Who’s a Relic? Me?

My past is older than most of the people I know.

So what does this mean? It means my frame of reference could be hanging in a museum. The antiquities of the fifties and sixties, the skate keys, mimeograph machines, inner tubes, they’d hang next to my frame of reference. Everything would be part of an exhibit entitled “Jan’s Old Things.”

My father who was a musician of sorts n the 40’s and 50’s played his organ every night when I was a teenager (in the 60’s) using bootleg books of sheet music that he’d bought somewhere, out of the trunk of somebody’s car, who knows. These two bootleg books were big binders of music. He’d flip through them, hitting on his old favorites and blasting the organ as loud as it would go, wall-vibrating load, no exaggeration.  (With that sentence I may have discovered the source of both of our hearing loss.)

Anyway, because he loved music from the past, I could never figure out why he didn’t love music from the present.  But he didn’t. He had no use for it. He looked over his paper at the Beatles on Ed Sullivan (right now there are six people in the universe who even know who Ed Sullivan was), shook his head a little and went back to reading about the stock market.

I considered him a relic. Oh, he was an interesting relic and got more interesting as he aged and especially after he died, but he and I did not share the same cultural space.

That’s what happening now. I am getting the message that my stuff, my things, my props are not just from another generation, they’re from a couple of generations ago. It’s been suggested to me for a while. Someone dropped off a relic cape a few years ago thinking it was time I started wearing one and I’ve left it sitting in its box thinking it wasn’t right for me, wouldn’t fit. Me? A relic? When I’m so unexpectedly current and informed? I eschew your cape!

But then I wonder, who the heck is Stacy Dash?