The fine folks at Finish The Sentence Friday would like to know what my favorite decade is. This is a question to which I have given some consideration without coming to a solid decision. To me the issues divides into two sections, which decade has produced the art and entertainment as well as the history,that has given me the most pleasure, or the most challenges, secondly which decade has been the most enjoyable to me personally.
For the sake of conciseness as well as sanity, I am confining myself to the decades I have lived in.(Although this deprives me of 30's horror movies, everything to do with WWII and 50's rock and roll, I am trying to keep this from becoming too unwieldy.) Conveniently enough I was born right at the top of one, so we can easily work with the standard decades from 1960 on.
In the case of the first category, there is no doubt in my mind that the answer would be the sixties. Certainly it is the source of most of the music I love (One word--Beatles) although I did pick up a lot of music in the 70's as well. A lot of my favorite films were made in the 60's as well, a diverse group that would include, Lawrence of Arabia, To Kill a Mockingbird, Planet of the Apes, The Manchurian Candidate, and many others. The down side of all this great creativity of course, is the political turmoil of the time. As I have written before the first public memory of my childhood is the JFK assassination; and a long string of sad tragedies follow in its wake.
When it comes to my personal life, it becomes more complicated. The 60's and 70's, my childhood were happy enough at home, not always so much at school. After all the upheaval of Vietnam and Watergate, everyone seemed to go to sleep for awhile. I often had the feeling of being born in the wrong time. I should have been a little older, so I could be involved in all that was going on; or else I should have been a little younger so I could be clueless with the rest.
The 80's were a miserable time politically (Ronald Reagan and the trickle down theory that never seemed to even make it to the middle class, let alone the poor) but personally it was a great time. I spent most of the decade slowly but surely working my way to a bachelors degree, I was lucky enough to fall in with a wonderful group of theatre people, form many of the friendships that have mattered the most over the years, created some excellent plays, worked on many more, got married. They were some very good years.
The 90's saw me into civil service, which provided security and benefits, even if the pay wasn't always what it should be. We had our children (enough to make any decade memorable), and mostly became the people we are today.
The 2000's began badly, as everyone knows that divides their lives into before and after 9/11/01. It made my professional life far more complicated as we had to process all sorts of information about terror alerts and weapons of mass destruction, while the proliferation of cell phones greatly increased our work load. But the children were doing well, and things were, overall, quite good.
Now here we are at the present decade. One child partway out of the nest, the other working on it. Retirement as a realistic option looms on the horizon. Then we will probably reboot our lifestyles again, as we will be able to focus back upon ourselves again.
John Lennon, in his last interview, made the observation that "we're still alive, we're still all here, and while there's life there's hope." In the end, the best decade should always be the one we are living in, because that's the only one we can do anything with.
This post is part of Finish the Sentence Friday. To see how other writers chose to finish today's sentance, click on the link below:
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