Twenty-five years.
You probably think that’s a long time, don’t you? Well, let’s think about that.
Twenty-five years ago, Bill Clinton was in the first year of his presidency and nobody had heard of Monica Lewinsky yet, including Bill himself. The big headlines that spring had been about a truck bomb at the World Trade Center that left the twin towers damaged but still standing, and a long siege by the FBI of the Branch Davidian religious compound near Waco, Texas, that left more than 70 people dead.
Twenty-five years ago, the Unabomber was still mailing out his explosive packages from a cabin in Montana. Women pilots in the U.S. Air Force were just gaining the privilege to fly in combat. And “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was a new policy solution that didn’t really satisfy anybody.
The Internet had been around in one form or another for a couple of decades, but most people didn’t know much about it, and the World Wide Web was just in its infancy. Even though Windows was an established thing, it wasn’t unusual to encounter a computer display consisting of green or orange letters glowing against a black background. Boxy CRT-style monitors were still in use, and only stock traders and Hollywood agents carried cellular telephones, which were roughly the size of a brick at that time.
Music was delivered primarily on compact discs then. And while many cars still came with cassette decks as a standard feature, nobody was buying vinyl records except aging hippies and jazz fanatics.
The biggest song of the year twenty-five years ago was Meatloaf’s “I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).”
A gallon of gas cost slightly over a buck, and that same buck with some change would get you three crisp tacos at Taco Time.
Twenty-five years ago, the name “Loreena Bobbitt” made men everywhere reflexively cross their legs, and Gen X was shaken by the tragic (and tragically squalid) drug-induced death of one of our own, the actor River Phoenix, on a Hollywood sidewalk.
My favorite television shows were Highlander: The Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
I was building a collection of movies on VHS, and I dreamed of someday being able to afford a laserdisc player. In the theater where I worked, the movies opening this final week of April were The Dark Half, Indian Summer, and Who’s the Man?, but The Sandlot was still playing if you’d rather see that, and the original Jurassic Park was coming up in June.
I still had most of my hair twenty-five years ago, as well as a lot fewer pounds around my middle and a pancreas that worked reliably.
Yeah, twenty-five years seems like a very long time ago, doesn’t it? Except it wasn’t. Not really. To steal a line from the Boss, it all passed in the wink of a young girl’s eye. And for some mysterious reason, that girl is still with me, even after all that time. I’ve given her a million reasons to not stick around, but she’s done it anyhow.
Happy anniversary, Baby Duck. Here’s to another wink of your eye.
