My mother no longer drives, but she still uses her driver’s license as a form of identification. Yesterday the freshly renewed license came in the mail, and I must say that such a potentially banal event produced a lot of awe. The new license is good until July 28, 2024—my mom’s 100th birthday. She seemed genuinely surprised to consider that she was only a couple of years away from that anniversary, and I understood her surprise. The strange quality of aging—of the passage of time in general—is that the numbers don’t match up to the lived experience. Has it been only two years since covid closed down our country? It seems like much longer. Has it been 50 years since I was living in that college fraternity house? It seems so much shorter. As everyone knows, time is accordion-like in its ability to expand and contract. But when I consider that I’ve been an adult for half a century, my memories of fifty years ago seem as strange and foreign as the events of a historical novel.
No one knew it at the time, but 1972 was the last full year of the 1960’s, which began in 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I know, I know. If you look at the calendar, the Sixties stretch from 1960 to 1969. But when we talk about the Sixties, we think of war protests, long hair, bra- or draftcard-burning, race riots, Vietnam, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Woodstock, and the awful deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Before JFK died, we had beatniks, but not hippies; we had Beach Boys singing about a teen rebel who drove to the hamburger stand instead of the library, not the Doors churning up the haunting request to light their fire; we danced to (or mocked) the Twist, not the Jerk. After the Kennedy assassination, the country experienced a decade of turmoil and internal division, very much like the era in which we live now, and the decade didn’t end until 1973, when an OPEC oil embargo triggered inflation and lines at the gasoline pumps, when the Nixon administration signed a peace treaty with North Vietnam (a treaty that both sides ignored, but that still indicated a winding down of the war), when the draft ended, and when the country reached an uneasy internal peace as it reckoned with the shock of learning that petroleum-exporting countries could significantly change our way of life.
Those twelve months of 1972 straddled my sophomore and junior years of college. In 1972 we would drive down the road from Lexington to Hollins or Mary Baldwin or Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (now Randolph College) or Sweet Briar—round trips of between 75 and 110 miles—and the three passengers in the car would give the driver a quarter each to cover the cost of the gasoline. In 1972 George Orwell’s 1984 was still about an imagined future, as was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those of us who lived as young adults in 1972 recall that windows in cars literally had to be rolled up, that telephone receivers were literally hung up to end a call, that typing occurred on manual typewriters, that carbon copies were literally made with carbon paper, that movies were literally on film, and that computers were gigantic machines the size of refrigerators that required hundreds of perforated cards or massive rolls of tape to operate. In 1972 we used flash bulbs for photographs and record players that allowed us to stack several albums on top of one another and pay phones that required dialing 0 for an operator before we could make a long-distance call. In 1972 we had four television networks, though no one paid much attention to the brand-new PBS, and in order to watch a show, we had to be in front of the set at a specific time on a specific day. In 1972 I voted in my first Presidential election, and I’m still embarrassed that my very first vote went to Richard Nixon (though, to be fair, I was not alone). In 1972 the year 2022 was inconceivable to me, and fifty years sounded like an impossibly long time. Now fifty years seems so short. Could so much change really occur in only half a century?
I’m astonished at how lucky I’ve been to live through this brief segment of human history, to witness Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, to overlap lifespans with the likes of William Faulkner, Arthur Miller, Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Lorraine Hansberry, and Eleanor Roosevelt. But then I think about my mother, approaching her centennial, who saw the discovery of penicillin and the polio vaccine, the Great Depression, the dropping of the atomic bomb, the arrival of television. Is it any wonder that she has trouble keeping her chronology straight from day to day? She has so much to remember. William Faulkner, in “A Rose for Emily,” writes of the elderly as those “to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches.” Mom is moving into that meadow now, where the living and the dead mingle and converse, and watching her, I recall her 1972 iteration, the savvy, visionary, self-reliant woman who was gifted in architecture, accounting, and raising a family, among her many skills. As I muse about centuries and half-centuries, I realize that there’s no such thing as a long life. It’s just that some lives are shorter than others.