Tick Tock

Quick! I need to lose twenty pounds and replace fifty-thousand burned out brain cells.

Fifty years?!  According to emails I've been receiving, this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of my high school escape… uh, graduation and there is going to be a reunion.  After the initial realization that I could have gone to high school and graduated a couple of more times in fifty freakin' years it occurred to me to celebrate and embrace the fact.  It's always good to see old friends who shared the same longitude and latitude with you during this now seemingly prehistoric benchmark on history's timeline.  

The early sixties were really more like the 1950's.  The "Sixties" as popular culture defines it really didn't begin until just about the time my class graduated from high school in 1966.  Spencer, Iowa was, and is, tucked away in the frozen and often dusty cornfields of Northwest Iowa about two-hundred miles from Des Moines and even further away from any cities of consequence like Minneapolis or Kansas City.  Today, with Amazon, Netflix and broadband access in general, I imagine it doesn't seem far removed from the rest of the world but the feeling was much different fifty years ago.  In 1966 we had three television stations available in "living black & white" from the ever so sophisticated markets of Sioux City and Sioux Falls, a very skinny daily newspaper, a movie theater that got the latest movies a couple of months after the rest of the world, and a corn pone local radio station that featured farm markets and music programmed for our parents. NO ROCK N' ROLL!  Is it any wonder most of us wanted to escape?  (By the way, piggies are up and moo cows are even at today's livestock market open.)

It'll be fun to get together this coming August to do some catching up.  I can't imagine there being much pretense or self importance at this point.  If you had something to prove, you've done it and there is no need to bullshit anybody, even if you could. It's time to reflect on mistakes and successes with the wisdom and contentment that is the sweet by-product of grabbing life by the horns.  Coming from rural and small town America, the experiences of the past fifty years have been, I'm guessing, for most of us even more big screen and technicolor than it has been for our counterparts who graduated into adult life from places like New York City or San Francisco.  

Our dreams in 1966 may have been in black & white and we knew little of the world, but now, fifty years hence,  I'm expecting to hear plenty of colorful stories of triumphs, near misses and failures that taught some important lesson.  As Mark Twain said, "The two most important days in life are the day you are born and the day you discover the reason why."  I expect most all of the class of '66 has, by now, figured out why.   It'll be good to hear their stories.

"Turn the rotor it's time for Bandstand."