American Decades

So I was thinking about the last century, and what would be the textbook-required issues for each decade, in American History:

2010s

Trump

Social Media Culture and Violence

Paris Accords

Occupy and Arab Spring

Opioid Crisis and Healthcare

2000s

9/11

Great Recession

Smartphones

Obama

Afghanistan and Iraq

1990s

End of Cold War

Internet and Digitization

Globalism and Peace Movements

Partisan Politics

NAFTA and Automation

1980s

Home computers

Reagan

VHS and Cable

Decline of Unions

AIDS Epidemic

1970s

Watergate

Feminist Movement

Earth Day and Environmental Movement

Opening Asian Trade

Decline of the Cities

1960s

Vietnam and Hippies

Civil Rights

Moon Landing and Space Race

Kennedy/Assassinations

Great Society

1950s

Suburbia and Car Culture

Television and Advertising

Desegregation Begins

Red Scare

Korea

1940s

U.S. Entry into WWII and Internment

Atomic Technology

Post-War Global Order (U.N., Brenton Woods, GI Bill etc)

Computers

Plastics

1930s

Great Depression

FDR and New Deal

Dust Bowl

Resurgent Klan

Hollywood

1920s

Suffrage

Tenements and Immigration

Moving Pictures

Jazz on the Radio

Prohibition

They also tend to have, in most American History textbooks, a section on the water-cooler, second-tier items, so here are five more pieces for each decade as well, of stuff not covered in the main, above:

10s

LGBT Rights

#MeToo

Self-Driving Car

Streaming Services

Citizens United v. FEC

00s

Bush v. Gore

Human Genome Project

NSA

YouTube and Memes

MCU

90s

Gulf War

Americans with Disabilities Act

Coffee Shop Culture

Dream Team

The Simpsons

80s

Challenger Disaster

Hip hop

Spielberg  Movies

Video Games

WalMart's National Expansion

70s

Disco

Oil Crisis

Hijackings

Wounded Knee and AIM

Bruce Lee

60s

Bob Dylan

UFW and Cesar Chavez

To Kill a Mockingbird

British Invasion and Psychedelica

First Superbowl

50s

Military Industrial Complex

Modern Vaccinations

Jet Age Travel

Beat Generation

Rock n Roll

40s

J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and the CIA

National Laboratories

Woody Guthrie and the Almanac Singers

Merrill Lynch: Insurance and Shareholders

Oklahoma!

30s

Blues

Superman

Skyscrapers

Jesse Owens and Joe Louis

Alcoholics Anonymous

20s

Capone and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre

Edwin Hubble and Robert Goddard

The Great Gatsby

Newspaper Comics

Scopes Trial

So Cal Redux

When I was a kid I went to San Diego a few times with my dad and sister. We have a picture of us on a fiberglass Shamu, pretending to hold on as the orca breaches in front of the backdrop.

Besides SeaWorld, the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park were favorites, as well, visited multiple times. Then, once, in high school or late middle school, we went down there with my mom. That trip focused on the actual historic downtown a bit more. But we still went to the Wild Animal Park (now called the Safari Park) and ate our way through the exhibits. ("Look! A giraffe!" "Look! Nachos!")

Two summers ago in 2016 my sister and I went back to San Diego, since we'd not been in at least sixteen years or so. We went to the Zoo and Safari Park together (we certainly wouldn't support SeaWorld anymore), and I went to the Balboa Park Museums, which I only vaguely remembered from the visit with mom.

So when my dad turned 75 this year, and wanted to return to San Diego, we made plans. Having been recently as an adult it was all gravy to me. We decided to go to the Safari Park (we got to feed a giraffe and a greater one horned rhino as in 2016) and the Balboa Park museums (the Fleet Science Center was lousy, but the Natural History Museum across the way was neat), as well as the Cabrillo National Monument - one of the most visited in the United States, and a locale I'd not ever been to, but which my dad had when he was stationed there for the Navy.

San Diego was nice in November. We ate at good restaurants, and the not-too-distant memories from a couple of years prior were strengthened and more firmly set.

From there we went on to Los Angeles, to see the Getty. I'd not been to this museum since 2010, and my father hadn't seen it since its opening. It was a full and very pleasant day. The collection was as or more excellent than I had remembered, and I was introduced to some interesting new artists.

Similarly, last weekend, I went with my girlfriend to Hearst Castle, in San Simeon. It was my fourth trip to the estate, having gone twice as a kid, but much had changed since my most-recent visit, that same summer of 2010. That was the summer I first explored Los Angeles, and then took a trip up Highway 1. It was a romantic trip - of a relationship that was hollowing out from within. We had seen the Getty, went up to Hearst Castle, and saw the Monterey Bay Aquarium. There, too, that trip stuck out - for until I moved down here last year, that drive up the coast, seven years prior, had, like Hearst Castle, been the first time I'd been to Monterey since I was a young child. My adult views of these places were linked to that lost relationship.

All three stops of that trip have now been recreated - the initial touring around a Los Angeles I did not then know (which began a generally annual tradition of visits since), the stop at Hearst Castle and seeing the Aquarium. And of course, the final destination of that road trip, of Berkeley, Marin, and San Francisco - the part of the story I revisited and rewrote first, easiest, and most thoroughly, upon returning to California in 2014.

Combined with San Diego, the last two weeks have been significant for memory and nostalgia. Rewriting a city's past from childhood. Creating fresher, bolder memories with my new girlfriend of a place I last went with my ex-girlfriend. At Hearst Castle we even went and saw elephant seals - creatures I've not bothered about since I was very young, and would see in the Bay Area at Ano Nuevo. Monterey is my new home, and likely will be for some time - no longer a stop on Highway 1, or a drive down to the Aquarium with my mom, looking at the eucalyptus trees on Route 156.

Nor is the Getty a place I went once when I was 24, with my girlfriend and the guy she would, in just over a year, be dating instead of me. While those memories will always remain, this trip brought new ones, invigorating the sounds and sights of the place with my sister and my father, now 75, and sunset glows which, if I witnessed them then, I did not bother to record, being more interested in the pedantic self-important conversations of young adulthood, debating the distinctions between "art" and "craft" and other such things that matter. I was genuinely happy, then, but the inevitable crumble of that romance subsequently tinted those places for me with sepia tones of regret and loss.

I'm glad for the change of all of this. It is pleasant to know that I can balance out that time of my life with happier and richer memories of my recent-present. As Didion once said, "I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not." So I give a nod to my former 24-year-old self, and move on through the galleries suffused with the warm orange hues of now.