It was somewhere in Wyoming when I first realized it. Or it could have been a few weeks earlier in Alabama. Or perhaps even earlier, while I drove from the office to lunch one day.
Like many of you, I’ve been listening to the radio for a long time. Often, I find myself listening to many of the same songs I first heard more than 20 years ago.
That doesn’t bother me. Actually, it’s kind of nice to be “grounded” in such a simple and inexpensive way, to carry a portable sense of familiarity with me no matter where I travel.
But it threw me for a loop when this particular song ended, and the announcer came back on the air and started thanking me for listening to the “Oldies” station.
Oldies. Easy-Listening Favorites. Classics From Yesterday.
It doesn’t really matter what they call the station or how modulated their voices are when they read the weather or how they announce the next tune ever so slowly and carefully as if their listeners have a bit of a hearing problem.
It hurts, just a bit, to consider myself a member of the “Oldies” club.
Can the Beatles and Stones and Three Dog Night be “oldies” already?
Time and history have a way of sneaking up, I guess, much like urban sprawl and neighborhood redevelopment.
That’s apparently what happened to Fisher, Texas, the forgotten town near White Rock Lake swallowed up by Dallas 80 years ago. Fisher’s fate is like that of many other small communities neighboring Dallas: They fell quietly, almost imperceptibly, in the face of relentless growth and development that continues even today.
The difference with Fisher is that a few of the original residents are still with us today, telling vivid stories of the town’s heyday in this month’s cover feature.
Those telling the stories can’t really say why Fisher disappeared, living on only in their memories, and now in ours.
Like so many things, Fisher is simply a part of Dallas history that’s worth knowing and thinking about and filing away with other memories such as the State Fair’s Comet Roller Coaster and the White Rock Lake swimming beach and the old Christmas tree lot at Skillman and Abrams.
Memories and favorite songs – what are oldies to some can be fresh, new inspirations to others. And I suppose there are worse things than enjoying a few songs whose LPs are sprinkled with dust.
Like, perhaps, noticing a few liver spots on the driver’s hands just after checking his receding hairline in the rearview mirror.
