I used to hate the 70s. Just the whole decade. Everything about it. The clothes, the music, something about its being a big time for my parents kind of turned me off. I particularly thought the way men looked in the 70s was kind of vulgar.
I assume a lot of these opinions came out of my childhood habit of flipping through my mom's photo albums. There were quite a few of them, each with a different floral theme printed on a faux leather cover with thick interior pages, already yellowed, definitely not acid-free, each encased in a loud, crackling plastic cover.
Each photo was inevitably either washed out or blurry, with weird textures and rounded corners. They showed pale blue, almost white Arizona skies punctured by ranch style homes backing up to craggy sparse mountains. I saw so many familiar faces living in a world where I didn't exist, my gangly-legged mom with long hair, surprisingly handsome uncle in a shearling jacket, and grandma with her Vidal pixie cut and a miniskirt, all captured in shots with dogs I didn't know, cars I didn't know, entire houses I didn't know yet where my whole family lived. I think I felt left out. My mom's small family is such a unit now, particularly the grandma-mom-me trine that it felt shocking to see a history they shared that didn't include me.
I saw photos of my mom's frumpy friends as 18 year olds, lying by water in Mexico in a beach towel tangle of long brown legs and sunbleached hair. I recognized Teri, Sally and Janeane because I played with their kids, and they sure didn't look like that anymore. Furthermore, all of my mom's old boyfriends looked like Greg Allman. I remember feeling suspicious, stabbing my finger at a picture of some shirtless bearded blonde guy, leaning on a car and smoking with my giggling mom next to him, "Who is this?" "No one you know," she said. I remember meeting that guy in person years later, shortly before he died. I watched my mom interact with him, easy familiarity mixed with awkward change, and the way she still called him Kimmer (Kim) while he and my uncle helped us install her dishwasher. Somehow the same, somehow so old.
A lot of my mom's old friends really clung to their 70s vibes for years, even to the present. They kept their shaggy hair when it wasn't ok, and their clothes, though contemporary (I assume) still somehow reflected their high school days. I didn't like them as a kid, particularly the in-laws from my uncle's common law marriage to my mom's best school friend. I realize now that that was probably at least partly from my dad's shit talking them, calling them "Slopehead" trash, his nickname for anyone from Sunnyslope. Yanno, like my mom was. I didn't realize til years later how snide and snooty my dad was about her friends. In childhood, they had inhabited different social classes, and I didn't realize how much my dad had (likely unconsciously) clung to his.
My aunt-in-law's brother had some decades-long "joke" with my mom about how he was her husband, though they'd never really dated. He was a sleazy guy with a smoky jackal laugh who'd stand around in the street in front of his mother's house on holidays, drinking beer and getting in fights with passing cars, and I remember rolling my eyes to the point of damage any time he crowded my mom to laugh about their HILARIOUS old joke. I saw him a few years ago at my cousin's Christmas party and walked off in the middle of a conversation after about two minutes, leaving my mom to deal with him. "Thanks," she said later.
"He's your husband."
This song always felt emblematic of the old days that I felt skeptical of. I found it cheesy, embarrassing to even hear. I couldn't stand it. Many years later, while watching the British show Back in Time for Dinner, I heard a snippet of it and suddenly it felt familiar, charming and very sentimental. I've liked it ever since in one of the more remarkable about-faces of my life, but it always somehow reminds me of those old times, belonging to others. I still love Todd Rundgren.
After that, the photo albums just transitioned to the same pictures over and over, me naked in a bathtub or lying walleyed in a crib. My dad grinning and flexing a giant bicep in front of a Winnie the Pooh wall hanging while I dangled headfirst from the other arm.
It's funny to me now how much I disliked all of my mom's friends. Heidi, my mom's post-Slope best friend, lived in Phoenix back then, and she seemed to clock my attitude before I was old enough to even show it. She'd stalk around her pool in a bikini and a deep brown tan, her perfect blonde hair gleaming with sun-in, and made me learn to dive at 7 or 8, telling me it was a life skill. It was for her, a trust fund kid whose goals included beaches and suntans and dogs and little else. I didn't want to dive and she'd call me out each time I hesitated, asking if I was a chicken or what, forcing me to line up beside her while my mom would shrug with a smile from a pool towel and look away when I glanced to her for support. Heidi would show me where to put my feet and how to put my arms up and arch my body forward before awkwardly splashing into the water following her perfectly smooth dives. I didn't realize til years later what a dream queen she was, and is - beautiful, strong, opinionated, a little scary. Her husband still says the way to get good at things like tennis is to "play up," which means play against Heidi. Bougie dynamics.
In the following years, after they moved, I would hear Heidi say, "Oh tell her to get out of here," through the receiver when I'd go tugging on my mom's arm while they were on the phone, whining or asking for something. Heidi has no kids and no chill for them, and I learned to be quiet and act right around her on our visits to California because her adult-style ribbing shocked me, and I tried to stay off her radar. Now she's my other mother and we spend all of our holidays together in Texas. Heidi's the bouncing baby girl from Austria.
Conversely, and for no rational reason, I always liked my dad's friends, a motley group of former 70s coolguys who transformed into dads in white sneakers, but each of whom retained some legacy chopper or truck from or similar to the ones they had in their younger days. These old guys would inevitably roll some bikes out to their driveways while friends were over, so that they could stand around and talk interminably while I played in the yard or eventually grew tired and fell asleep somewhere. But, they didn't seem committed to reliving the past or particularly sentimental about it, and most of them simply embraced their new normcore lives instead of clinging to past selves. Perhaps they didn't feel that they had peaked in high school, unlike my mom's lame fake husband, who definitely did. So anyway.
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