XL Down, XL to Go

Super Bowl XL is in the books. Pittsburg did not win; Seattle lost. There’s not enough cappuccino (a quad grande, skinny and dry, if you please) in the Emerald City to ease the pain in their sorry hearts this morning. That big-mouthed tight end of theirs needs both of his hands transplanted. All he proved is that if your end is tight, stupid things come out of your mouth.

XL – a somewhat daunting number that’s more than a little hard to believe for those of us who have seen them all. Forty years! How does this time-flying thing happen? I easily recall sitting in the living room of my college fraternity house in January 1967, watching the curious but semi-exciting match up between the NFL and AFL champs. Green Bay kicked Kansas City’s butt, as expected, before a less-than-sold-out crowd at the LA Memorial Coliseum. There was very little pre-game hype for a game that had not yet been christened as either “Super” or a “Bowl” (it was the “AFL-NFL World Championship” game). Some die-hard football fans viewed that game as little more than a post-season exhibition. Two years later in SB III, a bold and brash young man known as Broadway Joe would predict and then deliver an AFL victory, when the New York Jets humbled the Baltimore Colts. Football and the Super Bowl changed that day, reminding us that anything and everything can change in a day. Now, we’ve had forty Super Sundays – and I’m forty years older.

On an otherwise innocent day last year I was watching TV and along came a commercial advertising the 50th anniversary of Disneyland. It struck me like the proverbial truckload of earthen building material – because I went to Disneyland just a few months after it opened in 1955, back when Dumbo and the Peter Pan ride were the big attractions. I got my picture taken in Frontierland wearing a coonskin Davy Crockett cap alongside life-sized cutouts of Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen, because that was cool in 1955. Fifty years! I can’t believe that I’ve been alive for, much less can recall, the fiftieth of anything. The Twelfth of Never, sure; but not the 50th of the Anaheim version of Never-Never Land. When will this madness stop!

The first boomer just turned 60! It’s been 42 years since the Beatles arrived in the U.S., the Rolling Stones performed in Bakersfield (yes, they did), and JFK was assassinated; 37 years since the same fate struck down MLK and RFK; 36 years since Woodstock, the first moonwalk, and my first trip to Haight-Ashbury; and 35 years since the Beatles disbanded! My high school class “celebrates” its 40th anniversary this year, and my law school class marks its 30th (yeah, I know, it took a while)!

Is anybody paying attention to this cataclysmic erosion of time? I’m telling you, this could end poorly if we don’t do something about it. Other similarly stressed boomers have asked me what I’m going to do. I think the answer is rather obvious – – –

I’m going to Disneyland! There are old rides to enjoy again, and new rides to experience for the first time. It is, indeed, a Magical Kingdom; a place where grown men can wear coonskin caps; a place where madness stops and time does not erode.

Yo, Mick!