50 Years of Consciousness and the Spirit of ’76

Remembering Memory in the Bicentennial Year

Among innumerable milestones of infinitely greater importance, 2026 is also the 50th anniversary of my consciousness, which I’m defining as my first sustained memories of being alive and aware of myself as one human being living on Earth among a few billion others. I was born late in 1969, about a month after the Woodstock Festival, which was named for the small town where I now drive once a week to do laundry but was actually held somewhere else about 50 miles away. I have scattered and blurry memories from the early ’70s, you probably know the kind I’m talking about—something weird that happened on a playground, the way a large dog barked at me from behind a fence, seeing a sparkler thrown and then arcing through the air on July 4. But these are just fragments, and I can’t piece them together into anything coherent or locate myself as a thinking being inside them. By 1976, I could.

This new awareness I associate so strongly with that year is mostly a product of biology—a quick google calls it “childhood amnesia,” and suggests it has to do with a combination of brain development and language facility. I’m sure that’s most of it. But 1976 was a good setting for those early sustained narrative memories because I was living in the United States during the Bicentennial. I can’t begin to describe how much red, white and blue I took in, how many times I saw the magic number “76,” including on an orange globe that rotated above the gas station a few blocks from our house in Lansing (the place, incidentally, where I first fell in love with the smell of gasoline and which often comes to mind when I smell it now).

I couldn’t help but feel patriotic. We still said the pledge of allegiance, and the United States seemed like the center of the world—or more precisely my state, Michigan, which seemed to me the center-of-the-center, the most American of places in the broader nation. It hurts badly that, half a century on, the Semiquincentennial will happen with Trump in office—this time, I’ll be happy to get it over with.

This is more of a guess, but 1976 may be the year I noticed recorded music, and some of the prominent sounds I was hearing were specific to my home state. Bob Seger released both Live Bullet and Night Moves, and I heard at some point that he was a Michigan dude; Gordon Lightfoot had a hit with “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which I’m sure I heard on the car radio late in the year, and which was set in the world of the lakes surrounding me (though at this point the one I knew best was Lake Lansing).

The Bicentennial came up virtually every day while it was unfolding, including while I was watching TV. All year long, CBS—the station my parents watched most, probably because it had Walter Cronkite, but it didn’t hurt that the transmitter was 10 blocks away and thus the picture was crystal clear—broadcast one-minute segments that told stories of what happened on the corresponding day in 1776. These spots blew my tender and still-forming mind—it felt like climbing into a time machine. The series was called “Bicentennial Minutes” but I knew it as “200 Years Ago Today,” since that was the phrase that opened each episode. I found it riveting, probably because many seemed like adventure stories, with the evil guys in red coats and our scrappy heroes winning the day.

I loved 200 Years Ago Today and looked forward to it each night. And then one day I noticed they weren’t airing anymore. I asked my Mom about it. She explained that they were only created to commemorate the Bicentennial, which was over. I don’t recall learning that Santa Claus wasn’t real, but this I remember: I was devastated, the best thing on TV was gone forever.