Halfway there and lots more to go...

Next month I mark an awe inspiring moment in my life, more poignant than turning 21 and downing that first legal beer, or five. This moment is greater than 31, when I knew that my first born was on his way. This marker is greater than the lie they tell you about pushing 40; there is no pushing involved – the ball rolls downhill on its own. Next month I stand witness to half a century of life. It sounds so heavy and so antique all at the same time. Yet the face I shave each day, whose older eyes still hold a sparkle of naughtiness, sees it as just another day. Really! Be that as it may, I cannot deny the inventions that have peppered my life. I was born before Walt Disney’s  “Wonderful World of Color” splashed our tube television sets in September 1961, seven years after the Korean War ended with an armistice. I sat on my living room floor each week in 1966 eating a bowl of Bird’s Eye Custard pudding as I  watched a young William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy take my imagination to places it still goes with “Star Trek,” a little show produced by Lucille Ball’s company DesiLu. I witnessed the Concorde’s first flight in 1969 (and sadly its last a few years ago,) and the first Boeing 747 take flight in 1970. I was in awe of the latter – how something so large and bulky could appear so graceful in the sky.    I watched Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger work magic in China in 1971 as he paved the way for the historic 1972 summit between our two countries, even while Nixon was soon to fall from grace. In the early 1970s, the compact cassette tape edged out the eight-track – which had formerly edged out the reel-to-reel tapes of my  father’s generation, opening up music in a truly portable fashion long before the iPod or Mp3 player. Back then, a kid had to be skilled in tape splicing, repairing the thin tape after it snapped or got tangled and “eaten” by the machine that played it. I was born after the Beatles became famous and watched as they disbanded in 1970. And sadly, like so many Americans, I bore witness to the end of that era with the murder of John Lennon in 1980. The first moon landing on July 20, 1969, took the age of the Apollo rockets into my life with the large-sized models that I painstakingly glued together. In February 1977, the space shuttles took over – bringing space closer to a science fiction reader’s dream of a casual occurrence. At least until the disaster of the Challenger in 1986. The Vietnam War from 1959 until 1975 was always present in the news of my youth. While on a night flight to meet my father in Thailand for a visit in 1972, lightning flashes far below caught my attention. As a stewardess (pre-flight attendant days) passed by, she asked what I was watching. When I told her, she patted my head. “That’s not lightning,” she said. “That’s Vietnam.” Although my half-century may have passed quickly, I recognize that it has held a richness of living history that may make me better appreciate the second half of this two act play. Even now changes in the world are occurring at breakneck speed, often seemingly random in nature until some time has passed and events can be looked upon with a degree of hindsight. Or perhaps I can slow the passage of time by changing the framework I use to measure these changes, refraining from years and measuring by centuries instead. By that reckoning, I will be 0.5 centuries next month, a young age, filled with many years of potential and life, and I can deal with that. MisterWriter