Pick a Year

[saavedra77]

I purloined this meme idea from cakeface:

Cite a year between 1967 and 2007 in your comment, and I'll tell you how I remember it. If it's too far back for me to clearly recall, I'll fill in the gaps with family lore and/or plausible surmises.

Hint: election years are good. I've been paying attention to those since I was in single digits.

Comments

[princeshetheran.livejournal.com]

1974, also the year I was born...

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

In 1974, in fact throughout the 1970s, I lived on my grandparents' seven-acre farm in Mt. Laurel, NJ. We had an apple orchard, a peach orchard, two grape arbors, as well as a pear, a mulberry, and a few cherry trees. We raised chickens. And had about a dozen cats.

I went to school about a mile away at Fleetwood Elementary, in Rancocas Woods. I finished first, started second grade, that year. I was a mite on the shy side. I had friends, but they were all of the geek variety.

Perhaps it's telling that some of my most vivid memories from 1974 came from television:

This was the year of Watergate, and that was pretty much my introduction to politics. I remember sitting at my grandmother's feet throughout that winter, spring, and summer watching it all unfold on the TV news. My grandma really, really, really despised Richard Nixon--well before it was popular to do so. Events seemed to bear out her instincts.

On the other hand, my second grade teacher waved aside questions about the imploding presidency, saying "I think they'll find out someday that all presidents have done things like that."

I mulled this vaguely disturbing thought over for awhile and ultimately came down on grandma's side. All that talk of break-ins, cover-ups, impeachment, smoking guns, and Saturday Night Massacres made an impression, after all.

And you've got to admit, he was a shifty-looking bastard.

I remember the day that Nixon resigned, his retreat to the helicopter, that pathetic two-handed "victory" wave, as a kind of vindication. Quien engaña no gana.

The year's other indelible TV spectacle was the kidnapping and brainwashing of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army. The security-camera footage of the heiress in her militant beret, marching into that bank with a machine gun is second only to Nixon's fake victory wave as an image of the year.

On a cheerier note, my favorite TV show at the time, by far, was Kung Fu. Although I only really cared about the parts set in China. I liked it even better than Star Trek reruns. I coveted a Kung Fu lunchbox like the ones I saw other kids carrying at school, but, alas, never got one.

And everyone at school was so excited about Evel Knievel, even if he didn't manage to jump the Snake River. It was just immensely cool that he tried.

1978

[drglam]

For me, finally escaping Tennessee.

Re: 1978

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

1978 was the year that legal gambling came to nearby Atlantic City, the year of the Love Canal disaster and the Camp David Accords.

But I wasn't really paying that much attention to current events, by this point. I turned 11, went from fifth to sixth grade.

Junior High was something of an adjustment. I got my first whiff of pot in the Junior High bathroom. Once, while my sixth-grade teacher was out of the room, a girl confided to the entire class that she'd "gone all the way" with some seventh-grader.

But we could tell that it was all just talk.

Life on the farm was getting kind of tiresome. My grandparents watched Hee-Haw, every week. I was beginning to think of life there as "Country Music Concentration Camp."

I found an outlet by visiting my mom on weekends. She lived in Burlington, a little old industrial town along the Deleware River, which seemed by my feeble standards a worldly metropolis.

Fleetwood Mac's Rumors was all over the radio, and I thought that it was the best thing I'd ever heard.

Of course, the only music I heard in my grandparents' home consisted of Buck Owens and the Buckaroos.

I'd suggested at one point that I'd like to learn to play the violin. Somehow, my family persuaded me that I should try the trumpet, instead.

I kind of hated it.

I hung on through our Junior High production of Grease. I spent the performance going through the motions with the band's brass section, but in fact played not a single note. I quit the band and gave up the trumpet once and for all after that night.

I think that this was about the point when I started reading a lot of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. I got sucked more deeply into the comics habit I'd picked up the previous year.

In fact, I started writing and drawing my own comics, which shall we say owed a great deal to the Avengers and Batman.

That was about it. Pretty standard eleven-year-old stuff, right ...?

[cakeface.livejournal.com]

1982! I was -2. What were you up to?

After They've Seen Paree ...

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

I was a mopey fifteen-year-old in 1982, bookish, disheveled, but secretly kind of full of myself. My mom, grandma, and I lived in an old mill town called Mount Holly that then served as a bedroom community for Fort Dix. I went to Rancocas Valley Regional High School, where portions of the movie Eddie and the Cruisers were filmed, that year.

1982 was an exciting time, actually--it was a year of firsts, for me: I attended a séance, visited New York City, I took my first a transatlantic flight, spent a week in a major European capital, walked through palaces and cathedrals, got drunk, stayed out until four in the morning, got my first taste of being on my own.

My best buddy that year was this Billy Idol-looking junior named Fred. Fred got me listening to the Clash, the Gang of Four, the Dead Kennedys, the New York Dolls, the Ramones, and X. I was also listening to bands like the English Beat, the B-52s, and the Talking Heads, then.

I had by this time settled into a what would turn out to be a lifetime habit of voracious reading: that year's list of literary conquests included Dashiell Hammet's The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, and The Glass Key; Steinbeck's Cannery Row; and Hermann Hesse's Damien, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Siddhartha.

The major event of the year, however, was the trip to France. This had actually come as a something of a surprise. My French class was going in the spring, but I just assumed that my family couldn't afford it. Grandma didn't really react when I first told her about the trip.

But, then, on the day before the registration deadline, she just quietly handed over the check and said "bon voyage."

(Well, no, she didn't literally say that. I don't think that she knew a word of French, but it was something similarly laconic.)

A few weeks later, we flew out of JFK. I'd in fact never been to NYC, before, even though it was just two hours away. My first impression was that the whole area looked like the apocalypse. From North Jersey's miles of industrial wasteland (think of the opening credits to The Sopranos) to the spiraling descent into the Holland Tunnel to downtown's grey, grimy, crowded streets, I found the whole thing pretty depressing.

On the other hand, Paris seemed impossibly perfect. I loved how this deep sense of history positively radiated from the architecture. We did most of the usual things: the Louvre, Notre Dame, Sacre Couer, shopping on the Champs Elysées. We didn't bother with the Eiffel Tower, because the lines were just impossible.

We were given an amazing, possibly inappropriate amount of freedom to explore the city on our own, too. The Metros were a revelation--clean, fast, cheap. Fred (who was along for this trip, too) and I spent a day hanging around Monmartre listening to buskers, watching street artists, hanging out in cafés. Groups of us went out clubbing at night, and nobody seemed to give a rat's ass about our ages. Coming back to our hotel one night, I swear the taxi crossed the Seine three times, running up the meter. (Then again, we were drunk adolescent tourists, and kind of asking for it ...)

We spent the following week on a bus tour of the Loire Valley, Normandy, and Brittany. We wandered around Versailles, whiled away an afternoon oohing and aahing at Chartres Cathedral, and then spent the most gorgeous day of the entire trip at Mt. St. Michel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._St._Michel), climbing up that steep, winding road to the monastery. At the top, we soaked up the awesome view across the Channel and watched the tide sweep back across the flood plain, turning the mountain into a virtual island.

In short: Best. Vacation. Ever.

Re: After They've Seen Paree ...

[cakeface.livejournal.com]

(You're making me travel-hungry again. UNFAIR. :D)

Thank you for sharing that - it's beautiful.

Re: After They've Seen Paree ...

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

Aw, thanks ... :)