Rememberering

posted 28 Jan 2006, 9PM | 1 Comments

Every few months lately I have a new reason to remark that it's been SO MANY years since SUCH AND SUCH happened in my life, where SO MANY equals SOME BIG ROUND NUMBER. I'm expecting these incidents to become more frequent for the forseeable future, and then, as I grow non-plussed by common incidentals of the aging process, I'm expecting them to plateau. But I'm not really expecting the plateauing to happen for a while. In any case, a new one caught me off guard this week, so I thought I'd share a few.

I remember first remarking amazed in 2002 that 10 years had passed since REM released Automatic for the People, arguably my first favorite album. And in the spring of 2004 I realized that 10 years had passed since Kurt Cobain died.

[An interesting aside: Cobain's death was the first significant event I learned about via the Internet. This still surprises me; my friends Michael and I happened to be checking my Prodigy account at Hollis's house that evening in 1994, and we learned the awful news from Prodigy's start page. In a corollary, 2004 marked 10 years since I met =[spackle]=, my first Internet crush.]

While moving my sister into her B.U. apartment last fall I realized that exactly 10 YEARS had passed since my own first move to college. And 10 years before that I was 7 years old, just starting third grade. I'm really into the SO MANY YEARS BEFORE THAT construction as well.

Earlier this week I was running in place on a treadmill at the gym when a television caught my attention. This week marks 20 years since the Challenger explosion, and 20 years since the death of teacher Christa McAuliffe. In an age when the U.S. had little experience with domestic accidents or bombings, and at a time when I shared my life with Massachusetts teachers, it was no small tragedy for me. I didn't see the launch live, but I remember the look on Mrs. Falconer's face when we returned from the cafeteria, Jack William's voice on WBZ Eyewitness News as the clip was shown over (and over) again.

Twenty years before that we hadn't even been to the moon. Now we're well over halfway through the current decade.


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2 Feb 06 at 12:36PM cheamp said:

Your mention of time, age and school reminded me of this strange scale of age I used to think of in terms of relationships. I hadnt thought of it in awhile but recently I used it to shame my roomate. It plays on the conceptt that our personal image of ourselves remains a certain age, say 18.

It goes like this, say you are 28 and your girl(boy)friend is 24, then when you were a senior in high school they were in the 8th grade. My roomate for instance is 30, his girlfriend 24, so she would have been in the 6th grade when he was a senior. It doesnt sound bad until you realize he is fucking a 6th grader.

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