I lay there, a 47 year-old woman suddenly feeling like 20, 16, 12....

It was overwhelming, this sense of nostalgia and a feeling about life in general gripping me.
What it means...why it's both infuriatingly fast and slow at the same time.
Was I here before?
Are our souls recycled?
Who was I before and who will I be next time?
Do we meet the same souls from life to life?
Those people you have an instant rapport and connection with--- were we connected in a past life?
Spouses or siblings or BFFs or coworkers in another time? Or enemies, working shit out from life to life?

The clock radio and the 1990s Metallica ballad put me in a trance, putting me in close proximity to accessing these answers. They were just out of reach. I was floating in space, and maybe if I worked at it a little harder I might find myself 30 years younger, and waking up in a past bedroom in one of my old houses, starting over, choosing an alternate ending.
Tears quietly filled my eyes, I felt so jumbled and electric.

Will I feel this way laying on my hospice bed at 96? As my life winds down?
Entertaining some younger person next to me with tales of the 20th Century?

"There was a time someone called you on the phone and if you didn't answer you didn't know who it was that had called you! It was all a mystery. And even if you DID answer, you still didn't know who was calling until they started talking. And you never knew where they were calling from. We used to do this thing called 'crank calling' where we'd dial random numbers and mess with whoever answered."

"There was a time we didn't have red M&Ms. Because Red Dye No. 2 caused cancer."

"And, conversely, there was a time when all pistachios were dyed red for some reason. Your fingers would get all red from peeling the shells off."

"Used to be you could go places and no one knew you were there. And you could have your own thoughts and not have to share them with an audience. All of my teen angst was written in journals and hidden in a box. It wasn't broadcast on the internet."

"My baby bedroom was yellow. Because that's what they did back then. Yellow or green. Nobody knew ahead of time if you were a boy a girl. Now we know. But we still don't know at the same time. Because maybe that kid will identify as something else. Ironic."

2022 now. I started this story two years ago, further illustrating how time flies.

 

At my job, I've been here almost 20 years now. When I started I was 29 and was once one of the youngest employees. Now at 49 I am one of the oldest. Randomly trying to explain to Millennials about life in the 20th Century. 

Okay, so there was this commercial around 1984 that went what you'd call viral now. It was really popular. These little old ladies were ordering hamburgers at a fast food counter, and they bring out this huge bun with like, a comically tiny burger sitting in it. One little old lady, this 80 year old woman named Clara Peller yelled out, "WHERE'S the BEEF!?" 

Suddenly, everyone was yelling this. WHERE'S THE BEEF? Like we shouted it at people out of the school bus windows. Girls shouted it at guys on the street. There were t-shirts and stickers, and Clara Peller became famous.

It sounds really stupid when you talk about it now. 

"We didn't have thousands of pictures of ourselves growing up like kids do today. Most teens probably have 100s of selfies in their phones right now.. I only have a handful of photos of my high school friends and me. My Mom is a great photographer so we do have documentation of our youth, but it was special to have your photo taken. It cost money to have film developed, and camera rolls were limited to 24 or 36 shots. We didn't always bring a camera along, but when we did it was special. We had to choose wisely before snapping that shutter. And it was real. No filters or fakery."

Here's me at 14. I recently saw this pic in an album at my mom's house, and looking at it now I wonder why I never had a boyfriend in high school. What a peach! I was a hot number! Maybe I was too hot? Or maybe I wasn't hot at all, for the times. I didn't wear make-up or do my hair up with Aqua-Net. I was an art student, and threw the discus. I was the slowest girl on the cross country team. I listened to old blues and big band music. Maybe too weird and natural for the average fellow teen boy of the mid 1980s. Maybe I was somehow both ahead of and behind the times. Maybe some there were some shy guys my style who secretly pined for me, just as I secretly pined for other dudes who I felt were way beyond my ability. I wasn't all that "boy crazy" though. I was entertained by my own little projects and adventures and imagining being married to various Chicago Cubs. I had very few beaus before I got married at 23. Ironically, I married a man who grew up in the suburbs going to all of the school dances, dressed in suits, driving a hot rod. A real stud with spiked hair and skinny ties! He'd had plenty of girlfriends before he moved into the same boarding house as me in college. 

 

 

 

My Realistic clock radio woke me up again today, 39 years after I got it. Chad and I both turn 50 this year. I drive a 49 year-old car. We live in a 118 year-old house. The passage of time is something all around me. I am steeped in it, surrounded by it daily. Keenly aware of it, yet also not understanding it and what our place in time signifies.

 

Biffing it hard on my roller skates at 49 has much longer recovery time than it did when I was 8. I wear safety gear and a helmet now too, which I never did as a kid. We're more fragile now, no longer made of rubber. Bruises take shape faster. Skin heals slower. The cell turnover rate slows. We're past our prime.

It's weird because in many ways I feel exactly the same as I did at age 8. 

As we push 50, things that have happened to our bodies over the years, either by injury or diet or simply the passage of time cause the "check engine light" to come on. We laughed about this meme, because it stopped us from crying....

The chunks of flesh the dermatologist carves off of us due to long ago forgotten sunburns. They don't even really warn you before they slice! It hurts a lot. Chad has problems with a foot and leg he injured in a cross-country skiing crash in college in the '90s. He has to take pills for high blood pressure and cholesterol and watch his blood sugar. He had to have eye surgery due to retinopathy. I've already had a colonoscopy. There are doctors appointments and waiting rooms now.

I'm really irritated I have to wear "cheaters" to read the fine print. The first time I realized I couldn't read that small print was really shocking to me. My eye doc said that normally people much younger in their 40s need them, so I'm above average...but he also said my +1 prescription is going to go up as I get older (+2.5 is the biggest cheater you can buy off the rack at the store). As a teen I used to draw the smallest cartoons, and on 1/4 size paper, so tiny and focus so closely on them. 

Old fillings from the 1980s crack and the dentist has to replace them. My jaw pops because because 1. I'm a woman in my 40s and 2. as a child in the '80s I would chew entire packs of Hubba Bubba at a time. 

The sun spots on my left cheek from being in the driver's seat in Arizona for 25 years. It adds up, slowly but surely. My hands look like a 90 year-old's most days. My little uterus, never having born a fruit, quietly drifts into menopause. Gravity and greys arrive right on cue. Having an old house and an old car, I am accustomed to the treacheries of age and oxidation. Sometimes it's just the genes. My silver streaks are a direct link to my paternal side. My dad was fully grey by age 36. And because I'm the same girl as I was at age 14, I don't dye it. I rock it natural.

Q. What's the trick to looking good as you get older?

A. To never have been that cute when you were younger.

My looks were never a source of praise or attention, so there was never any kind of currency for me in being cute. I developed a personality and talents independent of my appearance and for that I am grateful as I grow older. That fresh peach I used to be has aged and distilled into a smoky brandy, full of nuance and knowledge.

Michael Apted's "Seven Up!" series followed  a group of British 7 year-olds every 7 years. I think they're on "64 Up" now. The initial premise behind the documentary is that human being's personality is fully formed by age 7. I tend to agree and the documentary over the years definitely confirms it. 

Some things don't change with the passage of time. Some are timeless. But most things are not this way.

Elder generations exit. 

Friends begin to leave too. 

The first friend of yours to die is always such a shocking revelation about mortality. But by the time you've reached my mom's age, 80, you will have seen many of your old friends pass away and start to feel lonely if you think about it too long, everyone who's gone all around you. Where did they go? Will we see them again in the next life?    

Does time overlap like a burrito as posited by Richard Norvik (Barry Miller) in the time-travel classic "Peggy Sue Got Married" (c.1986)? What happens to us when the lights go out and we breathe our last breath? Does our soul move along to the next place? Is everyone hanging out together in Heaven, or are we recycled as babies are born? Is there a finite supply of souls? When you have a "deja-vu" are you remembering a past life? Or an alternative universe that never happened? Do the spirits of dead send us messages and visit us in our dreams?

If I fall asleep listening to my clock radio, might I wake up and be 14 again, in my childhood home, with my old leather Nikes kicked off in the corner? Going through all of the same challenges all over again? 

Would I even want to?