Once upon a time, had I heard of someone over the age of forty dating, I would have been horrified. Who would date at that age? And why? Just the thought of two old people kissing was disgusting!
I remember the first time the thought of older people doing anything that younger people could do occurred to me. It was around my freshman or sophomore year of high school. One day, a friend of mine came to school crying. She was immediately surrounded by a whole group of us girls, hovering, wondering what was so horribly wrong. Did she flunk a test? Did she just break up with her boyfriend? Did she get a zit?
She sobbed and hiccupped, and finally was able to blurt out: “My mom and dad are going to have a . . . a . . . ” A what? We were all holding our breath.
“ . . . A bayyyy-beeee!” She almost collapsed in grief.
Seven collective jaws dropped open. A baby? My friend was the youngest of three. This was the same girl who had already gotten to be a bridesmaid for one of her older sisters (a fact the rest of us friends were jealous about), and she was already an aunt! And she was telling us her parents were going to have a baby?
Her mom and dad were grandparents, for heaven’s sake! They couldn’t have a baby. Yuck! One girl, in a most ineffective attempt at consolation, told my friend that she had to be wrong. There was no way people could have a baby at that age, she said. (They were in their early forties.)
You see, we might have been young, but we knew all about life. After all, we’d had to sit through the movie three years before—the one every twelve-year-old girl in the 1960s had to watch in health class—so we had an idea of how girls or young married women could get pregnant. But people over the age of forty? Nahhhh. That wasn’t in the movie. Our friend had to be wrong. The idea of someone’s parents “doing it” was almost ridiculous. Or so we thought then. Never mind that as the oldest of six, I never bothered to wonder how all those babies appeared at our house!
Oh, arrogant youth, thy name is Becky! I can say that now as I look back. But growing up Baby Boomer, it seemed as though the world revolved around us young people, and we were okay with that. We knew everything. We learned it from television!
Growing up in the 1950s meant becoming addicted to that fairly new invention, the television set. Sitting in front of the TV, my generation was subjected to something called “commercials,” a lot of which had to do with food and beverages. Along with other kids my age, we began to associate TV with food. Sunday evenings were popcorn night because Walt Disney Presents was on. The Wizard of Oz automatically meant popcorn balls. Friday nights we were allowed to eat our fish sticks in front of the TV so we could watch Kukla, Fran and Ollie or The Perry Como Show. And Saturday mornings found us seated on the floor in front of the TV, as if our little hind ends were glued there, in order to watch Mighty Mouse, Howdy Doody, or Rin Tin Tin. Anytime a commercial came on the television set that was geared more for adults, we kids changed from zombie-eyed captives of the TV to the world’s fastest sprinters. Olympians couldn’t match our speed as we raced from the living room to the only bathroom in the house and/or the kitchen refrigerator in order to get snacks for the next segment of the show. And the first one back got the primo spot, as close as possible to the tiny TV screen.
As we got older, we expanded our knowledge through game shows and newscasts. Our horizons broadened, without us ever leaving our own home. Oh, such a smart thing to do!
Take fashion, for another example. Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton were our fashion idols. Anything British was “in.” We wore tent dresses in electric-blue paisley or hot pink and orange florals. These beautiful creations hid the chubbiness of adolescence. They also drew gasps from parents who thought they were about to be grandparents the first time they saw their daughters in the billowing fashions.
We also wore mini-skirts so short that they were probably the reason some girls my age did get pregnant—or the crude “knocked up” in 1960s lingo—although the slogan “Make Love, Not War” may also have had something to do with it.
Some people my age experimented with drugs. My girlfriends and I experimented with cosmetics: white pearly lipsticks, thick black eyeliner, and blue, blue eyeshadow. That look was so popular then that it can still be seen today—on The Walking Dead.
As Baby Boomers born between the years 1946 and 1964, we believed we were far superior intellectually to anyone our parents’ age or older. The sci-fi thriller Logan’s Run was our version of the current Hunger Games. Youth was strong, smart, and able to rule.
But then something happened to me. To a lot of Baby Boomers, as a matter of fact. Just aging would have been bad enough, but did life have to change so drastically? Why did so many of those drastic changes have to be about technology? My current house, built a year before the millennium, is better built for the future than I am. It has more wires in it than Spaghetti Works has noodles for a week-long all-you-can-eat buffet. Whether we Boomers like it or not, the key to the future is in cyberspace.
Somewhere between Sesame Street’s Big Bird V-Tech computer for ages three and up in the 1980s, and the Apple Watch of today, our children’s generation suddenly became more technologically savvy than most of us Boomers would admit. It wasn’t just technical stuff, either. I worked at a college and overheard matter-of-fact conversations about sex that were way more provocative than any racy romance novel I’d read. They were worldly and more informed about countries, religions, the environment, and politics than us Boomers ever were, mainly because of the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web.
While time moved on, evidently Baby Boomers didn’t. Remember when about the only acronym you heard was “IBM,” short for International Business Machines? Now there are dictionaries with nothing but acronyms listed, and most of them are now for texting. The first time I hurriedly emailed one of my children some sad news about an acquaintance, I ended the missive with “LOL”—for “Lots of Love.” My daughter called me to say she failed to see anything funny about an illness, and then had to explain to her befuddled mother that “LOL” now means “Laugh Out Loud.” Can’t people talk or write in complete words anymore? Who made all this shorthand up? Now before I even figure out what an acronym stands for, it becomes obsolete, and is replaced with something new.
It’s certainly true that what goes around, comes around. It’s payback time for all those moments I felt smarter than my parents. I can now empathize with the hundreds of generations before me who have plaintively whined, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” As a once-progressive Baby Boomer, I tried to keep up with the times. But times definitely do change, and change is good, right? Well, maybe.