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.
