Showing My Age

I think I was in middle school when I started watching reruns of The Smothers Brothers with my parents. I don't remember what channel it came on, but it became a nightly ritual in our home. My parents, of course, were reliving good memories of having watched the show when it was new. I was discovering it for the first time.

Several years later (I was either dating my husband or we were already married, I don't remember), we were all over at my mother-in-law's house. My parents were there as well. I don't remember what the occasion was. I just remember that we were all together. Somehow conversation drifted to a discussion of Bible stories about brothers, and my dad made some quip about Tom and Dick Smothers. I, desperate not to be left out of this lively conversation, quipped right back, "I don't think they were in the Bible." My mother-in-law (who may or may not have been my mother-in-law yet) apparently didn't pick up on the knowing smile I shot my father when I made my joke because she looked directly at me, with that look an older person gives a younger person just before imparting some useful knowledge which the younger person obviously doesn't possess, and said, "That's a joke only us old folks would understand."

I was highly offended.

I've titled this post "Showing My Age", but I'm using the title ironically because I rarely "show my age." And I'm bothered by anyone who, after referencing a beloved song or movie, immediately follows with, "I'm really showing my age here!"

Why? Why does knowing about a specific song automatically date a person? Can't people know about songs that came out before they were born? I certainly do. And I have for a long time.

1989 is the year I turned ten years old. It's also the year my parents decided to go see Paul McCartney in concert. They loved going to concerts, and for some reason they always took me with them. They wanted to take me to see Paul McCartney but remembered the last two concerts they attended, with me in tow, and realized that, if I didn't know any of the songs being performed, I would be miserable. And if I was miserable, I would make them miserable.

Thus began my musical education.

Songs by The Beatles, as well music from Paul McCartney's solo career, played in our house day in and day out for months. My parent's goal was that, by the time we went to the concert, I would know all the songs well enough to sing along to them, which would make me enjoy myself while I was there.

Their evil plan worked. Not only did I enjoy the concert, I became completely obsessed with The Beatles (a fact that got me teased a good deal in school). But I didn't stop with The Beatles. By the time I was in eighth grade I had discovered all the best songs from the sixties and seventies (and a few from the fifties). In ninth grade, I found our local oldies station, and that became the background music for my commute to and from high school and, later, college. While most people my age were listening to...whatever young people listened to in the nineties (I have virtually no memory of the music that was popular during my teen years), I was rocking out to Petula Clark, The Hollies, Sonny and Cher, The Seekers, Buddy Holly, and the list goes on and on.

Showing my age? Well, I'll certainly never show my age when it comes to the music I like. While I have, in recent years, found one or two nineties songs that I've determined are worth listening to (I think Hootie and the Blowfish have a couple that I like) for the most part nineties music leaves me cold. Or, worse, it sounds like the music all the mean girls at school listened to. You know, the girls who made fun of me for liking The Beatles.

It was very frustrating when, as a teen, I would try to talk to someone of my parents' generation about music and they would preface every statement with, "Of course you're too young to know this song..." Why? Why was I too young? Maybe I was too young to remember when the song was new, but the song still exists. Anyone, young or old, can listen to it. There's no such thing as "too young to know a song."

And now? Still not showing my age. You see, I'm now a mom of teenagers and they, unlike me at their age, are into new music. So I listen to it with them. And I'm finding that I like today's music a whole lot more than I will ever like anything that came out of the nineties.

What can I say? I've always been a little weird.