It’s a lovely thing, to wake up one morning and realize you have something pretty important in common with Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts and Pamela Anderson.
Aside from the obvious (we are all, of course, women) we all turn half-a-century old in 2017.
Anna Nicole Smith was born in 1967 as well, but she is already dead.
Funny, how you get to the eve of your fiftieth birthday and it seems so natural to say “already” dead, as opposed to just plain, ordinary, no-expectations kind of dead.
A lot of things are fifty this year, for example the Princeton Centennial Pool.
Not to harp on the whole dead theme, but at 50 an outdoor pool has reached the end of its lifespan.
Think about that for a minute.
The whole town is chattering about the possibility of building a new, glossy indoor aquatic center.
The old pool sits tucked away behind the ball diamonds. Nobody talks about it anymore, except to reference its deficiencies and general unworthiness.
That pool knows the people who once loved it with all their hearts are out shopping for a replacement.
Can it remember the day it was born, when cool water first filled its body?
Everyone was so excited.
Ribbons were cut.
It was the community’s pride and joy and today it costs $100,000 a year just to keep it going and fill in all the cracks.
Oh, to have a spare $100,000.
The game Battleship was unveiled to an unsuspecting public in 1967.
Now that’s exactly what a 50-year-old woman wants to compare herself with – a battleship.
In 1967 some genius invented the handheld calculator, and where is that today? It’s shoved at the back of a drawer. Nobody’s charged its batteries in years.
A calculator? It’s practically a museum piece.
Other notable products introduced in 1967 include the Big Mac, Gatorade, Pringles, and Ho Hos.
This explains a lot about how I feel in my jeans, at 50.
Jeans at 50. That’s got to be social progress of a kind. My mother never wore jeans – probably never in her entire life.
That said, those elastic waistband pants that crop up occasionally at the thrift store are starting to make more sense to me.
Right now we are just looking at them, which is about two steps before we start thinking about carrying around Kleenex in the sleeves of our sensible sweaters.
Do you suppose Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts and Pamela Anderson ever think about pants with elastic waistbands?
The Boeing 737 took its maiden flight on April 9, 1967. Lite-Bright was invented.
In the same year the first automatic cash machine was installed in the office of Barclays bank in Elfield, England. At least people still use those. The very first Rolling Stone Magazine hit the streets. That edition sold 5,000 copies.
In many ways 1967 was a great year.
It was the year of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the book Rosemary’s Baby and the very first heart transplant performed by Dr. Christiaan Barnard.
Yahoo.
When one is as old as Pringles, one looks on medical advancements with new appreciation.