57 Years Ago

One of the perks of moving into middle age is hearing over and over again of the deaths of icons from your youth. It was widely reported yesterday that Lux Interior, the frontman for the "punk" band The Cramps had passed away. The Cramps weren't my favoritist group ever, but I liked "Human Fly," and a number of their other songs. It's just odd to consider such an energetic, full-of-life, and brash kind of guy, one who I always sort of thought of as "my age" (though it turns out, a decade older), is gone. I dread the loss of Clint Eastwood, certainly a hero of my teens and twenties.

But as I commented to my mother a year or so ago, the one I can't even contemplate is The Queen. There's only one: Elizabeth II. It's not so much that she has anything to do with governing England in my mind (very little to none, except as a state representative, as far as I understand); it's more like she's the living corporate logo of that nation. And in this case I use corporate both in a "business" sense and in an "embodied" sense. She is the emblem, the public face, of our mother country. The idea that she might not be some day is very nearly inconceivable to me.

57 years ago today, her father died, leaving her the Queen apparent.