I sometimes forget how old I am. Being around my brother's friends, I am reminded that, unlike them, I was born on the last year of the age of hippies and Woodstock. I'd talk to them about The Perfect Strangers and Michael Jackson's songs when he was still African American. All I'd get were blank stares. I would often feel old.

It was therefore a pleasant surprise when, surfing through channels last night, I stumbled upon a re-airing of Voltes V [which they dubbed in Filipino]! Suddenly, I was seven again, calling out the names of my childhood heroes: Steve, Big Bert, Little John, Jamie Robsinon and Mark Gordon! I did not forget a single detail: Camp Big Falcon, the Japanese lyrics to the volt-in theme, Voltes's many hidden weapons. I even remembered the particular episode they were airing: when Mrs. Armstrong was killed when she piloted a jet into a beast fighter in order to save the Voltes Team from certain death!

The episode transported me back to those lazy late afternoons when, coming home from school, I would park myself in front of the television set, and, eating my merienda of chicken sopas, I would lose myself watching my cartoons on channel 13! Most days, it was Voltes V. On others, it was the RoadRunner! Sometimes, they would show re-runs of the Bugs Bunny series! I can even remember one particular episode when Bugs is unwittingly kidnapped by Marvin the Martian's flying saucer:

Bugs: Hello, ob-jay-dar, hello space probe, hello earth. . . . But if that's the earth, where the cotton-pickin-heck am I?
Marvin: Why, you are on Mars, isn't that lovely?
Bugs: Mars? You mean the planet Mars?

Indeed, it is only now that I fully realize that I am a child of the 1980's. We learned our English from Sesame Street, and our Filipino from Batibot. Our video games were the game-and-watch and the Atari. Ours was the time when computers had 5 1/2 inchs disks for memory devices, and [ctrl]-K-B had some significance as we typed our documents on WordStar. We were obsessed with Japanese robots: Voltes V, Voltron, Grendizer, Mazinger-Z, Mechanda Robot, Daimos. We pined for an Optimus Prime toy, and memorized the dialogue to the Transformers Motion Picture.

Later on, we graduated to G.I. Joe's and Robotech. We bought Nintendos and went crazy over Super Mario Brothers. We just had to have the latest Trapper Keeper designs, and we bought the latest casette tapes of Pearl Jam. The more baduy of us watched Bagets, and even, perhaps Mikee Cojuangco's Forever.

It was a magical decade.

Of course, most of us are working now, nearing age thirty faster than we'd be comfortable to admit. In a year, it will be a decade since many of us graduated from high school. Some of us have gotten married. Some of us have sired children. Some have become lawyers, or doctors, or film directors, or businessmen. And yet as varied as our careers have turned out to be, we are forever bound by the events and influences which shaped that magical decade. As John Updike wrote:

We took the world as given.
Cigarettes were twenty-several cents a pack,
And gas as much per gallon. Sex came wrapped in rubber
And veiled in supernatural scruples—
Call them chivalry . . . .

Psychology was in the mind; abstract
things grabbed us where we lived; the only life
worth living was the private life, and— last,
Worst scandal in this characterization—
We did not know we were a generation.

And so, children of the eighties, here we are. As we come to our own, as the torch is passed to us, I can only pray that we will leave our children with the same fond memories we experienced during our own coming of age. In the meantime, many of us will smile ruefully as we watch the next generation of children get hooked on the things that marked our own childhoods: Volltes V, among others. We may even watch the shows together with them, and for that brief thirty minutes, we will be seven years old all over again.