If Karen Carpenter were still alive she'd be 73 now, turning 74 in March. That kind of stuns me, not because of how old she'd be but how young. I mean, it feels like she died 50 years ago and came to fame 100 years ago. Wouldn't she be, like, 90 by now? No, she'd only be 73. And as everybody knows, 70 is the new 50 (or is it 40?).
Such impressions have so much to do with how old you were and where you were (if you "were" at all) when things were happening. I imagine that to a 90-year-old of today (so 17 years older than Karen Carpenter) who remembers the Carpenters making their first splash back in the 70s, the reaction would be different: "She'd be 73 now? Impossible! Wasn't she a kid, like, yesterday?"
When "kids" like Karen Carpenter and Dolly Parton were gaining their first fame in the late 60s to early 70s, I was a real kid of just 10-13 years old. That strongly colors my impressions, because to a 12-year-old all "the famous people" on t.v. are the same age: "famous and grown-up." (I've commented on this here before, I know.) So it could have been Karen Carpenter and, let's say, Rudy Vallee doing a duet on t.v. and to my mind they'd have been in the same category: famous grown-up people on t.v. Never mind that Rudy Vallee was old enough to be Carpenter's grandfather.
It never occurred to me at the time that people like Carpenter and Parton were only seven or twelve years older than I was. It turns out Karen Carpenter was less "older" to me than I am to my "baby brother."
I remember when she died. It was terribly shocking, sad and manifestly too soon, yet when I realize now she was only 32 at her death I recognize that I failed to grasp then (I was 25) just how young she was. I knew she was "too young to go" but, no, I didn't really grasp how young she was. Because she was "Karen Carpenter who's been around forever, ever since I was a little kid." So she was young but also "old" to my perceptions.
And that's how it always is. We fix people in our cognitive space-time schema based on where they were relative to us upon our first (needless to say, fallible) impressions. To my generation a guy like Rudy Vallee was a somewhat comical curiosity, mugging it with his megaphone ("Why's he holding that thing?") in the 1960s and 70s. We had no clue what underlying generational sense-recollections he was evoking for his contemporaries (or why it would still be entertaining for them to watch him). But to them Vallee's heyday "was just yesterday... sigh." He was a lens to a whole constellation of vivid impressions from their youth. They saw a completely different Rudy Vallee than I saw on the t.v. screen. They saw a world I didn't see.
Just like the way no 20-year-old today would get either the allusion or the associated world of memories and feelings if they saw some reporter ask Christopher Knight if he'd had pork chops and applesauce for dinner.
What's of particular interest to me is how parochial each "bubble" of such memories and impressions is. None of them is universally meaningful, all-encompassing, no matter how much effort is put (via testimonials, awards, retrospectives, etc.) into hyping them as such. Each "bubble" is an ephemeral, subjective complex of impressions and emotions, bound by local relationships and interactions on the personal. sociocultural and generational planes. Not only will they mean nothing to people a hundred years from now, you only really need to hop a plane to a neighboring country today to find out how parochial they are, of utterly zero meaning to most people in the world. They come and they go, making due mockery of the oft-vaunted "importance" or "timelessness" of this or that "immortal' figure, feat, career or, even, an entire era.
It is, perhaps, the strange, inherent, unearned, unconscious wisdom of youth not to be awed by a "bubble" they weren't germinated in. They're not impressed by anything you haven't provided them an immediately felt, concrete reason to be impressed by. This is of course a fleeting, shallow brand of wisdom (they're monumentally impressed by any number of contemporary "megaphone muggers" that nobody outside their parochial bubble will care about 50 years from now), but, still, wisdom of a sort.
And so the merry-go-round goes. "All flesh is as the grass of the field...."
