Boomer Angle

Apparently, according to my birth year – 1962 – I am a Baby Boomer.  For years that label did not sit right with me.  I guess I’m a Late Boomer (lol).  Seriously, how can I be considered a member of the same generational tribe as someone who rocked out at Woodstock or who burned their bra or who fought in Vietnam or who came of age sexually before the Pill?  It just doesn’t make any sense.  I mean, after all, I was shaped by the Feminist Movement; not part of it.  I was just a kid growing up in San Francisco when all that was going on, but I was curious and paying close attention.  I knew something was up.  I remember being 6 and standing in line with my mom at Woolworth’s, and in front of us were a fringed, long-haired couple kissing.  “Mom, are those hippies?” I asked quietly, intrigued and a bit scared.  Mom just smiled.  I don’t remember what they were buying.

They had landed in my home town – like so many others – with flowers in their hair.  See, I was still too young.  I just knew they were causing quite a ruckus.  But, by golly, those flower-adorned rabble-rousers were Boomers!  The REAL Boomers.  The rebels, the protesters, the dancers, the artists, the pioneers, and, yes, the hippies throwing words and phrases like “groovy,” “cool,” “far out,” “you dig me?” and “hey, man” into the cultural blender.  I knew my parents weren’t hippies, or Boomers.  They seemed SO much older.  They were just two native San Franciscans (yes, native) raising three kids in their home town.  Another time, Mom took me daytripping to the Cannery near Fisherman’s Wharf, and lava lamps and the smell of patchouli oil seemed to be everywhere.  Or maybe I’m just remembering it that way.     

I remember being terrified of the Draft because my brother Rob was close to Draft age, having been born in ’56.  And if you’re a Generation Xer or a Millenial, in case you don’t know, the Draft was a mandatory conscription of very young men into the military during the Vietnam War.  To my relief, Rob was never drafted.  But so many were.  And they were Boomers.

Inevitably, the artist/hippie thing started to rub off on me in the early ‘70s.  Those were my fertile crafting years; full of making macramé wall hangings and driftwood dioramas adorned with beach glass, moss, and dried flowers, all of which became Christmas gift fodder to unsuspecting aunts and cousins.

I remember being a young teenager reading the feminist tome “In a Different Voice” by Carol Gilligan.  Carol was a Boomer, no doubt.  I loved that book.  By then I knew my interests ran in a bit of a different direction than my social circle’s.  I wasn’t that taken by soap operas, like “All My Children” and “Ryan’s Hope,” although I did catch an episode now and then.  No, I started writing poetry and taking quite a shine to the word “choice.”  I dig that word.  Yes, dig.

And then came disco.  The year was 1978, and it was all about disco, baby.  Even today, I must confess, disco is one of my Pandora stations.  I was 16, and disco broke me open, set me free.  Disco was the mirror-balled declaration of my adolescence, my coming of age, the beat to which my hormones danced.  The Bee Gees’ siren call; “You should be dancin’.”  Yeah.  That’s right.  Saturday night.

When the ‘80s came along, the winds shifted.  All the ruckus and rabble-rousing was doused, and everyone moved on.  I was torn between my burgeoning hippie/feminist identity and the “Me Generation.”  The era of Michael Milken, the savings & loan debacle, Ronald Reagan.  It was a time to get serious.  I remember one night in ’82 as a sophomore at UC Berkeley, a group of us dormies went to see “The Graduate” with Dustin Hoffman.  A classic.  And I’ll never forget that scene when Ben, wearing sunglasses and reclined face-up in the pool on a floatie, responds to a question from one of his parent’s friends standing poolside.  

“Ben, what are you going to do with your life?”

“Ya got me.”

So while I was scurrying through college, graduating, job and apartment hopping and sampling living in Boston and New York City in my 20s, what were all those real Boomers doing?  A lot of them were getting serious, too.  Interestingly, they started looking a lot like my mom and dad.

And through it all, I kept writing poems.  Poems were my connection to my inner hippie/artist/feminist.  Poems gave me permission to write, to call myself a writer amidst all the seriousness, which eventually distracted me for a while, away from all the poetry.

Then, midway through my 40s, writing called to me again.  Writing fueled by life and observations of a world in constant and dizzying change, from a Boomer angle.  A Late Boomer, that is.