Hitting three-quarters of a century marks a milestone unlike any other. It is, to use a four-letter Elizabethan word, O-L-D-E.

But since it’s also inevitable, there’s no reason to cry over the previous decades’ spilled milk, the milk in this case being my glorious past, which as time goes on, becomes ever more glorious.

My physical decline, while a literal pain in the prat, has thus far stayed at the annoying level, rather than become a debilitating one. And that’s fine with me. But what bugs me is my cerebral slippage, which now happens in almost all my conversations.

Last week I was diddy-bopping down Memory Lane with my pal Ted “Buzz” Budzinsky. The focus of our convo shifted to Saranac Lake in the ’70s.

I realize everyone thinks their nation’s best of times were their personal salad days, but there’s a lot to be said for the ’70s being a wonderful time. While there were all sorts of negative forces and events raising hell with my peace of mind, still, it was a time of great positivity and promise.

It was a time of dynamism, especially for the Boomers. Having been raised in the restrictions of the ’50s, and having survived the lunatic excesses of the ’60s, the ’70s offered haven and delight with all its alternatives. And naturally scads of my peers and I availed ourselves of them. Sure, a lot of them failed miserably, but that’s just a given with the nature of experimentation. It pays to remember Edison ran 2,774 experiments before he finally made his first successful light bulb filament.

I was so swept up in the times, I was drawn to an alternative lifestyle — adulthood. Of course I failed, and I might add it was no fun while it lasted.

Anyhow, My Home Town was a den of delights in the ’70s. With two colleges and our homegrown townies, every new or recently-discovered deviation from the mainstream was pursued con brio, by almost everyone in the teen-to-thirties demographic. You name it, and young peeps were checking it out, if not tearing into it, hell bent for leather — music, art, crafts, philosophies, literature, style, and on and on. While the ’50s and early ’60s could’ve been painted in black and white, the ’70s palette contained every color of the spectrum … and then some.

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Trippin’ the time machine

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My chat with Buzz didn’t start out talking about the ’70s but we somehow ended up there when he mentioned having found a box of photos from then.

“It was unreal,” he said. “Like being in a time machine.”

“Yeah?” I said. “And what exactly were the pics of?”

“Mostly that house of crazies I lived with on Shepard Avenue,” he said. “Remember them?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Other than you, the only one I ever talked to was Hank the Tank. And he was sure hard to forget. Saranac Lake’s biggest hippie, literally.”

“Yup,” said Buzz. “No other six foot four dude in town with a red braid all the way down his back, always wearing bibs and a cowboy hat.”

“I have a really funny story about him and me,” I said. “Took place out at Lonesome Bay.”

Buzz ignored my comment and went on.

“Plus he had that girlfriend with the VW bus she’d painted all the planets on,” he said. “They were about as hard to miss as a Sherman tank.”

“A psychedelic Sherman tank at that,” he said.

“But her paint job on that bus was brilliant,” I said.

“Oh yeah,” he said, “she was a talented artist.”

“She was a talented everything,” I said. “She could paint, she could sew, she could do bead and

leather craft. Someone once said if you gave her enough steel wool, she coulda knitted a Cadillac.”

“Was her name Celeste?” he said.

“Yeah, but it wasn’t her real name,” I said. “It was short for ‘celestial,’ which fit her to a T.”

“So what was her real name?”

“Never knew,” I said.

“I couldn’t figure what she saw in him,” he said. “She was ambitious, always working on something. The only things he ever did was pump iron and party.”

“Never know what anyone sees in anyone,” I said.

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Changes

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He nodded. Then we both fell silent, wrapping ourselves in our respective cocoons of nostalgia.

A very long moment passed.

“Wonder what ever happened to him,” I said.

“Funny you ask,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I ran into him in town, sometime in the nineties.”

“What was that like?” I asked.

“Unreal,” he said.

“Why?”

“Apparently, after he left here, he went back home to Long Island and married the boss’s daughter,” he said. “Is a regular pillar of the community.”

“Hank the Tank a solid citizen?” I said.

“Not very solid at all,” he said. “He musta gained a hundred pounds. Goes at least three large, maybe three and a half. I had no idea who he was at first, wearin’ a pink alligator shirt and khakis. But he recognized me.”

“So what’d you talk about?”

“Not much,” he said. “A little this and that. Then I asked him if he wanted to have a beer in The Hole for old time’s sake.”

“And..?”

“And you woulda thought I’d asked him to sell his first born to the slavers,” he said. “He got all uptight, said he hadda get back to Placid, ’cause he and the little lady and the in-laws hadda golf date.”

“Hank the Tank, golf?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “And he said if his wife smelled beer on his breath, he’d be in the dog house for the next month.”

“Oh, how far the mighty fall,” I said.

“Even worse, he said he should never have come to Saranac, ’cause if his wife and her fam ever found out about his life here, they woulda annulled the marriage before the sun set. Then he just slinked away.”

Trying to reconcile the new Tank with the old one had stripped my gears. I just sat there, trying to process it, when Buzz interrupted.

“So what’s the story with you and Tank?” he said.

“Story?” I said. “What story?”

“The story you were gonna tell me,” he said. “A funny one.”

“I said I had a funny story to tell you about Tank?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

And there it was: Cerebral slippage of the first degree. Not only did I not remember telling Buzz I had a story about Tank, I couldn’t think of any story I could tell about Tank.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll think of it.”

It was a consoling thought, but one I had no faith in. Yeah, sometimes I think of what I just forgot; other times it’s as far gone as The Lost City of Z. And it turned out, that was one of those “other times.” I never figured out what I wanted to tell Buzz, nor could I dredge up any tale I would’ve told him.

So what to do?

I did the only thing I could. I accepted it as part of The New and Not Improved Me and let it go.

The fact is no matter how well my mind worked in the past, it doesn’t work that well anymore. If you like metaphor, think of it like this: In the course of any conversation, odds are my train of thought will either get shifted to a siding or get completely derailed. And then, like all American railroads, the tracks’ll get torn up and sent to the scrapyard.

And while I mourn the passing of the American railroad, I waste no time or effort trying to bring them back.

My memory, like our mass transit system, is — for better or worse — the only one I’ve got.