When I'm 64, and other reminders that you are old

In My Humble Opinion
1

I remember when the Beatles first arrive, and I remember hearing this song for the first time and thinking “64 is old!” Well, on December 25th I made it. I am now 64 years old, the subject of a Beatles song.

So let’s list some things that prove you are chronologically old:

You remember when rock music was considered a fad that would fade in a couple of years.

You remember hippies and the whole 1960’s bit.

You remember when people only had land line telephones, and if you called them and got a busy signal, you had to call them back.

You remember when grown up people were referred to as “girls and boys.” But only certain grown up people (women and coloreds). Hell, you remember when calling a person “black” was considered derogatory, but using the N-word wasn’t.

Add some more, please.

2

You *do *remember where you were when Kennedy was shot. You don’t remember where you parked your car.

Regards,
Shodan

3

I hate (almost) all music everyone is listening to.

I go to be early and get up before dawn.

Dinner must begin before 7:00 pm, and can be as early as 5:40

I go to more funerals than weddings.

4

I read the obits, before doing the crossword. Never did that before.

5

You remember the incredible popularity of folk music in the early 1960’s, and it wasn’t considered mainstream. And the young singer/songwriter who came out of that movement that was considered a “talentless hack.” Of course, that fellow now has a Nobel prize in literature.

6

There are ten doctors in my phone’s contact list.

7

The hilarity of a co-worker and I talking about our prostates. Never thought I would catch myself doing anything like that.

8

At 47, I’m in that weird “not quite old, but no longer young” area. Middle-aged is a good term. :wink: Anyway, a constant reminder of the “no longer young” part is that these days my youngest co-workers have parents my age.

whippersnappers!

I clearly remember a time before call waiting, etc. If the person wasn’t home you could often leave a message (on an analog recorder; some folks didn’t have “a machine” yet), but if you got a busy signal there was nothing to do except try again later.

9

Last week the eight-year old son of a friend objected when someone referred to his tablet as a computer. He insisted a computer had to have a keyboard and a mouse.

I said that a computer was something that filled an entire room and used punch cards and a CRT screen with green letters.

For analyzing the data on my thesis in the late 1970s, I had to lug all the many boxes of punch cards over to the computer center on campus. To do the analysis, the techs in the back room had to mount tapes.

10

When I was informed by a young person that they had “studied Woodstock in history class.”

11

Heck, I remember when beatniks were the great threat to our nation. And when Davy Crockett caps and hula hoops were the biggest thing.

12

My mom told how, when she first got to really know her mother as a person, rather than just as “Mum”, was when she was in college, and Grandma was “about 40”. So she went through life thinking of Grandma’s age as “about 40”. So it really hit her hard when she herself turned 40, because “my God, I’m as old as my mother”.

Of course, now, her two children are both “as old as her mother”.

And one that struck me a few years back: When I was a kid in the 80s, “oldies” meant music from the 50s and 60s. Music nowadays that’s that same age is from the 80s and 90s.

13

I now have a co-worker who wasn’t born yet when I started working in libraries. And not by a few months, either.

I’ve now had a beard and lived in North Carolina for more than half my life.

This week my car turns 20.

14

I remember watching Eisenhower’s first inauguration on my grandfather’s 12 in. television set.

I remember the St. Louis Browns moving to Baltimore to become the Baltimore Orioles.

I remember a fantastic new show that came on television called, “The Adventures of Superman.”

etc. etc.

15

I’m 57 (and a half!) and on my way to 64. My boss, the young whipper-snapper, he just turned 40.

16

Telling a college student who is gushing about **Bohemian Rhapsody ** “They really blew me away when I saw them at Live Aid,” and see her appear to calculate in her head: “She saw Live Aid? Live?” It’s longer ago for her, now, than Woodstock was for me then.

Seeing Sean Lennon on SNL and realizing he’s older now than his father got to be.

17

I remember when my back didn’t hurt.

18

I’ve recently been re-watching Mad Men. It occurred to me that, for kids who are now the same age as I was during the Sixties, those events are as remote in time as WWI was for me at that age (both about 50 years or more in the past).

19

When I talk to my co-workers who are all younger about what things were like when I was a kid. There weren’t any video games (first ones that regular people could afford started coming out when I was in early college). Same goes for cable (there was no satellite TV, at least not for folks like my family)…it started coming out in a mass way after I was out of high school. The big one is…there was no internet. I tell them stories about the first online connection being things like bulletin boards (I had one of my own I ran for several years) and how they were used to exchange programs and other stuff (porn for instance :p), or even how the early internet was and it blows their minds. They can’t wrap their heads around much of it and ask me stuff that shows the disconnects (‘so, your cell phone didn’t have data?? Could you text??’ ‘Um…I didn’t have a cell phone until I was out of college because even when they were available they were huge and only rich people had them’).

I’m not as old as some of you (to Shodan, I was probably in a diaper or just naked chasing chickens in the back yard when Kennedy was shot…my first memories of the event were years later at several of my uncles or grandmothers homes where they would build little shrines to the man, right next to the ones of Mary or Jesus)…but the world has sure changed a lot since I was a kid. When I think about it, it reminds me that I’m getting long in the tooth…

20

I have worked at my current job (38+ years) longer than many of the people working there have been alive. Many of them look younger than my oldest grandchildren.