...When I'm Seventy-four

The idea of 74 was probably incomprehensible to twenty-something Paul McCartney when he penned When I’m 64, but here I am staring that age. Sure, I still have all my hair and my wife insists she still needs me and feeds me while complaining I’ve become a tad persnickety in my culinary tastes (but man cannot live on greens and tofu alone). My birthday meal tomorrow includes meat and potatoes! A lot has changed in almost three quarters of a century. History has been written and continues to be re-written. Truth has become truthiness. But some things stand out indelibly.

I remember when my family got its first TV, a big wood console with a small screen broadcasting in black and white. I remember the picture of the Indian appearing on the screen, the announcement it was the end of the broadcast day, the three channels ABC, NBC and CBS (all free without a cable subscription) plus the additional local channel. I remember Saturday mornings watching Mighty Mouse, Crusader Rabbit, The Andy Devine Show (remember Froggie? Hiya kids, hiya, hiya hiya with Midnight the Mouse, as well as Gumby, Huckleberry Hound, Bozo, Quick Draw McGraw, Felix the Cat, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and of course, the Mouseketeer Club, Mickey, et al. And lest I forget, beloved Shari Lewis with Lambchop.

I remember when the first color TV arrived on our block (a street of little houses made of tacky tacky that truly did all look the same, peopled by house-maker mom, dad who served in WW II, two or three kids). Our next door neighbors got it and on a Sunday night the entire block crammed into their small living room to watch Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in color!

I remember the atomic bomb drills, all us kids taking shelter under our wood desks in the event of nuclear attack, or sitting in the hallway, head between knees, ready to kiss our asses goodbye (did anyone actually believe that was going to save us?). I remember the timed drills to see how fast we could walk home from elementary school to share our last few minutes on Earth with family.

I remember saving up pennies, nickels and quarters to buy Topps Baseball Cards at the local stationers—a nickel got you three cards plus a flat square of gum. Ten cents got you a Batman or Superman comic (you had to root for one or the other). Twenty-five cents got you a triple edition, money saved shoveling driveways of neighboring houses for fifty cents a pop! We’d stick the baseball cards between our bicycle spokes to simulate the sounds of a motorcycle-very cool. We’d send our baseball cards to our favorite players and they’d send them back signed…for free!

I remember coming home from school, dropping off my stuff and taking off on my Schwinn three-speed bike, my mom’s only admonition to be home in time for dinner! (so much for playdates and helicopter parenting). She would have freaked to know how far I was venturing from home but had not yet heard of helicoptering.

I remember my first trip to McDonalds for a hamburger, fries and a shake for $1.00, the occasional TV dinner eaten on trays in front of the TV set (a rare treat. My fav Swanson’s Chicken Pot Pie). I remember Sunday mornings when my sister and I would walk up to Springfield Blvd, crossing significant traffic to Sherri’s Bakery for crumb buns, jelly and creme filled donuts to bring home for Sunday morning breakfast, the only time we got to eat breakfast with our father. I can still taste those crumb buns.

I remember sitting in my father’s lap as he calmed my fears of nuclear destruction making headlines in the papers. He told me “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once.” Only later, reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, did I discover my father had not made that up.

I remember my grandfather telling me what a great country America was. He’d never talk about his childhood in Lithuania, a land of repression and tyranny. Ours was truly a land of opportunity (what would he think today?). And I remember his pride when we moved for our 700 sf house in Bayside to a beach community in Huntington Bay, New York. He’d braved the unknown to make it to America. My father had taken the next leap forward. What will I do?

I remember the Bay of Pigs. The sinking of the Thresher nuclear submarine (one of my elementary school classmates fathers was aboard that doomed vessel). I remember the Gulf of Tonkin, the war zone splashed across the TV screen accompanied by kill ratios, and the wise, trustworthy and settling words of Walter Cronkite. I remember the three daily newspapers that arrived at our house, two in the morning, one in the evening, and everyone in our family read them, or at least parts of them. I remember when the New York Times actually had all the news that’s fit to print! I remember watching Jack Ruby assassinate Lee Harvey Oswald on TV…something clicking in my head, a loss of innocence, the possibility that things were not always what they seemed, and I remember Walter Cronkite returning from Vietnam warning us we were being bamboozled by our leaders. I remember watching Hootenanny, listening to the folkies lead us into the true 1960’s. Hadn’t Bob Dylan had already told us don’t follow leaders watch the parking meters? I remember when music became politics. When innocence turned to cynicism. But hope remained.

I remember the first time boarding a Boeing DC 3 Propeller plane, my family decked out in our finest. The stewardess (yes, that’s what they were called then) taking me into the cockpit to meet the pilot and co-pilot, the pilot pinning wings to the lapel of my sports coat, the take off (count to twenty, something I’ve been doing ever since) and watching the ground fall away as the world resolved into a miniature.

I remember watching the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan Show in NYC, all the little girls screaming, thinking I was above all that, instead turned on to The Blues Project and other new bands like Vanilla Fudge and The Incredible String Band and Pentangle Scott Muni featured on underground WNEW. But I also remember Leonard Bernstein’s Youth Concert Series at the NY Philharmonic, Soupy Sales telling us to reach into our mother’s purses and send him all the green paper in them…

I remember. But my granddaughters cannot imagine a world before emoji’s, I-Pads, smartphones and computer-driven animation. Only one of them can remember a president other than Donald Trump. So I will talk to my grandchildren about the things I remember, the good and the bad, and teach them well to analyze and question authority. My forebears got me this far. My job’s the next leap forward.