We Didn’t Start the Fire

When I was kid, back in the day when Billy Joel was growing up, I read a long poem in McCall’s magazine. I liked it so much, I memorized it. In the early 1990s when I heard the song, We Didn’t Start the Fire, I immediately remembered the poem. Perhaps Billy, as a boy, was also inspired. Whether it was the inspiration or not, it became one of my all-time favorite songs with the perfect video.

The ‘60s kitchen reminded me of our ‘50s kitchen. Each shot is worth a thousand words and so many memories, though, as a child, I never saw a pregnant woman. They stayed indoors. I remember my mother and godmother talking about a neighbor they hadn’t seem in months and decided she must be in the family way. Sure enough, early summer. There she was cuddling a baby on the front porch.

The Life magazine reminded me that once I started working, I got a subscription to Life for my mother. She never got it. The rag went bankrupt and I didn’t get a refund.

My brothers had Davy Crockett caps and we all had cap pistols. My godmother got a kitchen table and chair set like the one in the video with what appears to be aluminum legs. Later, her new kitchen appliances were yellow. My brothers had Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry watches – no lunch boxes. We all had Brownie cameras with flash bulbs.

Once a month, my dad took my brothers to the hobby shop for AMT model car sets. My friends and I became quite proficient with hula hoops.

In the early ‘70s, my white coworkers talked about valium continuously and popped pills in the afternoon. I had no idea what it was. Over lunch they talked about how well birth control worked , but now that they were off the pill, they couldn’t seem to get pregnant.

By the time I got to college in the ‘70s, most tie dye shirts covered braless tits. I went braless myself one time wearing a heavy knit tunic top over my bell bottoms.