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Markers of Time
A bit of making fun of me encountering one of the signs that I’m getting old, prompted by some fun comments about overlapping lifetimes on the post “Memeing the Month Away”:
My mental markers of time are way out of date. A century is no longer the massive era or epoch measure of time it has always been in my mind.
About four years ago we were watching one of those shows in the house renovation genre, though this particular show was about renovating motels. The host introduced one episode announcing that they were going to renovate a “century-old motel.” My thought was, “How can a motel be a century old? Cars weren’t a thing a century ago.”
I was born in 1956, so for most of my life “a century ago” and “last century” meant horses and buggies, no cars, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no telephones.
But I had to realize that in 2021, life “a century ago” (1921) included, for many, if not all, a car and electric lights, indoor plumbing, and maybe experience with telephones. Oh, yeah. My grandfather owned a Ford Model T by 1921, and he and my grandmother were driving it around Maryland to visit relatives. So, yes, the early versions of motels (lodgings designed for the motoring public) were being built by then. Suddenly “a century ago” no longer seemed like the ancient history I had always thought of it as.
In my mind, “a century” or even “a half a century” was a really, really long time, referencing big changes in life and culture, not a time within a person’s memory. Life “a century ago” was nothing like life today, so different it might as well have been on a different planet.
Yet now life “a century ago” looks much more like life today than life “a century ago” looked a few years ago. “A century ago” now includes a bunch of what I’ve always thought of as “modern” history. And my high school days were more than “a half-century” ago. Yikes!
My mental markers of time have gotten way out of date.
Do others have this problem?
Published in History
Yep. I write history, too.
One grandfather grew up on the family’s sailing barque. It hauled freight in the Mediterranean, not tourists. The other grew up in a peasant village in Greece where state-of-the-art farm equipment was a burro. Both lived to see men walk on the Moon. That is a big change.
When I was a kid, all the dads were World War II vets. Now that is 80 years ago. The 707 and DC-8 were cutting edge. We had reached the moon. Today the jets are no faster than the 707 and DC-8. The 747, brand new in the 1960s, is still being used and the Air Force still uses B-52s. We are still trying to get to the Moon. That really seems like not much change. Even with the Internet.
Oh, yeah. Blazing Saddles is more than half a century old. And I saw it in the theater when it came out.
Also, where are the flying cars? We were promised flying cars.
The Jetsons had flying cars, but they still had land lines and sent telegrams or wires.
I don’t consider it a problem. This isn’t exactly what the OP is about, but when I think of things last encountered in the 1990s or earlier, and not particularly missed in the interim, it pleases me to say, “Man, I haven’t seen or done that in this century.”
I’ve had that thought watching movies from the 1920’s on TCM. The characters ride in cars, use the telephone, and have electric lights. I could live there and it wouldn’t be too foreign. But go back another hundred to 1820 and everything would be different, even to the people from 1920.
I’ve had the same thoughts. As I got older, World War II seemed like yesterday and the Civil War did not seem like ancient history. :)
Years ago a good friend of mine and I were talking about time. He had a little girl who needed frequent “time outs” for excess exuberance. He said, “Parents need to keep mind that time is experienced in relation to how long a person has lived. Two minutes to a two-year-old is an eternity and more than enough to interrupt whatever behavior is problematic at that moment.” :)
It is so true.
The other thing that bugs me is how time has sped up as I’ve gotten older. The months and seasons just race by.
Yeah, that 50th high school reunion sort of sneaked up on me, not in a great way. my musical preferences stopped piling up somewhere in the 80s.
Ever notice that there are no tv ads for “A Place for Pop?”
I recall that as a child, I thought that the poem Eletelephony was hilarious. It would be incomprehensible to a child of today who knows a telephone as a flat slab.
Once there was an elephant,
Who tried to use the telephant—
No! No! I mean an elephone
Who tried to use the telephone—
(Dear me! I am not certain quite
That even now I’ve got it right.)
Howe’er it was, he got his trunk
Entangled in the telephunk;
The more he tried to get it free,
The louder buzzed the telephee—
(I fear I’d better drop the song
Of elephop and telephong!)
pre-positioned to the most relevant part, but it’s all good:
Reminds me of another marker that startled me.
A couple of years ago the clerk at the liquor store asked me if I was born in this century as the marker for whether I was over 21 years old.
Son, I wasn’t even born in this millennium!
I noticed a few years ago when I reached 80 that I was feeling closer to the founding fathers. If a hundred years isn’t so long ago, neither are two or three hundred. Strange maybe, but somehow comforting.
Apparently I’m so old that I don’t see what the big deal with the Amish lifestyle is. They live pretty much the way many of the farmers and even some of my relatives did when I was growing up in northern England. Eggs were delivered by the egg lady on her horse. The milkman’s horse knew his whole route, he just walked alongside the cart and took the bottles to place them on the doorsteps.
Whilst visiting a museum with my homeschooled kids the docent kept saying things like, would you believe people used to use THIS, to which my kids would shout, we use one of those. We were even able to help her identify some “mystery” kitchen tools. It’s really not that long ago that motors were put into everything from kitchen to workshop….. surely?
In terms of timeline, I suppose. But the Founding Fathers themselves were in their 30s or early 40s.
Good post, and it made me think of an Asleep at the Wheel song.
I’ve mentioned this one elsewhere:
You can figure out a television show’s target audience by watching the commercials.
There’s an over the air tv station called METV TOONS. They show the brilliant Looney Tunes from the 50s to 70s.
I’m watching Bugs and Daffy and what commercials did I see? Popular toys and games of today and sugary breakfasts cereals? Oh, no.
Hearing aids, life insurance, buying gold.
Yosemite Sam, “the meanest, roughest, toughest hombre that’s ever crossed the Rio Grande!,” and I see a freaking Life Alert commercial. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”
I didn’t know which was funnier: the cartoons or the fact I must be an octogenarian that needs a walk in bathtub.
Then there’s this song from nearly half a century ago. I say time flies. How about you?
Cheryl wrote that in about 1993, man. That’s barely more than thirty years.
A few years ago I was at a Cub Scout outing with my youngest son (I’m an old dad- he was born just before I turned 48). The subject of B-17s came up while I was talking to some of his friends – my dad was in training as a tail-gunner when the war ended. One of the kids piped up that his Great-Grandfather was in WWII.
I have a photo of my Great-Grandfather from the Civil War. (William Becker, Co B, 12th Michigan Infantry).
I used to get a strange feeling when I realized the year I was born was closer to the end of World War I than my age, but I blew past that point over 40 years ago.
I’m beyond that point, too. Not as far beyond that point, but far enough.
There’s a song that ends like “thinking of how… timmmmee fliiesss…..” but I don’t remember who did it or the name of the song. Seems like it’s from the 70s, but trying to find it online seems to be hopeless, coming up with only references to rappers from the last few years…
Antiques are generally 50 to 100 years (or more) old, with the exceptions of automobiles and certain electronics, which would be considered antique at 25 years old. So if you have a 2000 model year car, you are driving an antique. Vintage is usually described as 20 to 50 years old.
These are obviously not rigid categories. I have seen clothing from the 1960’s described as vintage, rather than antique.
As to the founding fathers – although in 1776 Benjamin Franklin was 70, Thomas Jefferson was 33, and most others were in their 30’s or 40’s, James Monroe was 18 and Alexander Hamilton was 21. Franklin was only a few years away from being born in the 1600’s. Much like I was born in the 1900’s, and my kids, when adolescents, told me I had to get into the 21st century.
What throws me is when I hear someone say “the turn of the century” and then slowly realize they’re referring to 2000.
I suppose technically it was a new century, yes, but that was overshadowed by the dawn of an entirely new millennium! To me it will always be “the new millennium” or “y2k” while “the turn of the century” still means 1900.
I have this problem all the time. I was in my early 40’s when the TV show “Friends” came on.
The five youngsters who were playing the lead roles were some 18 years younger than me.
Over the decades, whenever I started to feel old, I would remind myself how I wasn’t even two decades older than Jennifer Aniston.
The universe helped conspire with my internal decision of refusing to view myself as getting old. In 2005, my DMV-issued Calif license featured a photo that showed me looking like Meg Ryan’s slightly older sister. (Five years later, on the updated license, I resembled the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” according to the same DMV, but who knew, right? Obviously by 2010 the Deep State knew I now hated Obama and was getting its revenge.)
With “Friends” on perpetual re-runs, and reminding myself I am only 18 years older than that 20 something crowd, I am shocked when some news story tells me that Monica, aka Courteney Cox, and the youngest of the friends, is now 60 years old. Then I remind myself that the news media usually gets things wrong.
So I blissfully return to the pleasant image of me being 42. The charade works until I have to bend over to get something off the floor, and then can’t get up. At that point I yell for Mark to give me a hand up.
If I’m ever off ricochet for more than 96 hours, it might not indicate my demise. But rather it could indicate my husband’s sudden but stubborn refusal to avoid helping me up any more.
Maybe he’s waiting for someone to help HIM up, first.
Another reference for the car enthusiasts that I find disturbing: The first modern car (a car that could be driven by a current person without extensive pre-trip instruction) was the Ford Model A (floor pedals in the same place they are in modern manual transmission cars, current “H” pattern gearshift), was introduced in late 1927 – approaching a century ago.