Blame It On The Sixties

Last Sunday I turned sixty-three. My mother took me to dinner. One of my daughters took me to dinner a week earlier. The other two called. My cousin from Georgia called and so did a close friend from Milwaukee. My sister and brother sang Happy Birthday on my voicemail. A couple friends from Minnesota visited and we walked around the manmade lake a half-mile away and grilled lunch in the backyard. It was a good day.

Back in the sixties I couldn't move like Jagger
but friends told me I had lips like him.

I am fortunate to be able to recall such events. While the details will fade over time, I—at least to this point in time—can usually hold on to the essence of what took place on a given day or period of time. Of course, if I can’t I can always blame it on the sixties. For it has been said, “If you can remember the sixties, you probably weren’t there.” Actually, people my age didn’t get exposed to the substances supposedly responsible for both the literal and metaphorical cloud enveloping that period of time until the decade was nearly done. Contemporaries of John, Paul, George and Ringo, who celebrated their fiftieth anniversary of arriving in the states and playing the Ed Sullivan Show just a week before my birthday were already floating several feet off the ground by the time I graduated high school in 1968. In all honesty, the only reason anyone remembers their arrival is thanks to the CBS archives and the many press conferences the group held.

Formal attire in the sixties was a clean
t-shirt and a tie. I wonder whatever
became of those pants.

Marijuana and other elicit elements were only a third of the equation. The other components, usually placed on either side of the aforementioned, are sex and rock and roll.  Not that there wasn’t sex before the sixties, just it was rather sterile up until that time—similar to the way it becomes once a person reaches his sixties. By the end of the decade twin bed sales plummeted along with bras and girdles, while the magic potion for wiping out unwanted pregnancy, which became known simply as “the pill,” soared in popularity. Looking back it’s easy to see why the war in Vietnam was so unpopular. Who wouldn’t rather wear rose-colored glasses and wallow in free love rather than slog through some mosquito infested marsh thousands of miles from home?

The last part of the equation was the music. Although it is usually described as rock and roll, probably because of its close correlation with the experimentation occurring in sex and drugs, there was a strong hint of folk left over from the previous decades that permeated the lyrics, if not the sound. Not only did Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger influence Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel, but folk infiltrated Beatles, Stones and Byrd’s hits, too. Sadly, this matters little today since most people who have reached their sixties can’t recall three items on their shopping list let alone the second verse to a song by Manfred Mann.

At sixty-three the dazed look doesn't require any special substances.

I feel fortunate to have reached the start of yet another year. Despite losing most of my hair, acuteness in my vision and the upper register of my auditory perception I am still thriving. Wait a second. What did our mechanic say it is going to cost us to keep our twelve-year-old car running? Well, maybe I’m not thriving, but at least I’m still surviving. Let’s see, how did the lyrics to that Beatles song go?

“Will you still need me? Will you still feed me? When I’m sixty-four?”