Where's the beef

I like being old enough to remember the presidential election of 1984. It was may first. And of course, of course I voted for Walter Mondale. I mean, really – the poor man lost every state except for Minnesota, his own, and he barely won that state with just 51% of the vote. I hated Ronald Reagan at the time. I thought he was such an extreme conservative.

Boy, did I have a lot to learn. If someone told me that today’s Republicans would make Reagan look like a bleeding-heart liberal, I’d probably have stayed in Munich, Germany in the early 1990s when I was there on temporary assignment and the boss had his eye on me for a permanent position. I said, another time perhaps. Aufgeschoben ist nicht aufgehoben (delayed is not cancelled).

Ah, how I miss those early years. When I was in my 20s and early 30s … I didn’t know what an achy back meant, what arthritic hips felt like, the effort it took to recover from a hip replacement, the vagaries of acid reflux-induced nausea, the dull pain after burying my second parent, of knowing I could never really be a child again.

Where’s the beef, indeed. I can hear Clara Peller saying it, I can hear Walter Monday saying it (for the record: about Gary Hart, that philandering polecat) … but I never really wanted to proof that “I got the beef.” I just wanted everything to stay the way it was.