I AM OLD

I am old. I am very very old. 60 years have passed since I was born, and soon it will be 61 years. I don’t feel old. I don’t look old while glancing in a mirror when I don’t have my contacts in and it’s not a magnifying mirror and I stand about 6 feet away from it. But so much has changed since I was born when I compare it with my grandson, Sawyer’s, life that I have finally figured out that I am old.

A few weeks ago Sawyer and I flew to Minnesota to visit Brittany, Jordan, and my other 3 grandchildren. Sawyer is a seasoned flyer having crisscrossed the United States many times over the past 2 years of his short little life. However, due to the great example of Brittany when she flies with her kids, I decided to buy a portable DVD player so that Sawyer could watch Tigger and Pooh and Their Friends, Too, and maybe a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, and perhaps one Little Einsteins. Four hours on a plane w/ a toddler who can still fly free so he sits on my lap can be a bit of a challenge, and Sawyer has demonstrated time and time again that he doesn’t sleep on a plane until the final 30 minutes of the flight, no matter whether it’s a 1 hour flight or 6 hours. I bought him his own little headset, which he thought was sort of interesting at first, but decided he liked it better off than on which means he watched the movies without sound, and was just as entertained.




And it got me thinking about the first movies I ever saw. They didn’t have sound either. No, I’m not describing “pre-talkies”. But sometime between my age of 4 and 7 my family lived in a house that was up the hill and about a mile from the local drive-in theatre. 600 Clayton Avenue, El Cerrito, CA, was a 2-bedroom, 1-bath white-siding house on the corner of Clayton and Lincoln Avenues. It was and still is forever referred to as “the corner house”. Occasionally, on warm summer evenings somewhere around dusk, my older sister, Cheryl, and I and a few of the neighbor kids would climb up on the roof of our house and perch ourselves ever so carefully on the slanted side of the roof that faced the El Cerrito Drive-In.


We could see the screen and we could see movement on the screen and sometimes we thought we could actually tell what was going on. Of course we couldn’t hear anything and I suppose we never had any idea what the movie was about. But we thought we were the neatest kids on the block to be able to see the movies from our own home. (To this day I have no idea where our parents were or how we were allowed to climb up there at such a young age. Then again, maybe we weren’t allowed. Maybe that’s why we scrambled down lickety-split when we heard them call us.) I’m pretty sure the first movie I ever saw in an actual movie theatre was The Wizard of Oz when I was 5. It scared me then and frankly, still scares me now.

My point being: I watched my first movies at 4 years of age from the roof of my house. Two-year old Sawyer watches his movies, when he’s not in front of our television, on a portable DVD player as he flies across the United States.

I am old. I am very very old.