Classic Rant #102 (October 2, 2009): When I’m 64 (12 More Years)

Here is my fourth grade class picture. I hooked up with someone on Facebook who I hadn't had contact with in 40 years or so, and he was nice enough to have posted it there. I am in the upper row on the far left in this photo. Boy, was I good looking back then!

Anyway, that photo was taken over 40 years ago. Even though I belong to a number of social networking sites, most of the people in the photo have faded from my memory and I don’t know what happened to them.

Yes, it was a different world back then. Our “iPod” was a pocket transistor radio, and few of us had color televisions. Pay-TV was supposedly just starting at this point, but it wasn’t in my neighborhood in Queens, New York.

I was 10 years old when this picture was taken, and I was a pretty good student. I worked hard, and usually did fairly well in school.

Honestly, the world was beginning to change around myself and my classmates, but you really didn’t know it at that time. Even though President Kennedy was assassinated just four years earlier—and thus, we had already lost some of our innocence—you really wouldn’t know it by this picture. If the date wasn’t on the photo, it could easily have been taken in the 1950s, and not the 1960s (although some of the girls’ clothing would give the mid-1960s away).

However, just a few months after this photo was taken, all hell broke loose in our country. Race riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and a myriad of smaller, yet almost equally daunting episodes happened that helped to wash away the varnish of the 1950s and early 1960s that still encapsulated our world back then.

I look at this photo, and I see how much I have changed physically. I lost my hair, I have a couple more creases on my body that weren’t there way back when, I am a bit taller, and yes, a bit heavier.

I had a gall bladder when this picture was taken; now, I don't have one. The only problem I had with my eyes was that I was nearsighted.

I have been through a divorce, and my second marriage, I am happy to say, has been wonderful. I have two kids, one in college, and one who might go there sometime in the future.

When I was 10 years old, I could not imagine that my life would be as it is today. Could anybody in this group have imagined what they would be doing 40 years later?

The one thing that is basically the same for me is that I feel that I really am the same person that I was when I was a young kid, although I am an adult. I still laugh at the same things, have the same beliefs and the same values.

Physically, people say I look about the same as I did way back when (less the hair), and I kind of agree with them.

However, if anyone would have asked me at the age of 10 what I would be doing when I was 52, I honestly don’t think I would have gotten it right. I don’t know what I would have said, but as a starry-eyed kid, I bet I would never have projected what I am today.

Never in a million years.