I thought I had come to terms with the passage of time a few years ago when I taught a class on 9/11 literature to a group of students who had no memory of 2001, but this week my students reminded me just how much the gap between our ages is growing: They wanted me to explain what a character means when he says "I'm a spring."
We're reading Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is set in that distant decade the 1990s, when Getting Your Colors Done was a thing. I explained the whole seasonal color palette concept to my students. "I'm a winter," I said, a fact anyone who was sentient in the 90s could have discerned simply by looking at my outfit. My students seemed both puzzled and moderately amused.
I'm accustomed to explaining the 90s to my students, but it's usually the 1890s. When I assign readings by Paul Laurence Dunbar or Charles Chesnutt, for instance, I talk about lynching and the backlash against Reconstruction and the Old Plantation School of literature and the Atlanta Exposition Address, topics that feel much more weighty than whether a person looks better in pastels or primary colors.
What other 1990s phenomena will I have to explain to the class? The whole decade is a bit of a blur, possibly because I was busy working on my PhD while serving as editor of a community newspaper and raising two small children. I immediately think of the Challenger disaster, but that happened in 1986. In the 1990s, Princess Diana died. Apartheid finally fell apart. The Cleveland Indians went to the World Series but lost--twice. Operation Desert Storm, the bombing of the World Trade Center, Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, Dolly the sheep...interesting times. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 and is now positively geriatric.
Which is how I feel when my students treat the 1990s as if it's just as distant as the 1890s, or when they talk about the Vietnam War as if it were roughly contemporary with the Civil War. To them, anything that happened before they were born is all part of the dim and distant past, interesting to learn about but full of primitive people doing quaint but incomprehensible things, like dialing a telephone or watching Matlock or getting their colors done.
Next thing you know I'll be chasing young folks off my lawn while reminiscing about the joys of cursive writing and analog clocks--but at least I'll be wearing the right colors to suit my season.
2 comments:
My aunt got my colors done in the early to mid 1980s! And we kind of got trained in it at the hippie Montessori run by artists back I went to when I was 4 or 5, so I can confidently say my DH is a winter (as is my mother and my sister to a lesser extent).
I am also a Spring. :) Lots of pastels.
I can remember going to some kind of home party, like a Tupperware party but instead of buying plastics we were getting our colors done. How long ago was that? I don't remember.
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