decades

I saw a mention recently that Star Wars celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year. How can that be?

It shouldn’t surprise me. Two years ago I missed attending the Pitzer College alumni weekend which included those of us celebrating our forty-year reunion as Terry and I were in the process of moving here to Hemet from Gilroy.

So yes, two years later would be the fortieth anniversary of Star Wars. I missed that event, 25 May 1977, and was only vaguely aware of it. I was in the process of moving then as well. I was leaving my beloved Claremont for the unknown world of Laredo, Texas where I was opening a new B. Dalton Bookseller store. Later that summer a new section of the mall opened up that included a multiplex. Star Wars was one of the movies showing when the theater opened. I lost count as to how many times I watched it.

I also received notice recently that the twenty-year life insurance policies that Terry and I took out when we bought our house in Gilroy are coming to term this summer. Has it really been twenty years? It has. It was 1997 when we said goodbye to our landlord, gleefully telling him that our new mortgage payment, PMI, and taxes combined were less than the rent he wanted to charge us under his proposed new lease.

It’s all hard to believe, but then our nephew Race, whom I knew as an infant when Terry and I first got (back) together, is now married and has his own son who will be two in November. My brother Brian’s adopted son, Eric, was an unhappy ten-year-old when Brian married his mother Bobbie. Eric turns forty on Friday and his daughter turns sixteen in September.

Sigh.

Issac Watts was indeed right when he wrote about time as “an ever-flowing stream.”