Came across an old favorite movie of mine the other day.
I have seen “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” numerous times, but it never seems old or boring to me. It’s got great acting, wonderful cinematography and an exceptional screenplay. It won four Academy Awards, which is outstanding for a Western.
And as much as I would like to deny it, it’s old. Ancient. No one under 50 was even born when it was released in 1969. In fact, if you went back to 1969 and wanted to see a 51-year-old Western, your best bet would be “Out West,” directed by Fatty Arbuckle and co-starring Arbuckle and Buster Keaton.
“Out West” was actually a comedic satire of contemporary Westerns, and if you were to see it, you would see a far greater difference from “Butch Cassidy” as you would see between “Butch Cassidy” and a 2020 film.
I was 19 in 1969, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have related to anything with the possible exception of a few books from 1918. To be fair, I looked at a list of the top books from that year and the only one that registered with me was “The Magnificent Ambersons.”
My parents were still the better part of a decade from being born.
Yes, it was a long long time ago.
It really is a matter of perspective. In the late 1990s, when I started my collection of autographed baseballs, I picked out a couple and told the clerk which ones I wanted — Frank Robinson and Johnny Bench.
“Oh,” she said. “You like the old-timers.”
Bench had retired in 1984, Robinson in 1977. They certainly weren’t old-timers to me To me at that point, old-timers were guys like Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, guys who had been retired for 30 years or more. Guys who had been out of the game already when I became an adult.
There are times it feels almost heartbreaking how fast time passes. Today I sent a birthday message to my first real girlfriend, someone who was an important part of my life for six months or so … 50 years ago.
It’s very strange to me. I was 20 that year and in some ways, thinking of myself as an adult for the first time. I can think of things that happened 10 years before that, when I was just a kid, and the 60-year gap seems less to me than being an adult 10 years later.
Sorry if that sounds goofy. In one of Stephen King’s anthologies, he had a short story about how time passes like a lazy creek wehen you’re young and a raging river when you’re older.
I think it was the early ’90s when the river started raging for me. I met and married my lovely Nicole in the fall of 1992. Her children, who became children of my heart if not my blood, were 12 and 7 then. Now they’re 40 and 35 and I have no idea where the time went. I love all three of them — Nicole, Pauline and Virgile — more than I ever thought I could love anyone.
Both of the children have wonderful lives — great marriages, terrific careers and in the case of Pauline, six incredible children.
My dad died more than 12 years ago, but what seems harder for me to believe is that my grandparents died 30 and 35 years ago. I still dream about them.
Nicole and I are lucky all our siblings are still alive. I am the oldest of five kids in my family, so it’s not a big surprise. But Nicole is the youngest of four in her family and at least one of her siblings is past 80.
It isn’t just family, though. For all the fuss about the O.J. Simpson trial, it has been 25 years. The 9/11 attacks were more than 19 years ago.. I hope at some point I will be alive to think how many years it has been since we suffered through Donald Trump in the White House.
It isn’t all bad. The year 2019 turned out to be an incredible one for me in that two teams I had followed almost forever finally were champions. The Washington Nationals won the World Series, and Virginia men’s basketball won the NCAA title.
I figured I was in trouble for a while, since either one of those victories were ones about which I could think, “Now I can die happy.”
But time goes on. I’ll be 71 in December, and it seems almost unreal to me.
But not as unreal as “Butch Cassidy” being 51 years ago.
That still floors me.