Deeper thoughts

I’ve just been thinking about the how when I was a kid in the 70s, it was cool to be deep.

“That’s dee eep, ” we’d say, drawing out the vowels so it sounded like there were four e’s in the word. Then we’d nod our heads solemnly.

Deep was used to acknowledge that something had respect. It made it past shallow. Shallow was bad. The worst! Shallow had to be scorned.

So everyone pretended to be deep. Real deep.

It’s making me laugh, remembering TV scenes like this:

A young Kristy McNicoll, staring solemnly at the hunky but misunderstood guy. He wipes away a tear as he recounts how hard it was, you know, after his dad left. It was just him and his mom. They were poor, but happy.

His mother worked really hard to put food on the table. And even though she was exhausted after a long day of work at the diner, she always had time to read to him before bed.

He pauses. Kristy’s eyes soften — she is empathizing.

He digs deep(!) and finds the courage to continue: that’s why he wears this — he flips the pendent hanging from his pukka bead necklace to reveal a tiny photo of Winnie the Poo.

Kristy looks at the necklace solemnly, then up to Todd’s face (of course he’s called Todd). She nods and says, “That’s dee eep”.

But the 70s didn’t stop there. There was also “Jonathan Livingston Seagull!”

That bird was deep!

Oh, man, I miss the 70’s.

“We had a time, oh what a time”

And I do think it’s time to bring back some deep.

Art history moves in waves from one extreme to another. We’ve been in shallow for a while now. What will deep look like this time around?