Installment # 3

I can’t agree with Socrates (See Installment 2) for the same reason that I cannot agree with Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!”  Yikes!!  I want to live no matter what.  Life is precious to me; human life in particular, and my life most of all.  Let’s not get carried away here.  During the Cold War, around the time that Russia beat us into space with Sputnik, there was a national debate where one school of thought (the doves) said, “Better red than dead” (We called the Russians/Communists “the Reds” in those days).  The other side of the debate (the hawks) said, “Better dead than red.” With Sputnik orbiting the earth we feared that Russia would be able to spy on us and eventually conquer the world.  But a third voice was heard – president John F. Kennedy, I think – who said, “Neither dead nor red.”  That was the rallying cry that I could relate to.

Writing in 1960 in his book, Rabbit, Run, author John Updike has one of his irreligious, semi-literate characters think to herself, “One good thing if the Russians take over is they’ll make religion go extinct.” (Page 171). Fear of atheistic, communistic Russia was very real.  But I am getting ahead of myself in terms of relating the many important events that I have lived through.

I talk elsewhere about my psychological makeup, results of personality tests and the like.  But here I would mention that this process has helped me see that I have a logical mind combined with very little common sense.  There must be a one-word term for this, but I haven’t researched it.  It sort of reminds me of the guy who asked what it sounds like when a deep thought tries to enter a shallow mind.  No one had a good answer for that, either.  Anyway, this combination of logic without sense has resulted in many situations that may have been awkward and unpleasant at the time, but now seem almost hilarious.  It also explains, at least to me, why I have been naïve or gullible in many instances. 

I may seem to be running myself down sometimes but, in addition to being able to laugh at myself, I think these examples and anecdotes are amusing in themselves, plus they help explain why I did some of the things I did, or said some of the things I said.  I hope they provide insight for my grandchildren, great grandchildren and so on, as to who I was and what attributes they may have inherited.  For example, I was well into my 50s when I asked son Bobby (I think it was) what happens if you eat a slice or two of bread just a few hours before the first signs of mold show up.  I had seen bread that looked OK one day and was clearly moldy the next day, and I wondered how that worked.  Bob simply shrugged and said that if you eat bread when it has gone bad, but not bad enough to show the signs yet, it will just make you a little sick, but not as sick as when it is obviously moldy.  Oh.  That makes sense.  I must have been thinking of a sudden cross over from OK to not OK, with no transition period.

Similarly, I went through the medicine cabinet one time (again, I was in my 50s) and boxed up all of the prescription and non-prescription medicines that were past their expiration dates, and exclaimed to Sandy how dangerous it is to keep expired medicines on hand.  She calmly explained that the medicines do not turn to poison or anything, they just become less effective over time.  Ibuprofen that is 2 years past its expiration date, for example, just won’t give you much benefit.  That makes sense.  In general, I am slow to figure things out for myself, but quick to recognize a good idea when I hear one. 

I only recently learned that you can still get a nice sun tan while wearing what they call “sun block.”  The spf lotions block the harmful ultraviolet rays, but not the harmless rays that help with tanning.  Who knew?  I guess I was taking the term “sun block” too literally.  What actually blocks the sun is shade!  So I was trying to balance time in the sun with no lotion with time in the sun using sun block in order to tan but not burn.  One of the celebrities was quoted recently as saying, “There’s something about being naïve.  Really interesting things come because you don’t know what the rules are, what you can and can’t do.”  But more on that later.

I would like to list as many of the changes I have lived through as come to mind.  Some may seem more trivial than others, and I may not comment further on some of them.  I think the big thing is the accelerating pace of change, itself.  Technology is accelerating at an accelerating rate.  In fact, there is a growing field of study regarding how technology increasingly begets technology without the intervention of humans.  Very scary stuff, although most of us humans were left behind a long time ago, so technology and the pace of change has been accelerating without our involvement for a long time.  I mean what percentage of us humans have any real understanding of electronics, biotechnology or telecommunications and how things work? I am admittedly at the low end of the range of understanding, but I feel sure that most of us are bewildered and need simply to accept that things are possible that only a few years ago were unthinkable. 

I remember as a child and young adult reading the Dick Tracy comic strip, in which Detective Dick Tracy was able to communicate with his office via a device he wore on his wrist.  In almost every cartoon there would be a notation with an arrow pointing to his wrist that said, “2-way wrist radio,” and I would chuckle and say that those of us living at that time would never see the day when something like that was possible!  Now that is so commonplace as to be child’s play.  The things we are doing today surpassed that level a long time ago and are racing forward.

But aside from technology, I and others my age have lived through or lived with: The Iron Curtain, The Berlin Wall, The Cold War and the end of the Cold War, the formation of the European Economic Union and related creation of the Euro currency, the end of Great Britain’s 99 year lease of Hong Kong, which then reverted back to control by Mainland China.  What is especially interesting about the latter two is all the hand-wringing and doomsday talk we listened to as the time approached – similar to the run up to year 2000 which I talk about later.  If there is a lesson to be learned it is: Don’t overreact to the prognosticators, and don’t underestimate the ability of humans to take things in stride and deal with changes.  By the way, we used to call Mainland China ‘Red China’, but that is not politically correct anymore.

But to continue with my list:  the election of the first Catholic president (JFK) and his subsequent assassination (unrelated to being Catholic); the assassination of his brother, then Attorney General Robert Kennedy; the Civil Rights Movement and the related assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (related to him being black and probably the most important leader of the Civil Rights Movement); the tragic early deaths of Marilyn Monroe, Natalie Wood, Elvis Presley and Diana, Princess of Wales.  More recently we mourned the early deaths of peerless music greats Michael Jackson and of Whitney Houston. 

I was a great Elvis fan during his early singing and movie-making career.  (Note that I didn’t say his acting career; he wasn’t much of an actor, but I loved his movies and his songs in his movies).  He dropped off my radar in the latter part of his career, as he became an unhealthy and unattractive victim of his own success.  His contributions to music are readily available elsewhere, so I will not go into that here.

To save you the trouble of looking it up, Elvis died in 1977 at the age of 42; Natalie Wood died in 1981 at the age of 43; Princess Diana died in 1997 at the age of 36; Michael Jackson died in 2009 at age 49, and Whitney Houston died in 2012 at age 48. I was 18 years old and overseas when Marilyn Monroe died in 1962 at the age of 36.  As such, I may not have seen any of her movies before she died, but I was well aware of her through newspapers and magazines. 

My first exposure to Natalie Wood was as Maria in Westside Story.  She was also famous for her role opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955 – a little before my time).  Younger generations have lost people such as Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger and Amy Winehouse, who may have meant as much to them as those I have mentioned meant to me. James Dean died at age 24 in late 1955 when I was only 11, so it had little real impact on me.

Some events were dramatic to live through, but are now more or less forgotten by those who experienced them, and so far ignored by young historians.  Fifty or a hundred years from now, they may be seen differently.  Some examples: Nixon’s WIN program – “Whip Inflation Now;” the severe gas shortages of the mid 1970s; the Black Panthers movement.  Some changes are so subtle that it takes a generation or two before historians can look back and “connect the dots,” so to speak.  When most Americans worked on farms, having a tan meant that you were part of the working masses.  The absence of a tan meant that you did not do menial outdoor labor.  As a result of the industrial revolution, having a tan meant that you did not do menial indoor labor.  It was a sign that you had the leisure time to enjoy outdoor activities, like boating and golf.  The healthy outdoor glow went from a negative status symbol to a positive status symbol.  But it took time for people to catch on to that.

Young people are probably not aware that picking someone up at the airport used to require paying for short-term parking and, as a courtesy, meeting your party at the gate as they disembarked.  So the whole process took longer and was more of a reunion than just a ride home.  You could meet them in baggage claim, but that would seem discourteous.  When I worked at Pan Am, which I discuss elsewhere, tearful farewells and joyful greetings at the gates were common daily sights for us.   The alternative to parking was to keep circling and driving by the pickup curb until you spotted your party.  The uniformed people with the whistles would not let you sit in your car waiting, any more than they do today.  The subtle change is the cell phone, which has given rise to the airport cell phone lot, where you may park and wait for a call or text message from the arriving party.  If you live within 15 or 20 minutes of the airport, as we do in San Jose, you can monitor the flight’s arrival status via the Internet, and leave home as the plane lands.

Another subtle change that occurred to me only recently is that our ability to search the Internet has altered how we interact with people on a social level.  In terms of people skills, we were taught to speak in terms of the other person’s interests, not our own.  I found myself asking a horse owner questions such as, “What exactly is a quarter horse?  Why do they call it that? How does it differ from a regular horse?”  She did her best to try to answer my questions without confusing me further, but the next day I “Googled” it (looked it up on the Internet) and learned as much as I could possibly want to know for someone who is not into horses. 

It was the same thing with dance styles.  Instead of asking my granddaughter to explain the differences between lyrical and contemporary dance (not that easy to do, I learned), or to risk embarrassing a dance parent by perhaps causing them to admit that they didn’t know, I “Googled” it and studied to my heart’s content.  These days, if you ask too many fundamental questions about someone else’s field of interest, they may just tell you to “Google it,” requiring you to then find some other way to interact and chit-chat with your new acquaintance.