For The Record

On this past Halloween day, I asked a younger colleague if he had any plans for the night. He’s twenty one and I was just making conversation about this and that, the way people do at work. He said, yeah he probably was going to hang out with friends. What about you, he asked. I said, no, we had no plans. We’ll actually probably be nearly in bed, reading and falling asleep by the time trick or treaters are out. Really? he asked. Yeah, like most of our friends. When we get together for dinner, around nine we’re pretty much looking at our watches or cell phones to check out the time while we’re yawning and stretching and thinking about how we need to get going. I get up early though, I said, that’s when I’m at my best, so I like going to bed early, even though it’s earlier than I used to.
Then he asked, what year were you were my age? I said, let’s see. I was born in 1953, so add twenty one, that’s 1974. Then he asked, what was it like then? Good question, I said, and the first things I came up with were no cell phones, no computers really, at least in common usage, no laptops or anything like that. There weren’t any computers in your pocket, no GPS. There weren’t any movie rentals, TVs were a lot different. There weren’t any CDs, it was all LPs or 8-tracks and cassettes. The first stuff I thought of were the interactive electronic devices with which he’s so familiar. Later on, I thought, oh yeah, Vietnam was still going on, though it was winding down. We had a president resign at the end of all the all the Watergate drama. I was in college that year.
It made me go online to look up 1974. Of interest to me were these events. In college basketball Notre Dame ended UCLA’s 88-game win streak, Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s record with his 715th home run, a UPC was scanned for the first time in a supermarket, Philippe Petit walked a wire between the Twin Towers, Muhammad Ali regained his heavyweight title (stripped from him seven years earlier for his refusal to enter the draft)in the Rumble in the Jungle, and the mother of the late Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in a church service. It was fun to revisit the year I was twenty one, but my young fellow team member could have done that as easily as I did.
Of course, he wasn’t asking me for content, not really. He was asking how it was for me, personally, back in 1974, even though that’s not the way he phrased it. It’s a question not unlike what I used to ask my own grandfather, who was born within a generation of Lincoln’s assassination and is still the only centenarian I’ve ever known. Now I’ve been asked that question for the first time in my life at age sixty six. It’s a question no doubt my grandchildren will ask me someday. I was asked in all innocence and I gave to it the seriousness the inquiry deserved, all the while smiling inside a bit at how old I must seem to this young man.
I recently read that gratitude celebrates life with a joyful “yes” at every knot of the great network in which everything is connected to everything. For the record, even though I laughed about it with some friends at dinner the other night, I felt that connection, as well as respected and honored that he would ask me and try to find out something about my life.

