From 1967 to age 67, what a long strange trip it's been

Sixty-seven has always been an important number in my life.

I graduated from high school in 1967, and for many years the favorite memories of my life came from that year. I was on television for the first two times in my life, I went away to college and actually enjoyed the first couple of months and I started dating the first girl in my life I was completely crazy about.

It was quite a year, and until the last three weeks of it I was 17. I had skipped a grade in elementary school in Ohio, so I was a year younger than nearly all the other kids in my class. At least chronologically. If you figure in social skills, confidence and just about everything else, I was really two or three years younger than my contemporaries.

At 17.

That wasn't a complete disaster when I was in high school, but once September came and I was in a dorm room at the University of Virginia, I might as well have been a space alien. I had had four dates up to that point, and my roommate from the Tidewater area informed me that during his last two years of high school he had had sex 200 times.

Needless to say, he had I were from different worlds. My only sexual experience up to that time was a solo endeavor.

But 1967 was such a fascinating year in so many ways. It was the year music became incredible, with bands like the Jefferson Airplane, the Doors and Buffalo Springfield exploding on the scene.

It was the year of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a Beatles album that was unlike anything we had ever heard before.

It was the year of the Summer of Love, the year we all wished we could be going to San Francisco with flowers in our hair.



It was the last year everything seemed possible. Then in the first six months of 1968, they killed Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. In the next six months, Richard Nixon became president and nothing was ever the same.

By the way, the sign is fake. There is no Interstate 67.

 So what's the deal?

I just needed a good-looking 67.

You see, today is my 67th birthday.

Fifty years later.

I'm old.