It's funny to me that just a few days after I posted my "Grandparents' cars" post, Josh Wilker, author of the blog Cardboard Gods (and the book of the same name) has a new post about the first rock concert he ever attended (AC/DC in 1979, if you're keeping score at home) in which he writes "...I think my generation, perhaps the most backward-looking generation yet to walk the earth, is the first blessed with ample concrete evidence and artifacts of what, in earlier times, would have been the utterly transient particulars of fleeting youthful experiences." (Wilker, who is almost exactly my age, is one of the most perceptive and fluid writers around, and I have to admit I am supremely jealous of his talent). The point he's making is that with the internet and all the far-flung and obscure information it contains, we Gen-Xers (who do seem inordinately obsessed with our youthful experiences) are able to double check and verify all of our ghostly memories. I did this with my, in retrospect, excessively sentimental post about my grandparents' automotive transportation. For example, I didn't remember that the '68 Polara had one single band of taillight(s) until I obsessively pored over Google images of various Polaras.
I've got to tell you that I don't even remember for sure if my grandpa's T-Bird was white or not. Am I confusing it with the Polara, which I know for a fact was white (because I found some old family snapshots where the old car appeared in all of its muscular Mopar glory).
This leads me to the other part of Josh Wilker's statement. Why does it seem that my generation seem to be so obsessed with our childhoods? Are we, in fact, more nostalgic than that notoriously navel-gazing Baby Boom generation? I know for a fact that the World War II generation were not backward-glancing in the least. When you grow up with nothing during the Great Depression, and then have to turn around and fight a world war, you grow up fast and have neither the time nor the desire to wax poetic about your long lost youth. My life has been considerably cushier, comfortable, and less eventful than my Grandpa N.'s, so it has afforded me the opportunity to remain in a state of (somewhat) arrested development. Grandpa spent 1936-1940 looking for full-time employment, then served in the Army Air Force from 1942-1946. As far as I know, it wasn't until my grandma died that he revisited his childhood by revisiting some of his old haunts in Iowa and Illinois.
Well, once again, I have no real idea where this post is going or the point of it is--but I'm sending it into cyberspace anyway and you can make of it what you will.
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