Time loops: Echoes of 1976 in 2023

Sometimes the past connects the future in ways that we could never imagine

The year was 1976. I was nine years old; my sister was eleven. My dad was a captain in the US Air Force back then, and our family was stationed at Ramstein Air Force Base in West Germany—a place that became ground zero of a potential nuclear conflict during the Cold War.

Ramstein Air Base came to be because of the terms of occupation following the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.

In 1976, we lived in a small German Rhineland Pfalz village a few kilometers (or “klicks” as they used to call them) outside of the airbase, in a small apartment flat on the third floor of a renovated farmhouse that was owned by an elderly German couple.

On the second floor was another American military couple, Karen and Jerry: Karen was a nurse, and sometimes when I would come home from school before my parents were back from work, she’d invite me downstairs to help her bake cookies for Jerry.

The village that we lived in—along with the surrounding ones that had once been serfdoms as part of this or that regional castle—had been founded some 700 years earlier.

To an American kid whose own nation was just then celebrating its 200th birthday, it was an interesting place to live—there was a direct connection to a depth of history that kids who grew up only in one American city stateside were missing.

It was deeply meaningful, to me, to be living in a small town that had existed 500 years before the USA was even founded back in 1776.

At that point in time, on an American airbase in West Germany, black and white television was still the norm for American language TV broadcasts; there were only two channels available then for American military families stationed in Germany. When I got home from school, I’d watch Baa Baa Black Sheep, The Wild Wild West, and Star Trek episodes in black and white on a small screen.

There were also FM and AM radio stations run by the Armed Forces Network; I used to listen to old-time radio shows like the Green Hornet, Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story”, and American baseball games that were carried on AM radio as they were called play by play somewhere back home in the USA.

I’d listen to baseball games, imagining that I was there in the stands watching, as I would fall asleep with a small transistor radio on my nightstand, antenna pulled out and angled just so in order to get a clear radio signal.

Personal computers of the kind that we all take for granted these days hadn’t been invented yet, the cellphone was decades in the future, and video games from Atari were still a year in the future, too.

The Berlin Wall still stood back then, part of the Iron Curtain that separated East and West Germany. It was a stark, physical division between ideologies: communism and socialism in the East Soviet Bloc countries, and free market capitalism in the Western European countries. I was young, but even then, I understood the irony of a fence that was actually designed to keep the communist/socialist subjects inside the fence, rather than keeping the westerners out.

Being something of a bookworm, I spent a lot of time reading books that my dad helped me check out from the base library at Ramstein, climbing trees in the backyard of the house, eating apples that I picked while I swung on the tire swing tied to the apple tree, and hitting baseballs by myself—out on the orchard hill up the street from the house. I got a lot of exercise chasing my flyballs down and then hitting them back in the other direction.

My dad had an 8-track tape player back then, which was a new thing in those days; he also had a record player. We had a small collection of “45” and “78” records, maybe a dozen or two in total.

There are whole generations of younger people alive today who have no idea what “records” are, or what they represented to people in those days. If you have forgotten: A “45” record was a 7-inch vinyl record that had just one song on each side, whereas the 12-inch “78s” had a whole album of songs split between the front and back sides of the record.

When I wasn’t reading, climbing trees, or building castles with Legos on lazy afternoons, I would put on my dad’s headphones and listen to a record or two from his collection on the record player.

He had a few classical music albums (Mozart, Beethoven and Bach) which I loved, and also one or two pop albums; I remember Neil Diamond’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull soundtrack, an album or two by Barbra Streisand, and Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits.

On the “flip side” of the Simon and Garfunkel album were two songs I especially liked: “Homeward Bound” and “America”. I liked most of the songs on the whole album, but those two songs I would listen to over and over.

On “side 1” of the album there were two other songs, one in particular to be mentioned later, that I would also listen to over and over. To listen to songs on repeat with a vinyl record, you had to gingerly lift the needle when the song was done, and then carefully move it back to the start of the track, taking care not to scratch the record or drop the needle too hard.

Not quite as convenient as pressing the “next track/previous track” on your cellphone audio player these days, that’s for sure.

In 1981, after serving two three-year tours at Ramstein, my dad was reassigned to a base back in the United States. We moved that summer, packing up our household belongings once more as military families tended to do every two or three years.

The record player and records got packed up that summer; by the time we arrived in Indiana months later, the “audio cassette” had become popular, and a few years later Compact Discs (CDs) started appearing in music stores.

I don’t remember if my parents ever unpacked that record player or not; I lost track of it. I don’t recall seeing it or the album collection that we had again after we left Germany.

My dad might still have had it squirreled away somewhere, or my sister may have taken it when she moved out in her college years, but my sister and I had migrated to “audio cassettes” and left our childhood music preferences behind, so it was out of sight and out of mind.

The last time I can remember listening to that Simon and Garfunkel Greatest Hits album on that old record player was probably 1979 or 1980.

Until, that is, on April 3 of this year, 2023.

I had been living with my daughters, 23 and 26 years old at the time, in California; 2023 marked my 34th year there. I had moved to Redondo Beach from Indiana to start my first post-college job in the Aerospace industry (TRW Space and Defense) back in 1989.

On April 1, with my fiance’ Emily and my daughters’ help, I had packed up everything that I owned that could fit into a small 14-foot trailer, discarding or leaving behind everything else that wouldn’t fit.

In that trailer were boxes of my treasured books, some of which were from my childhood book collection that I started back in Ramstein Germany when I was 8 or 9 years old.

Emily flew out from Michigan on March 30 to help me finish packing up and drive my pickup truck, towing the 14-foot trailer, on a cross country road trip from California to Michigan. We did the classic Great American Road Trip, spending a few days driving down good old Route 66 through California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas.

My treasured books, which I had mentioned in a previous substack article The world has changed since I last wrote to you: but the best is yet to come (substack.com), had all been boxed up and stored away in a garage for four years, following the forced sale of my family home in early 2019—a sale precipitated by a divorce that left me dispirited and nearly broke. They were now packed away in the trailer, awaiting their chance to see sunlight again.

On April 2, on the second day of our cross-country drive, Emily and I had made it only as far as Flagstaff, Arizona, following a difficult drive the day before that started at noon and ended at 3am the next morning. We were so exhausted that we stayed an extra night in Flagstaff and woke up to hit the road to continue the Great American Road Trip on April 3.

As we pulled out onto the freeway, Emily said “I made a music playlist for today. Can I plug in my iPhone and play it for you?”

She connected her phone and started the playlist: in the spirit of the “Great American Road Trip” and Route 66, she had chosen the song “America” from Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, and also “Get your Kicks on Route 66” by Nat King Cole.

When “America” by Simon and Garfunkel started playing, I knew I recognized it, but it took me a while to place and remember the song—it had been so long since I’d heard it. But I remembered most of the lyrics once it got going. It slowly dawned on me that it had been on my favorite album at age nine.

It turned out that Emily had chosen more tracks from that same album (not knowing at that time I had any knowledge of or connection to that album; she was a fan of Paul Simon’s music and just liked that “America” track, since it fit our travelling theme.)

A few more songs from that album played next, and as the realization hit me what I was listening to, my eyes filled with tears. Because one of those songs was my absolute favorite song from that album—it was the one I had listened to over and over most often when I was 9 years old.

That song, from side 1 of Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, has these lyrics:

What a dream I had pressed in organdy
Clothed in crinoline of smoky burgundy
Softer than the rain

I wandered empty streets down past the shop displays
I heard cathedral bells tripping down the alleyways
As I walked on

And when you ran to me, your cheeks flushed with the night
We walked on frosted fields of juniper and lamplight
I held your hand

And when I awoke and felt you warm and near
I kissed your honey hair with my grateful tears
Oh, I love you, girl
Oh, I love you

I had long since forgotten the name of that song: but there it was—the title on my Truck dashboard appeared as the song was playing.

“For Emily, wherever I may Find Her.”

I looked over at Emily, sitting right next to me—my eyes glistening. Both of our eyes grew wide with realization.

God had chosen that song. How could it have been otherwise?

Sometimes the past connects the future in ways that we could never imagine.

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Postscript

As I prepared to write this story, I came across this interesting article: Future influences past. Perhaps the flow of time isn’t what we’ve been told it is.

I also got curious and asked ChatGPT for help finding this number: it turns out that of the 8 billion people alive on the planet today, 5.3 billion of them weren’t even born when I lived these experiences back in 1976. That realization is humbling.

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I hope you enjoyed this latest post! More to come this week on AI.

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