I’ve been looking at some old family photos. Old! Some of them were of me, and, yes, that makes me . . . more than middle-aged.
Some of those pics were from my high school years. They simultaneously beg a question and shout an answer. What does “cool” do? Cool marches on!
I graduated from high school in 1975. We thought the music was cool. (Some was!) We thought the cars were cool. (My VW bug wasn’t.) And we thought the styles were cool. (Oh, the shame of it!)
I’ve been afraid, for at least a decade or so, that I’ve lived too long because . . . aargh! More than a few of those 1970s styles are back! Once was too much. But this time around, we get (no offense to my friends in this honorable line of work), the “plumber” look, too.
Behinds and belly buttons, very few of which are particularly appealing. And tattoos, too, so that with a very little body art artistic flair, it is now possible, against all celestial odds, to have the sun and the moon rising at exactly the same time on the very same teeny or tweeny hemisphere. Amazingly immodest at times (just thought I’d toss that word in since nobody ever hears it anymore), but still amazing. Not least, because the tats will still be hanging around on an 80-year-old tail section years from now but a lot farther south in the hemisphere.
Not sure if it’s a blessing or a sentence, but I might actually live long enough to see the present teens and tweens hit 40 or so. I think they’re gonna hit pretty hard.
Yep, we thought we were cool in the 70s—very full of ourselves we were—with bell bottoms and six-inch wide patent leather belts and peace symbols on chains and shaggy manes. But I will be forever grateful that none of that stuff was tattooed on! And, except for the economically disadvantaged and aging hippies, or the really wealthy and aging hippies who you can still find in some mountain areas, some southwestern desert areas, etc., where the air is really thin or mind-numbingly hot, most of my generation was pretty much cured of the style-viruses of the 70s by the 1980s.
It turns out, though, that this style stuff is like cerebral malaria. After a long period of latency, it builds up again in the bloodstream. You wake up with a fever and a throbbing head, and you’re wearing bell bottoms—again! Then you look around at some modern-day really “cool” folks, and they look exactly like the poor pathetic style-slaves still trapped between the pages of your high school yearbook who scrawled in its margins profound stuff like, “Whatever you do, don’t change!” And, good grief, maybe some didn’t. They’re baaaaaaack!
It’s the stuff of nightmares. To have decades-old styles, the equivalent of my old purple-striped bell bottoms, inked on and be condemned to live out your latter years with tats zagging six inches lower from where they once zigged. Ouch.
I’m glad God’s love never goes out of style. He loves us in all times in all places and even when we’re all caught up in all kinds of styles. He loves us—and that never changes.
You’re invited to visit my website at http://www.CurtisShelburne.com!
Copyright 2016 by Curtis K. Shelburne. Permission to copy without altering text or for monetary gain is hereby granted subject to inclusion of this copyright notice.
