Eight-Eight-Oh-Eight. Wow What a Date

I’ve been thinking about this date for a long time. Today is eight, eight, oh eight. WOW. It’s the opening night of the Olympics and at 8:08pm tonight, we’ll be watching. It might be a little more difficult because last night while Cindy was on the phone with me, we heard a great pop! and then her TV went dead. It was a storm right on top of Green Lane, and the neighbors across town also had their TV zapped. So we might need to switch sets to see the Opening ceremonies tonight.

I told a few people a story that made me seem very old recently. That was about when my mother and I were in a jewelry store in Hopewell, New Jersey. It was a June morning, and when my mother was writing a check she said, “how about that–six, six, sixty-six.” Yeah it makes me seem damn old when I tell a story like this to my cafe workers, none of whom was born before 1984. In some ways I’m proud to be able to recall a story like this, in the mid-sixties.

Age is sometimes a badge I wear with pride, like when I recall what it as like to live in the 1960s during the Vietnam war era. I remember every night on the news they used to have these numbers, they were the dead and injured and then they would have the number of North Vietnamese dead too. The images in Life magazine were the ones that I remember the best, gruesome shots of men with bullet and scrapnel wounds, and of the victims of the My Lai massacre. A long time ago, but it still comes back to me easily.