History Channel, stop reminding me how old I am

It must be just another sign of growing old — or is that older?

They’re celebrating anniversaries of and writing histories about things that I remember as current events — and they’re marking more and more years since my prime — if I ever had a prime — with every passing remembrance and book. All of it is designed, I swear, just to make me feel older.

And I don’t really need that much help to feel older — I feel it every day, getting out of bed, walking up and down stairs, basically anything that requires physical exertion on my part.

But the calendar is enough of a reminder for me that I’m getting older all the time, without being reminded of anniversaries that are getting well into the double digits.

This year, for instance, has been filled with them. It seems like this year is the 40th anniversary of a lot of things I lived through and saw happen — at a time when I thought 40 years was an eternity, not seemingly the blink of an eye.

Indeed, I just finished reading a book about the year 1969 that called it “The Year Everything Changed.” I lived through that year and I don’t remember everything changing. At least, there were a lot of things that didn’t change for me — but I’m not going to write a book about any of that.

Among other things, 1969 was the year of Woodstock — or more correctly, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.

That event took place less than an hour’s drive from where I grew up in New York state and the traffic backups were all the way back to less than 15 minutes from where I grew up.

Unfortunately, I was only 16 years old at the time and nowhere near rebellious enough to think about running off for three days of mud, music and who knows what else.

Instead, I spent that historic weekend working at my summer job at the local hardware store, repairing torn screens, mixing paint and filling bins with nails, screws, nuts and bolts.

That helped me earn enough money so that, two years later, I could go away to college in Wisconsin. There, whenever anybody asked me where I was from, I would explain that my hometown was less than an hour from where Woodstock was held.

That invariably prompted the question “Were you there?” When I answered no, they’d then ask why not, to which I’d reply, “I was too busy working to go to Woodstock so I could make enough money to go to college and have people ask me why I didn’t go to Woodstock.”

The year 1969 also apparently saw the release of a lot of significant movies, such as “Easy Rider,” “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Once Upon a Time in the West,” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

They didn’t seem all that significant to me at the time, but then I was more concerned with who I was going to the movie with than what the movie was.

Indeed, the one with the greatest significance to me was “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” but not because of any cinematic significance.

No, that was the movie I went to see the night of the Junior Prom. I had made the mistake of assuming that the girl I was going with at the time would go to the prom with me without my having to ask her.

By the time I raised the subject with her, someone else had already asked her, and she had accepted, marking one of my first painful lessons in relations with the opposite sex.

Since it was too late by then to get any other date, I was stuck schlepping off the local movie theater that night, where Butch and the Kid happened to be on the bill.

I did get a bit of satisfaction when I walked into the theater and saw that one of the other single patrons that night was none other than the captain of the swim team, who fancied himself God’s gift to all the girls in school and usually had no trouble finding a date.

There was at least some solace in knowing I was not the only one who struck out on the night of the biggest social event of the year — though it was only small solace.

This past weekend there was a slew of cable channel shows on the 46th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — which means we’re only a few short years away from that event being half a century in the past.

To paraphrase another ancient source, time is not on my side.