One Toke Over the Line

I grow old...I grow old....
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
-T. S. Eliot

Our local PBS station was having a pledge drive and aired the special "My Music: My Generation --- The 60s." It was a pretty good line-up of performers and tunes. Some had only the original lead singer, others had most of the original band members.

The Association - "Cherish" & "Never My Love"
The Buckinghams - "Kind of a Drag"
The Byrds - "Mr. Tambourine Man"
Vanilla Fudge - "You Keep Me Hanging On"
Iron Butterfly - "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"
Blood, Sweat & Tears - "You Make Me So Happy"
The Archies - "Sugar, Sugar"

I was grooving (do they say 'grooving' anymore?) on the tunes, especially the ones performed by the original artists. Iron Butterfly had four or five original guys and I yelled at Hubby, "Hey, come look at this guy in Iron Butterfly. He looks old enough to be somebody's great-grandpa!"

Hubby eyeballed him closely and replied, "That's because he *is* somebody's great-grandpa."

Oh.

The camera then did a long shot of the audience. With few exceptions they were old, bald, bespectacled men and their gray-haired wives. The were nodding in time to the beat and a few were tapping their feet. It's been eons since they were the drugged-out, long-haired hippies dancing with wild abandon at Woodstock. I chuckled to myself and thought, "Tee hee, they look like the audience on The Lawrence Welk Show."

The magnitude of that realization suddenly hit me right between the eyes. POW! I had become my grandmother!

I watching my generation's equivalent of the Lawrence Welk Show...music for the "senior" generation; old fuddy-duddy music. Arrrrrrgh!

I watched hours and hours of Lawrence Welk with my grandmother when I was little. I can sing all the words to the closing theme by heart. If my granddaughter were sitting at my knee at this very moment, she would be whining the same thing I whined at my grandmother's knee all those years ago, "Gee Mammaw, can't we watch something that was popular this decade???"

When did In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida become fuddy-duddy champagne music???

Where did all these gray hairs come from??? When did I get so old???

And for all y'all who think you aren't old fuddy-duddys, here's a little something just for you. Go ahead, sing along. You know you can't help yourself; you know all the words. You've been singing it in your head since you starting reading this post anyway.



A "modern spiritual"... um hum...

I think Lawrence has been hiding his ZigZags in the hymnal.