During the Summer Olympics my favorite Facebook video would appear every three days or so on my newsfeed. It was a video put together by MTV comparing the gymnasts from the 1950’s and 60’s with Simone Biles. I know I was supposed to marvel at the gravity-defying, death-inviting, uber-flipping Biles, which I did. But I also spent considerable time deciding which decade I could have medaled in. I feel confident saying I could have brought home the gold from the 1952 Helsinki Games. I was at my gymnastic peak (cartwheels executed with pointed toes) in 1977.
Put another way, if I could time travel my 1977 mediocre cartwheel back to 1952, it would have been Olympic worthy. In my more delusional moments I decide, like Biles, I could have had a signature skill named after me: The Cooper, a slow cartwheel followed by a Half Smile, with announcers commenting to the TV audience, “How did she manage to pull a half smile even before the Cartwheel element was complete?”
As to a more scientific explanation of why my 1977 pedestrian cartwheel would be world class in 1952 see David Epstein’s Ted Talk: Are Athletes Really Getting Faster, Better, Stronger? He gives reasons behind the march of athletic progress–increased financial incentives, television exposure, changes in equipment, technology, and training.
Regardless of the whys and wherefores, I measure up quite nicely when I can compare backwards–a little like a high school senior claiming valedictorian status of the kindergarten class. It is when I measure forward, compare my experiences with my daughters that I represent the simple, quaint, pedestrian ways of yore.
When not consumed with counting gold medals, I spent much of this past summer with my soon to be senior and the college admittance process.
My daughter after a long afternoon of fighting with a tedious application process, a computer that would freeze and lose the tedious information, and a mother who insisted that all this tedium was character building asks me, “So how did you get into college?”
Do I tell the truth? That I talked to an admission counselor and then went to Sears and my parents bought me a new bed comforter for $39.99. A video forms in my head, a side by side comparison of getting into college 1980’s versus 2016. Buying a dorm room comforter versus navigating through 500 thread count layers of bureaucracy.
“Are you kidding me?” she yells into the computer. “They want to know how I spent my summer vacation in 9th grade?” She turns to me and asks, “What summer vacation?”
“You know, those months you spent at the ACT/SAT prep classes,” hoping I will refresh her memory, and hoping she doesn’t ask me how I prepared for ACT/SAT testing.
A new video forms in my head circa 1982: my best friend Charlotte and I apply Bonne Bell Lip Smackers, put on our acid washed jeans, raid my younger brother’s pencil bag, drive to the donut shop, and then stroll into the ACT testing center. That was our preparation, Lip Smackers, donuts, and acid wash.
I am jolted back into 2016 with her yell, “Good God, this school wants me to write five essays.”
“We can rework some of your old essays,” I answer with fake cheer while thinking who in the hell are these people, “What are the prompts?”
“Whose achievements would you most like to emulate?”
“Oh I can help you with that one.”
“Really?”
“Have I ever told you about the time that I practically won gold at the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games?”
And so we go, me looking back over my shoulder, not to the Olympics but to first steps, first words, first day of school, first dance, first day to drive to school while she impatiently waits for the next screen to download. And I wonder exactly when her childhood and adolescence was eclipsed by this crazy maze they call college admissions.
About the author: Amy Cooper is the mother of two girls, 17 and 19, who two years ago would deny she was their mother, but now let her follow them on Instagram as long as she doesn’t comment. She is on the verge of empty nestdom and will spend the next year deciding what she wants to be when she grows up.
