They're playing my music on PBS.
Remember when you were little and they played your parents' music on Channel 2? My dad would turn on a concert by the Grateful Dead. Or Eric Clapton. You know, baby boomer stuff. I was 10 years old and my dad would explain how the Dead wanted all their music to be free and anybody could plug into their amp to record them during a concert. Dad was in his late 30's. That music reminds me of my parents. Not the heyday of my childhood.
I turn 35 next month...Don't get me wrong, I'm really happy to be out of my 20's. But the heyday of my childhood is on my local Public Broadcasting Station. It was laughable...and singable, certainly. I beebopped and danced around my living room while the cats escaped to under something safe. It was also one of those times where I look at where my parents were at my age and note the various differences between generations. They had 3 kids at my age and a fourth on the way. They had a house and a yard in a stable suburb. We shopped at Talbots and I played on the hopscotch tiles painted on the floor of the kids department at Macy's. Dad had a promising new career at Digital Equipment Corporation. We had a dog and a cat and our first television with a remote control. And when I look back, I feel like I've fallen behind. I also feel like I didn't relate to the world my parents grew up in. So follows the age-old question...how do you get the next generation to relate to you.
Just live your life and it'll be what it'll be, is the answer, I think. Some people don't want the past to come back around. But to me it's an unsatisfying answer. Those days without cell phones and the internet, relying on books and people for knowledge versus "the cloud." Phone calls versus texting. Everyone watching one of only a dozen channels on tv. 9-11 was my first real experience with this feeling...because that day I knew, I absolutely knew, that I would never be able to convey the tragedy and terror of that moment to someone who wasn't there. That my kids would never understand.
But such is the challenge of any generation. And when faced with rolling eyes and blank faces we retaliate. Office freshmen are belittled by the old-timers. I mock them now, too. Society worships the young. And hazing is a way of displacing the insecurity of getting older, and feeling irrelevant. Feeling unnecessary. Feeling old.
But such is life. And this show, which, in it's defense, is actually more contemporary than it first appeared (episodes have included The Fray, Josh Groban, and Tim McGraw), made me stop and ponder that point. I'm getting older. Nothing stops.
The times they are a-changing...and in some ways they stay exactly the same.
Yup... don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall! 9-11.... Kennedy's asassination... and we're exchanging this on PEARL HARBOR DAY... the more things change, the more they remain the same. Before that, there was the war to end all wars... before that, "remember the Maine".
ReplyDeleteHow we share the information keeps changing, but how the information impacts us is a human element.
As is the feeling that you'll NEVER be as grownup as your parents were at whatever age you happen to be. You won't. I won't. And I am only 20 years away from the age they were when they ceased to be. And I'm still way younger.