I Think About This Sometimes

A I write this, I’m sitting here listening to a radio channel on iHeart radio called iHeart 70s and it’s taking me back to my childhood. In 1976, fifty years ago, the number one television show in the US was a show called Happy Days. It was a wholesome show about a teenager growing up in in the 1950s. In 1976, the show was in its fifth season and the height of its popularity, set in the year 1957. My parents loved it because it was a story about their teenage years.

If a show were made today using the same timelines, that show would be set in the year 2007 and would depict the teenaged years of my children. If you want to know what was happening then, just go back to the early days of this blog, which started that same year. It makes me feel old to even think about it.

I never met my great grandparents. I never even met all of my grandparents.

On my father’s side, my grandfather died 20 years before I was born. I’m now older than he was when he died. My dad’s mother, my grandmother, died when I was 9 years old. In fact, none of the males in the three generations before me on my father’s side lived past the age of 63.

On my mother’s side, the men fared somewhat better. My grandfather on that side lived to be 66 years old, and my great-grandfathers died at the ages of 84 and 72. The women lasted a bit, with my mother dying at 73, and her mother also dying at the age of 73. My great-grandmothers died at the ages of 39 and 66.

In many cases, medicine has advanced over the past generations, and people are living longer. I can say that I am healthier than my dad was at this age. He had already had a heart attack and heart surgery at a couple of years younger than I am now. He was disabled and on Social Security disability just a year older than I am now. I’m still kicking. I just got done mowing the lawn, which my dad was unable to do at this point.

Still, as we get older, we can’t help but wonder how many years we have left. I know there are more years behind me than there are in front of me. I’ve done so much and so many things in my life, it seems incredible to me. I still have so many more things I want to do, see, and experience. I doubt I have enough time left to get through the entire list.