"I Swear! I Thought Turkeys Could Fly!"

This morning, the beautiful young lady who is my daughter Emily donned her newest flannel and invited me and her brother to walk down to Hastings with her. She would have invited her mother, but she was partaking in her own Saturday tradition, chasing Zs, and, she does not really do "walks" if she can avoid it. So the three of us set out on our little jaunt to the local movie, music, and book store.

Upon arrival, Dylan vanished into the video game section, and Emily strolled through the music section, looking for copies of a couple of Green Day CDs. I wandered somewhat aimlessly into the DVD rental section and started scanning the titles, adding more films to my list of features I want to view but probably won't get around to seeing any time soon.  The list is fairly eclectic. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Purge, The Wolf of Wall Street, Elysium, This Is the End, Django. I need to take a week or so and just watch movies. I saw a few intriguing titles that I had not heard before that seemed worthwhile, such as Calloused Hands. Of course, I walked home with the kids, but without a movie in hand. Maybe this evening I will run back up and actually rent something.

As I was looking through the newer movies, however, I started to think about movies I have not seen for a while, but that deserve to be seen again, or at least my memory tells me they deserve that. I find myself mentioning certain movies to people, and they stare at me dumbly, as if they have never heard of such a film. Risky Business. Field of Dreams, The Blues Brothers, Johnny Be Good. Pink Floyd's The Wall. All the Right Moves. Nightmare on Elm Street. The Breakfast Club. Surely that cannot be so. It happens with TV shows as well. Recently, our high school office was forced to relocate to the wrestling room for the summer as the school undergoes major construction. Andrew Bauer mentioned how the office looked, set up in one large space with no separation or privacy. I asked where Les Nessman had his desk and masking tape "walls" laid out on the floor, and Andrew seemed truly perplexed. Now, Andrew is a brilliant person, extremely intelligent and creative. However, he had never heard of WKRP in Cincinnati.  I stood aghast. This is just wrong. (By the way, if you understood the title of this blog, then you are probably feeling me right now. And if you just read that sentence and are confused, or feel it is somehow entirely inappropriate, then you need to catch up on slightly out of date youth lingo.)

I have been forced now to accept one simple fact: I am getting old. Andrew Bauer is not some punk kid. He is a grown man. He has child for Pete's sake! Yet, he had not even the slightest hint of who Johnny "Dr.Fever", Venus Flytrap, or Jennifer Marlow, aka, Loni Anderson (sigh) were. I will admit that I was young when that show was on the air, but I remember it. I started to wonder:what other elements of cultural significance am I taking for granted? Does Andrew realize that MTV actual once stood for MUSIC TV? How old must a person be to remember that a large drink was once 16 ounces, or that there was once a world without such a thing as McNuggets? Who here remembers when the only way to watch cartoons on a weekday was to wake up early enough to catch a few minutes of The Bozo Show on WGN? Shoot, who can grasp that an antennae was once the only choice for TV reception, and that only granted you three channels, four if Bunker Hill PBS was coming in that night? And we lived in town!

I can pretend I am not getting old most of the time. My knees ache? Well, that is what I get for not losing weight sooner. If I exercise, they feel better.  My beard is going gray (ok, white) at a frighteningly accelerated rate? That must be stress, and besides, Kevin Kohls has a lot more gray hair than I do. I fall asleep on the couch at 8:15 on a summer weeknight? Dang, I must have worked hard this week. I have looked at old friends' posts on Facebook about their kids going to prom or graduating, and I think, "No flipping way her daughter is that old." Then I remember that my daughter has just completed her junior year of high school.

I can play it off most of the time, but when I am forced to admit that we are losing our connections with the cultural icons and societally significant events that I still think are relatively recent, it bothers me. I am not bemoaning the youth of today or "this next generation". No. I am just lamenting the fact that I am in fact getting old. And I am saddened by the fact that Andrew Bauer will never experience seeing, over broadcast television, Loni Anderson in a sweater.

I feel bad for you, my friend.