Now and then

This year’s unusual weather and unfolding events around the world have got me thinking about the winter of 1965-1966, way back when I was 8 years old.

I'm struck by the similarities between what happened then and what’s happening now. Christmas 1965 was one of the warmest ever on Long Island. The temperature must have climbed into the 60s. I remember my older brother and I, minus coats, test riding brand-new skate- boards on our driveway; several days later I wondered where all the snow was as I watched the Beatles in the film Help!, skiing in the Swiss Alps to the bluesy “Ticket to Ride.”

This winter the music on the charts flat out sucks, but the weather has been unseasonably warm and skateboards are still around; weekends on Exchange Place I see kids pulling off stunts on their boards I wouldn’t have dreamed of trying back in ‘65.

Many things competed for my attention at that time: My older brother and his buddies and their intense fascination with cars, go-karts and pretty much anything else that had an engine and made noise. Stacks of Mad magazines and baseball cards. AM radio. Soupy Sales doing “the mouse” (Hey, do the mouse yeah Hey, you can do it in your house yeah). Sting-Ray bicycles with butterfly handlebars. Tervo’s Hobby Shop and everything it had to offer—“Rat Fink” model kits, Lionel train sets, Slip ‘n Slides and dead frogs in formaldehyde, ready for dissection. Root-beer “foamies” at Whelan’s drug store, costing a dime each by the mug.

I don’t know any 8-year-olds these days so I’m not sure what’s occupying their free time, but I’ll bet it’s almost none of the above and it’s almost always virtual. Xboxes, anyone?

I was curious about girls, especially one blonde, blue-eyed mischief-maker named Elizabeth Roos. In her plaid, pleated skirt, Elizabeth drove the prepubescent me crazy at Catholic school. Yeah, she was a looker, and she loved to get my goat by stealing my pencil box. I'd act irritated but I actually loved the attention: Elizabeth Roos, swiping my pencil box!

Nowadays I'm sure similar games between the sexes continue in grammar school. I hope they’re as innocent.

Back in the winter of '65-'66 I viewed the wider world with more than a little fear and uncertainty. I didn’t yet grasp the Cold War. I do, however, remember one afternoon running into the house and screaming for my mother after seeing the Goodyear blimp, low in the sky, and thinking it was an atom bomb on its way to devastate the neighborhood. To my mind the Vietnam War, still supported then by most Americans, was but a continuation of World War II, what with the black-and-white images of battle on the nightly news resembling the black-and-white footage of World War II documentaries and TV shows like "Combat." Back then I equated war more with romance and heroics—perhaps because of my father’s medals and my Sgt. Rock comic books—and less with gore, severed limbs and death—things that undoubtedly silenced my dad when it came to his own experiences in the ETO. Someone got it right when he said that you can always tell the veterans who saw a lot of action because they’ll never talk about it.

Today progress is steady but slow in Iraq. We’ve got our hands full with Ahmadinejad and his quest to go nuclear in Iran. The Palestinians have rightly given the boot to the ultra-corrupt and ineffective Fatah party, but will Hamas hold on to its guns and its terrorist ideology as it moves to form a new government? Meanwhile, Kim Jong Il is still around, and Bin Laden says he’s just about ready to strike us again. All of this is happening, and yet we’ve got more and more Americans speaking out against our troops.

Today the wider world must still be pretty scary to young boys. My advice to them: hang in there, and keep your eyes on that girl sitting behind you in math class. She just might be after your Xbox.