Awakening to 25 Years of Change

A quarter of a century passed and Leonard Lowe only grew older.

Leonard Lowe is the fact-based character played by Robert De Niro in the new film “Awakenings.” As a young boy he contracted an encephalitic sleeping sickness. Almost 30 years later, an experimental drug woke him up. Eventually the drug failed and Lowe returned to his coma. In the film we never learn much about what the real or even the fictional Lowe missed in the years that stretched from a pre-World War II America to a Vietnam War America.

We couldn’t help but fantasize (it goes with the season) about Lowe. What if he had continued to live another quarter of a century and a new drug brought him back today? What would he have missed in those years? Our years? What would he have to know to get current again, to play catch-up?

We might also ask, how far have most of us traveled in that time?

Since it’s almost au courant to make lists and do some summing up in these dying days of December, we made one for Lowe. It turns out to be a sort of where we’ve been, where we’ve come to.

So, Leonard Lowe, this is for you, our version of “The Return of Awakenings, 1965-1990.”

Some things didn’t change much:

A Texan (L.B.J.) was President when you entered your second coma. A Texan is President today.

Watts burned in ’65. Parts of Miami burned this year.

The Middle East was in turmoil then. The Persian Gulf churns now.

Then the first anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and teach-ins began. Now anti-gulf war demonstrations and teach-ins have started.

And just this month Florida health officials said they hoped they had curbed the state’s worst onset of encephalitis in 30 years, with nine people dead and 202 affected.

If you had been awake 25 years ago, Leonard, here is a smattering of what you might have experienced in just one arena, arts and entertainment, in 1965:

Something called Op art started . . . the first “Odd Couple” play was produced . . . the first Grateful Dead concert was held . . . Marian Anderson held her final recital . . . Vladimir Horowitz returned after a 12-year absence.

Arthur Miller was still writing, coming forth with “Incident at Vichy” . . . the Los Angeles art collector Norton Simon paid an astonishing $2.2 million at a London auction for Rembrandt’s portrait of his son Titus . . . At the movie houses (multiplexes came later, Leonard) you would have seen such films as “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” “Battle of the Bulge,” “The Bedford Incident,” “Doctor Zhivago” and “Help!”

In science you would have learned about heart transplants, spacewalks and global satellites.

In politics you would have experienced the Great Society that began in 1965, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s arrest in Selma, Ala., Malcolm X’s killing, the start of Medicare.

You missed the first miniskirt (back again this year) as well as Timothy Leary’s book, “The Psychedelic Reader,” which gave the ironic advice to drop out, turn on and tune in.

Color television was coming into its own, although big screen and surround-sound were a long way off as were such newer devices as closed-captioning and simulcasts . . . we weren’t wired even remotely for what we call cable television . . .

In the last 25 years some things kept happening over and over again.

You’d have to catch up with three “Godfather” movies and V versions of “Rocky.” You would see Bernardo Bertolucci movies that reach from “Last Tango in Paris” to this month’s “The Sheltering Sky.” You’d see “Chinatown” in 1974 and its sequel, “Two Jakes,” this year.

The movies might help you experience two major events: the civil rights movement, as shown in the just-released “The Long Walk Home,” and the internment of Japanese-Americans, as told in the current “Come See the Paradise.”

It would be up to the newer medium of television to bring you up to date on the end of the Cold War, the reunification of Germany and the industrialization of Japan.

There is so much for you to catch up with.

You would be doing so much more than just growing older.