There’s at least one good thing about being 76. Time compresses, it gets shorter.
I was there during historical events people now talk about. I was twenty one during the race riots of the 1960’s. I know how Martin Luther King was portrayed in the media – negatively.
As early as age three, I remember parties at my mother’s home after WW2. A house full of sailors and a few marines. Liquor flowed but there was no loud laughter. No fights. Lots of laughing. A small amount of cussing, but generally polite. Yet drunk.
I can now think about the Civil War not being so far back. I look at photos of it, and I can almost hear them breathing. My grandfather was born in 1863, right during that war, and I talked to him when I was about four.
I now look at artifacts from Egypt’s golden past more than two thousand years ago, and I know what the workers on the pyramids are saying. The same way we talk now. Nothing spectacular. Complaining about the heat. Wondering why rich people aren’t working.
I can even feel what the artist felt when he finished the animal drawings on the cave at Lascaux, France twenty thousand years ago. “Cool.”
I recommend 76 to everyone.