When the Earth Cooled

If you’re reading this say, forty years from now, like in 2054, you probably believe that age 82 isn’t very old. By then “old” may start at about 100. Until you stop and think about “the way things were,” as life-span thoughts get you caught up in the now and the then. So yes, I’m 82 and I don’t really feel very old physically, and my mind works at about eighty percent, and I laugh a lot, get around, and all the rest. But hold the phone.

At 5:30 this morning, while waiting for Carol to awaken at about 7:00, I was reading a nice mystery filled with the usual dialogue between the main characters. One says to the other something about a good radio station in a small town. Like, “Great station, the DJ plays all the oldies; James Taylor, Carly Simon.” James Taylor? Carley Simon? Yeah, I know who they are, but oldies??? Here are some oldies: Frankie Laine, Eartha Kitt, The Mills Brothers, Carmen Cavalerro. Dennis Day, Paul Weston, The Three Suns. The Ink Spots. Oh yeah, the Ink Spots.

So I laid the book on the sofa and continued the line of thought about oldies. Let’s see: country music. Anyone in their 50s would consider oldies to be performers like Garth Brooks, Alabama (“Ride the Train,” great stuff). Well, how about my version of country oldies? Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, Alonzo and Oscar, Faron Young, Ernest Tubb, Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers. Grandpappy George Wilkerson and the Fruit Jar Drinkers. The Chuck Wagon Gang.

Then it occurred that it has always been thus. I remember my mother saying something about Fatty Arbuckle, and Rudolph Valentino. To her, in 1950 or so, they were the oldies. To me they were mythical. And so it goes. So as I went through this exercise before dawn this morning, I began to feel it. Old. But I have a solution, and it’ll make me feel as young as I always feel in my mind. Well, not young, just Not Old. I’ll just not concern myself with what “oldies” really means. If you go back far enough, some person had no concept of the term. And then the earth cooled.