McGinn: When did ’80s songs become the oldies?

Yes, I’m at the age where I have strands of hair crawling out of my ears.

Big deal.

To tell you the truth, I intentionally keep them long, too, just to get that warm fuzzy feeling of having the stylist stick the tip of the clippers in my ear.

Yes, I’m a dirty old man.

Big deal.

Like I said, I suppose it should make me feel self-conscious, like the time — and I’ll try not to get overly gross here — that I very briefly dated this girl in college and while kissing in my dorm room, she abruptly stuck her tongue in my ear.

“Ooh,” I giggled, “I like that!”

“All guys do,” she responded matter-of-factly.

Now that made me feel weird, as I distinctly remember thinking right then and there, “My God. How many ears has this woman licked?”

But having my ear hair sheared off by a complete stranger is no biggie. It’s life.

In fact, very few things make me feel like I’m actually going through the process of aging.

I still feel 17. If it weren’t for this sorry excuse of a beard — after three years, I still can’t get the mustache to connect to the rest of it — I’d still look 17.

But once in awhile, I’ll come across something that reminds me that I am, indeed, aging.

Rapidly.

On a recent road trip to visit family in Iowa, I turned the radio to a familiar Des Moines station, but was surprised to hear John Waite’s 1984 song “Missing You.”

“Hmm,” I thought to myself, “they must have changed formats.”

I thought about switching stations — do I sound like a John Waite fan? — but my wife already was singing along.

And then we heard it.

This was, in fact, the same station it’d always been.

It was still the “oldies” station.

I turned to that station expecting to hear stuff like “My Girl” or “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and instead got “Sunglasses at Night.”

“How can this be an oldie?!” I complained. “We were alive when this song came out.”

I answered my own question later on in the trip when, passing through Indianapolis on the way back to Springfield, we came across a station doing an “all ’80s weekend.”

We knew every song, and each one came with some sort of recollection.

“Oh, I remember couple-skating to this one,” I yelled out when a really awful Chicago power-ballad came on.

“Oh, I remember trying and trying to tape this one off the radio,” I exclaimed as we drove down I-70 singing Poison’s “Talk Dirty to Me.”

We were all smiles as we thought back to a past that always seems better than the present.

And like the Grinch’s heart, my ear hair grew three sizes that day.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.