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Lost In The Past

Lately, I find myself experiencing some serious bouts of nostalgia. I'm not sure exactly why; it could be my upcoming birthday, the college visits with my daughter, the realization that this year marks my 30th class reunion, or maybe the new hairs I discovered growing on my ears. But whatever the cause, I've had a lot of thoughts lately about the sweet days of youth and the disbelief of how far removed they are from today.

Turning 40 didn't bother me as much as 44. Why? Because it was pointed out to me that I was at the midpoint between 18 and 70. Think about that for a moment. I still felt young, but the mathematics said otherwise.

A lot of good memories are stirred up by hearing certain songs. When I hear Billy Joel's “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant,” I'm back in my friend Larry's Dodge Dart tooling around the rural roads of Rock County. In fact, I can probably name every 8-track tape I had in my '72 Vega.

Recently, I reconnected with a cousin on Facebook (see, there IS a good use for it). He and I chatted about when we were kids and we would listen to 45 RPM records in my room. He asked me if I remembered a version of the classic song “Wild Thing” that was “sung” by a guy imitating Robert F. Kennedy. Did I remember?? We played that piece of vinyl until it practically wore out! It was a great novelty record from 1967 – on one side was “Senator Bobby” doing the song and on the flip was someone imitating Illinois Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, also doing “Wild Thing.” My cousin told me that song had crossed his mind recently, and he had found it online and made it his ringtone. It had been years since I had thought about that record, and I loved the memory. After he told me that, I went searching for the song and found it myself. It was fun to hear again, and I could see why we loved it as kids, it was so demented. As far as the senators being lampooned, all we really knew about them at the time was that they were both dead. Listening to these sides again now, they are still incredibly funny. And with the benefit of forty more years under my belt, I now actually get the jokes and the references to Nixon, Reagan, Goldwater and Rockefeller.

Nosing around Hulu.com has contributed to my nostalgic musings. One of the greatest websites in the world, it's chock-full of wonderful old TV series including a couple of my favorites, “WKRP in Cincinnati” and “The White Shadow.” But this past weekend, I discovered that they have every episode of “Square Pegs,” a show I hadn't seen since it aired in the early '80's. I immediately dialed up the episode that guest starred Bill Murray as a substitute teacher, by far the best of the series. Between the new wave music (The Waitresses did the theme song) and the sweet dark-haired 17-year-old Sarah Jessica Parker (I prefer SJP in this incarnation over Carrie Bradshaw any day), it was quite the trip down memory lane. Checking out other episodes, though, I was surprised to see that the show – though it was way hipper than most stuff on TV at the time – had its moments of cheese. I sure didn't remember the bad laugh track, for example. And there are times when the acting and the lines wouldn't have been out of place on dreck like “The Facts of Life.”

And maybe that's a good reminder. The good old days may have been good, but they weren't as perfect as you'd like to remember them.