Friday was my birthday.  

I got my driver’s license 41 years ago. I’m headed toward sexagenarianism, and as exciting as that sounds, I find it alarming. Not necessarily in a bad way, but in an I-don’t-know-where-the-time-went way.  I’m still trying to get a grasp so I can run around celebrating my age and living life with gusto. 

I will get there. It’s my goal. Right now, still relishing naps and coffee breaks.

But it really seems like, just a few summers ago, I was getting ready to enter my last year of grade school. I had started a yard mowing business. I was starting to feel like I was no longer a kid.

The summer I turned 11.  1978

The big deal that summer was the movie “Grease.”  When it was released in June 1978, people were nuts.  We drove to neighboring towns trying to see it, only to find that movie theaters were sold out. We finally were able to see it later that summer, the week of my birthday.

After the movie, a whole new fad began: the 1950s.  The current fashions of the 1970s for both men and women took on a 1950s persona, and believe it or not there was a sort of “neatening up” of the teenage culture.

Guys slicked their hair from the late 70’s into the 80’s. Girls wanted to wear sweaters and softer looking clothing. It was a little more respectable and would last until the grunge look of the early 1990s.

And that summer of 1978, I secretly wished for a leather jacket like John Travolta had. I wanted to be a T-bird.

Speaking of Travolta, he was a big star that year.  Fresh off “Saturday Night Fever,” he’d gone from television fame as Vinne Barbarino on “Welcome Back, Kotter” to superstardom.  

We listened to the soundtracks from SNF and “Grease” all summer long.  The latter was given to me for my birthday that year: In the form of an eight-track tape.

I think that summer was probably the first year I began thinking about girls as more than objects of pranks and teasing. We had, earlier that school year, already been subjected to the Christmas dance for chorus and band students from grades 5-8.  I remember staring in awe with my other friends at the eighth graders in their cooler clothes, asking one another to slow dance and not batting an eye.  

We knew we’d have to be next, and I think it took from the end of fifth grade to December of sixth grade to get up the nerve.

There was a young married couple who lived down the street from us, and the wife had a younger sister, our age, who visited on the weekends. I thought she was a movie star, and I was smitten. From afar.

I called my two best friends, who happened to be twins, and they rode over on their bikes so that the three of us could circle the block like vultures until that girl came outside. We waved at her, but we never got the nerve to approach. 

Besides, we were a little shrimpy at age 11 and she was statuesque and much taller than we were.  

Most girls were taller back then.

And I think most girls thought we were goofy. I mean, we’d watched Steve Martin on Saturday Night Live doing his wildly popular “King Tut” song and dance, and were jumping around imitating him. We still found bathroom humor hilarious (not much has changed), and there were a lot of characteristics we embodied that girls found repulsive.

And many of us had just discovered deodorant.  Most of the time.

Everyone wanted the new, very cutting edge Mattel electronic games, with the handheld football and baseball games being the most fun, and most of the girls probably didn’t get what all the fuss was about.  The guy down the street who had all the coolest toys had a large, electronic baseball game, and we all thought it was like owning a full-size arcade game.

Most of us probably wanted the new game “Hungry, Hungry Hippos” too but thought we were too cool to admit.

Even though “Grease” was such a big deal, we were still anxious to see “Jaws 2” that summer, and now being much older than we were when the first one came out, surely we would be braver about taking a swim.  

Some of the major cool-cats were listening to the band KISS and their greatest hits album that summer. My parents, grandparents, and their friends were watching a mini-series called “Dallas” that was such a hit. CBS had announced it would be a weekly series.

1978 was the first summer I remember going to the county fair with my friends, and we competed as to whom could fill their guts with the most corn dogs, cotton candy, lemon shake-ups and Malone’s Taffy, and still ride the Tempest or the Tilt-a-Whirl a bunch of times. And of course, we started looking around for girls to ride the ferris wheel with.

When I think of the prices we paid for concessions and fun back then, I am amazed. If we’d only known!

Sure, many of us would revisit a day or two of childhood. But those were awkward years: not quite teenagers, not quite kids anymore, and a little stressful.

It seems like things sped up a little after that summer of 1978. Before we knew it, high school was on the horizon and it didn’t seem like we blinked and we were adults paying bills.  

Still, I think some of us like to think about the care-free parts of those days. Not being quite old enough for things, yet old enough to know better and be held more accountable by adults. There were still so many things that were easy and comforting.

And it took me another 25 years before I got that leather jacket.