There Was a Chance 2020 Would Be Great: Excerpts from Middling

I write an occasional newsletter (quarterly when I don't forget) to friends and family about my life: music, books, work, and getting older. I'd love to send it to you. Sign up for Middling here. What follows is an excerpt from the winter 2020 issue--before the whole world shut down.

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The safest place
Is the more or less middling: the mean average
Is not noticed.
—W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety

When I was a kid, I thought about 2020 a lot. That would be the year I would turn fifty, and at the time fifty seemed to me about the oldest a person could get. To speculate so far into the future seemed both pointless and irresistible. What would the world be like? What would I be like?

There were good reasons to wonder. When I was a kid, my society was enduring the aftermath of the abrupt end of a corrupt presidency. We were facing global tensions on several fronts; I read more than one library book about inter-continental ballistic missiles before I was ten. The Middle East was a powder keg. The economy was sputtering. People hadn’t learned not to pollute yet. There was disco music.

It wasn’t all bad, of course. Sure, we had Barry Manilow to deal with, but we also had the Ramones. (And Schoolhouse Rock: Rest In Peace, Jack Sheldon.) Sure, the rain had acid in it, but there was also this owl and this Native American guy actively appealing to us to give a hoot and not pollute. There was a chance I’d make it to fifty. There was a chance 2020 would be great.

I think about the past differently than the future or the present. In my memories, the hard stuff is less hard, because I know I’ve survived it. The scary stuff is less scary because it’s become more known than unknown. Even the lofty ambitions are right-sized by the passage of time. We aren’t cured of the past—we carry it with us—but the passion and the pain of it levels off. We become detached enough from it to consider it with grace.

In a matter of months I’ll be hitting my fiftieth birthday. Having reached this year of my preoccupation, I suppose it’s time to be preoccupied with something else—2070, perhaps, when I'll be a hundred years old, which seems like just about the oldest a person can get. Meanwhile, it occurs to me that there will be people thinking back to this unfolding decade with the same mix of melancholy, nostalgia, and (I hope) gracious detachment as I now think of the 1970s. Maybe one of those people will be me. Maybe it will be you. Maybe we should start practicing such gracious detachment even today.

"Fifty Nifty," Schoolhouse Rock