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The disc jockey dusted off a recording from 1975 and announced, "Here's a flashback from the carefree good old days."
He must not have lived in the same decade I did. Or he was already out of junior high school.
How come we never recognize the days as good old while we're slogging through them?
Back in my 1970s, anxieties popped up more prolifically than acne.
My fears fell into two major categories -- girls and geometry. I didn't understand either.
Geometry involved calculating angles to figure out how long a line was. As I recall, it was summed up like this:
One day, a poor little acorn rolled into an animal trail and got stomped into the ground by a herd of passing deer. Buried, the poor little acorn closed its little acorn eyes and cried little acorn tears until it fell into a fitful sleep that lasted several years.
When it awoke, it realized it had sprouted roots, branches and leaves from a bunch of angles, and towered in a long line over the animal trail. It puffed its knotholes and shouted, "Gee, I'm a tree!"
That's my complete compendium of geometry.
Everything else I did in 1975 involved girls -- meet girls, impress girls, salve wounds gouged by girls, sit home Friday nights wishing I had a girl.
Forty years later, I've discovered the folly of fretting.
If I need to know how long a line is, I grab a tape measure.
And boys aren't meant to understand girls. I am happily married to a wonderful woman whom I adore, and she still puzzles me. It's OK. I see her arching her eyebrows at me, too. Life might become boring if we solved all of each other's mysteries.
The point is, worry is pointless.
Five centuries ago, the great philosopher Michel de Montaigne said, "My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened."
An oft' quoted study shows that 85 percent of what people worried about never happened. Of the 15 percent that did, most of it turned out to be pretty easy. So only about 3 percent of all worries amount to anything worth the energy.
The great philosopher Patrick F. McManus once proposed that every human is born with a mental worry box. It's the size of the worry box that determines how bad our nervous tic becomes.
Most folk cram their worry boxes with scraps of doubts, fears and trepidation that by themselves don't amount to much, McManus wrote. Every so often, a truly big worry -- say, a cow falls out of a tree and nearly crushes you, and you realize you're surrounded by trees and hear mooing -- will push all other worries out of the box.
Once you flee the pasture, you can pick up all the little scraps again, except you have to replace one worry with a new fret -- how did cows come to be in the trees?
That's not exactly how McManus explained it. I'll worry about his wording later.
So while we sit here stewing, 40 years from now, some disc jockey will play a tune and announce, "Here's a flashback from the carefree good old days of 2015."
As the great philosopher Carly Simon sang, "These are the good old days."
— Fill Cole's worry box at burtseyeview@tribtoday.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.