It is unlikely — inasmuch as there is a very small chance — that a date I have randomly plucked from the contrails of my family history will have any external, worldly significance. But roughly, performing the math (and if I don’t bother to dig too deeply and account for leap years and such) the corresponding date to my life today — now — to my mother’s life, back then (did you follow that?) is September 11, 1984 — give or take.

Sorry ma. The Internets knows your age.

All this to answer the questions: what happened in your mother’s life when she was exactly the age you are now?

Why, you may ask, do I bring up this particular topic? I suppose if you’ve stumbled here from a search engine or other place you’re reading this and thinking “huh?” Consider that earlier today I randomly plucked nine topics from the web and opted to blog them. There is no “why” — there just is. So, read on.

Back to the random bit of family history, as I recall it at least…

Picture it. An early September in 1984. Mom is a young wife of thirty-two years, she and dad are getting by and dragging through life with them three kids: me, a brat of seven (going on eight), my brother of about five and a half, and my one-year-old sister.

We set the stage: Days previous, the Conservatives had swept power in Ottawa with a young Brian Mulroney at the helm. All over the television tubes was talk of a new show staring Bill Cosby as the consummate family man. George Orwell’s grim predictions of dystopia are proving inaccurate — at least in timing. In the air, orbiting Earth (and the news) those brand new space shuttles are showing off to the world. But wandering somewhere amongst the live-a-day throngs of a small, Northern Alberta town was my mother, her three kids nipping at her heels.

Likely, school had just started up again for the year. I would have been starting grade three — a grade, if I remember correctly left a sour taste with both my parents particularly thanks to the antics of slightly insane teacher. My brother would have been starting his first few days of kindergarten. And mom, reveling in the relative freedom of just one child to tend to (following a summer with three) would probably have been settling into a routine of filling her days by feeding a growing family, preparing for winter, and wending her way along, through, and up the socialite scene of Barrhead, Alberta. She still wore her hair in a jet-black perm, if I recall and hadn’t quite lapsed into her all-fleece wardrobe faux pas stage yet.

It was a crazy time to be alive. The Cold War wass still quite chilly while the economy was riding relatively hot. Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, and yet another Star Trek movie were gracing the big screens. Madonna and Bruce Springsteen filled the FM airwaves. “Portable” computers weighed in at over thirty pounds and the Internet was still a futuristic research project ten years away from public consumption.

Having moved back to Alberta just a few years previous, my parents were still new homeowners. Mom was likely just starting to reap the rewards of a few years of construction projects — a fence, a yard with grass, and a garage. A baby-blue Chev Impala sat in our driveway when it wasn’t accumulating mileage making the trips South to visit family around the province, and the folks were probably starting to examine the flexibility of their budget to accommodate that little red truck that showed up around that time, too.

Mom’s parents were still spry gardeners, living in their little house in Edmonton — and likely the latest visit had involved a late summer sit on the patio eating fresh vegetables and a barbecue. Her in-laws still lived on the farm where the past summer would have almost certainly included a couple weeks of wild abandon in the countryside near Lacombe. Maybe a family vacation involved a few trips to the lake, some camping and fishing, or perhaps a trip South to the Calgary Zoo.

By this stage in her life, mom would have been involved as a leader in the local boy scout pack (it was still called “boy scouts” then — and mom was a leader of the youngest, “Beavers” group.) And at home the house would have been cluttered with home preserves, craft projects of some large scope, and the ever-present, dutiful involvement with a crazy consumer survey project that provided hours of entertainment cataloging and recording her grocery purchases (all from the comfort of home.)

So, we ask the question: What happened in your mother’s life when she was exactly the age you are now? As best as I can recall — and without spending too many hours actually researching the primary sources and documents stored a couple hundred kilometers away at my folk’s house — I would dare speculate that it was just life. Life. Of course there are a few parallels to my own silly little world. And there are vast gaps as well. But in avoiding some vague, poetic revelation on the topic I’ll just conclude: life happened, I guess.