When I'm Sixty-Four ... and then some!

Long day today, and I don't quite feel like writing much of anything. Still and all, here goes!

I find myself these days thinking quite often of time, and how transitory it is.  Perhaps that is because I am becoming more aware and engaged with the world around me; it could also be due to the fact that age seems to be creeping up on me with each turn of the calendar year.  

I was thinking about one of my longtime favourite bands earlier today, The Beatles.  I remember when I was a pre-teen, I had a cassette tape (remember those?) of the Beatles' compilation album "20 Greatest Hits".  Got that one at a garage sale, along with "Wings Greatest" by Paul McCartney.  Anyways, I played that album so often on my Walkman (remember those?) that the tape was literally so worn you could faintly hear the other side of the cassette coming through backwards during the pauses between songs.

All this is to say that come 1995 when The Beatles Anthology and its "new" songs "Free As A Bird" and "Real Love" came out, I was beyond ecstatic.  I was by then a HUGE Beatles junkie, having attended conventions and had acquired, as I went through my teenage years, CD versions of all their albums.  There may have been a few bootlegs in amongst them too, just saying!

Anyways, I was thinking about Paul and Ringo (ages 79 and 81 at the time of writing) and thinking, wow ... they can't be that old, can they?  Then thinking that it's been 41 years -- damn near half a century -- since John was assassinated.  And that it's 20 years this month since George's passing.  And I though, well, after all my parents and their generation grew up with them so yeah, it kind of makes sense I guess ...

And then I foolishly brought math into the equation.  "Free As A Bird" was released in 1995, 25 years after the Beatles broke up.  We are now living in the year 2021, twenty-six years after Anthology came out.  That tells me that the Fab Four's mid-1990s audio collage reunion is now, and will forever be, closer to their existence as a working band than today.

The depressing mathematics work in other areas, too.  1995's Apollo 13 is nearer the time it portrays than the current year.  1991's JFK is closer by two years to the actual Kennedy assassination -- let alone the trial it spends a good majority of its time covering -- than it is to our time.  Heck, think of other forms of music.  The Spice Girls, whose first hit "Wannabe" was in 1996, are chronologically more proximal to ABBA at the beginning of their career in 1996 than they are to today, and to the ABBAtars that will soon be touring stadiums around the world.

All this is to say that, man ... I feel OLD!!!