I was reading an article about lifestyle changes that have transpired over the past fifty years. In 1972, I was only one year out of high school. I bought my first Volkswagen Beetle for $400 and the price of gas averaged only 36¢ per gallon. The average family income was just over $11,000 per year and the average home cost was around $27,000. The Vietnam war had just ended.
My grandchildren are incredulous whenever I tell them about my life when I was their age. I am more amazed at how well I have managed to keep up with the swiftly changing times. I must admit that I have resisted some of the changes. While I do not live in the past or cling to “the way things used to be”, nostalgia sometimes comes knocking on my heart’s door. I can still listen to the music that I listened to when I was young, but I am not hearing it as I heard it then. Listening to that same music today invokes a subtle melancholy for what was. Fifty years older also makes me fifty years wiser and I am listening now through layers and layers of experience and pain. Sometimes, I feel sad. I feel sad in the same way that I feel sad when my flowers begin to fade, their beauty gone forever. It is the same sadness that I feel when the first hard autumn freeze claims victory over the last stragglers in my garden.
The fact is, life has always, and will always, continue in a never ending spiral. In another fifty years, my grandchildren will look back at the way things are today. They too, will have grown and changed in what is often called “ the blink of an eye.”
