Decades

A thought struck me the other day. I was reflecting on the fact that World War I ended a century ago this year. When I was a child and learned about it, that war seemed like ancient history. Before I had high school history, it was wholly lost in shadows and still old. For my earlier childhood, even the very notion of a year 1918 was strange. Who would give a year a number like that? The last two numbers are always greater than the previous two. That was my arbitrary law of twentieth century years. (I had similar resistant thoughts to my native tongue. Whenever I'd encounter a homonym, I would think, "Who invented this defective language.)

Then it hit me: for anyone coming of age this year, their view of the 1970s is like mine of the 1910s-1920s. They're ancient history. They're was even a Soviet Union then, that's how primitive it was. Hell, the other decade that shaped my life, the '60s are like the 1900s to them. I remember in the tragic year of 1916, how shocking it was to lose celebrities who seemed ageless. Carrie Fisher, Prince, David Bowie . . . just starting that list shocks me. Raquel Welch, the pinup star teen boys' fantasy of the '60s is close to eight-years-old. Jane Fonda has reached that age. Harrison Ford is 76. Even Patti Smith is 71.

I guess it's the fact that, with modern technology, we can freeze people and events in time. It becomes harder to fathom so much time passing when I spend a lot of it in subworlds where time is by use of technology frozen or modular.

The only good news about that is I don't feel my age. That's probably why the ages to timeless celebrities are unbelievable.