Fifty years ago, but still so vivid in my memory

I love listening to Harry Chapin.

I saw him twice in concert, and I think at one time or another I've owned nearly all of his albums. He died at the age of 38, which cost the world another 30-40 years of great songs. Maybe even more if Chapin had been as prolific as his hero, Pete Seeger.

Anyway, there's one song that always touched my heart and evoked strong, wonderful memories. Chapin's "Old College Avenue" tells the story of a young man's first love affair while in college, and it always makes me think of the winter of 1969-70, when I was at George Washington University.



Her name was Shelley. She was 18 and beautiful and I was 19 turning to 20 and still pretty innocent when it came to girls.

We had a winter and a spring together, but we didn't survive a summer apart. We did so many things together, goofy things like walking in the rain and eating pizza at 3 a.m. and wonderful, optimistic things like falling in love and planning a future that never came.

America drifting apart into two different nations

Note: This is a piece that originally appeared on a different Website in the Summer of 2008. I thought it might be appropriate in 2019.

I remember a conversation I had with my grandmother in the last year or so before she died.

My grandmother, Florence Kindinger, in 1960

She was born in 1895 and lived until 1990, and amazing changes took place during her life. When she was born, the telephone and the electric light were still relatively new; most folks in small towns didn't have either.

The very first automobiles were being built, but 99 percent of Americans hadn't even seen one. Motion pictures were still a few years away, and radio and television, airplanes and computers, were still off on the distant horizon.

In her lifetime, men went to the moon.

I'm nowhere near 94 yet, but I've been thinking about the ways our country has changed since my own birth in 1949. Many of them aren't as dramatic -- planes fly faster, computers do more with less space, there are a lot more channels of television and things that weren't portable are now.

But not all the changes have been positive ones; indeed, many of the things we would call "progress" have actually served to balkanize us and divide us from one another.

I always get a kick out of comedian Jeff Foxworthy talking about growing up in the '50s and '60s and saying kids had it tough because there were only three channels of television -- ABC, CBS and NBC.

"And if the president was on, your evening was shot."

Now there are hundreds of channels, on all the time, and a hit show is lucky to garner 20 percent of the audience. You can watch television for women (Lifetime), for kids (Nickleodeon), for guys (Spike), or for almost any interest group you can imagine.

So nobody watches the same show.

Nobody has the same frame of reference anymore.

But on January 19, 1953, 44 million Americans, nearly 72 percent of the audience, watched the episode of "I Love Lucy" in which she gave birth to her first child.

Think about it. Seventy-two percent of the audience. Super Bowls don't draw that well; the Olympics or the Academy Awards would kill for that kind of viewership.

I started thinking about this yesterday when I found the YouTube clip of Sarah Brightman singing on the Johnny Carson show in 1991. I can't remember the last time I heard someone reference something that happened on late-night television, but there was a time when folks who were still awake at 11:30 p.m. tuned to NBC so they could at least hear Carson's monologue before falling asleep.

Are we one country anymore? I don't know. I've heard so much about red states and blue states that I'm starting to hate those colors. But we're far more divided than that. We're secular America and Christian America. We're beer America and wine America. We're meat America and vegetarian America.

2019 update: And of course, the greatest division of them all, Trump America and non-Trump America.

Is there anything other than a 232-year-old idea that still holds us together?

2019 update: 243 now.

I wonder.

After all these years, not so strange to be 70

It was the spring of 1968 and I was about halfway through what I'd have to say was one of the three or four worst years of my life.

I had been at the University of Virginia for more than six months. My grades were beyond atrocious and I hadn't made a single friend. Pretty much all I had was the music, and when Simon & Garfunkel came out with their long-awaited "Bookends" album, I found myself listening to it again and again.

The song that touched me the most was "America," about a couple who went on the road "to look for America," something a lot of us thought of doing back then. I was 18 going on 13 and desperately unhappy. If "Old Friends" and its wonderful line, "How terribly strange to be 70," didn't much register with me, it's probably because I never thought I would ever see 70.

Heck, I didn't think I would see 30.