Reflections of Nearly 80 Years
This week, I am closer to 80 years old than 79. It got me to think a bit. My wife and I just returned from eight days of cruising the eastern Caribbean on a writers’/publishers’ workshop cruise (along with 5,000 of my other closest friends). I learned a lot and have made some changes to my writing and publishing business.
We got home and immediately came down with Influenza A. I have never had the flu before in my life – never diagnosed! It was interesting, and I did catch up on a lot of naps I had been neglecting for a while. Drugs worked to calm the coughing and runny nose. But it left me with intense brain fog and fatigue. Live and learn!
I was born after WWII – a baby-boomer. Eighty years before I was born, the Civil War was winding down (officially over in 1865). Airplanes and cars were yet to be invented. TV sets were working in labs, but not readily available to the public. I believe we were the first kids on our block to have a TV (black-and-white with a plastic screen we could place over it to simulate the sky (blue tinge), trees (green center strip), and brown (earth/dirt/roads/etc.) on the bottom strip.
A lot of things happened between 1866 and 1946. However, comparing that eighty-year segment with the one I have lived in is impossible on so many levels. TV is only one of them. I remember reading the newspaper comics and seeing Dick Tracy with a watch that substituted as a phone and TV. We have that today, and it was only an imagination just a few decades ago.
I was in boot camp in 1969 and was awakened by my Drill Instructor to watch the first landing on the Moon. I thought that was impressive until I saw the America’s Cup Race in Australia (1987?). I watched live broadcasts from the sailboats at zero-dark-thirty in the morning in the States. That still impresses me today, even after all the Moon launches.
Today, my phone is a powerful movie studio and can hold more data than the first space shuttles. Even the data storage at work in the ‘80s was near zero compared to a small terabyte drive today. We go on day after day, enjoying the world and the products we can buy online, and never think about the difficulties of obtaining things just a few decades ago.
I used to blog quite a bit before the pandemic and plan to return to a consistent schedule this month – nowhere near the 630+ days in a row I did a few years ago. I will be happy with a couple of dedicated posts a week to get back into the habit. It is amazing how easy things are to do, and not to do. The aircraft I flew during Vietnam are now in the boneyard. Newer, bigger, and better replacements have taken over my old missions. Life goes on!
There are many other thoughts winding through the recesses of my brain, but they will not see the light of day on this blog. I prefer to write, but the world has changed, and I want to record parts of my life for my great-grandson, Leon, and for other family members by video. Like anything else in life, if you want to do it, you must actually start doing it. The brain might have the thoughts, but there is nothing to measure if it doesn’t leave its comfort zone.
Red O’Laughlin
RedOLaughlin.com
