… When I was a kid, I used to laugh at my parents always reading the obituaries in the daily newspapers, back when we had daily newspapers, and frequently noting how young someone who had just died was. How that person was younger than they were. I thought I would never do such an old-person thing.

I now do such a thing. …

(photo: Michelle Henderson, Unsplash)

(This piece was originally submitted as a response to our query: “Does age bring wisdom.”)

…The muscle memory that comes from a half-century of newspapering means I can write journalism about as easily as Derek Jeter used to field hot grounders….

….Hippie kids like me were galvanized by our opposition to the Vietnam War. We experimented with drugs and directly faced-off against our parents’ materialistic, straight and conservative lifestyles. Many of us adopted vegetarian diets, joined communes where we cohabitated with others of like minds, dropped out of school, joined militant organizations and were fearless in using our collective power to change society….

Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever met? How did you meet? How did it go?

Answer in the comments on the Waddaya Think page or email your answer to us at: writingaboutourgeneration.com

Excerpts:

Melinda Moulton: Michelle Obama….She hugged us tight and looked down into our faces (she is so tall) and told us that we mattered and that we should keep our faith in America.

Chris Harper: We did a profile of Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown. Barbara Walters wasn't in a particularly good mood…because she'd just come from a meeting with OJ's defense team and couldn't convince them to let her interview him….Gordy and I did a duo of "Money, That's What I Want!"

David Mindich:….The bartender…pulled me aside and said, “I want you to bring this drink to Andy Warhol….When I came back the bartender, said, “You idiot! That guy isn’t Warhol!”

Jerry Lanson: I was working with the kitchen crew at The Putney School when Robert Kennedy (the real one, not his son) came walking through, shaking hands.

Mark Kurlansky: "Possibly the most famous was Walter Cronkite. He invited me to his Upper East side apartment and he answered the door himself. In that voice I had heard all my life…”

Marty Appel: The most famous person I ever met will make you smile, Maury Allen.

Neil Offen: …She called him “boy” as often as she could. “Cassius, boy, gotta take a picture with you. C’mon, boy, let’s go take a picture.” “OK,” he said now. “Cheese.” …And just as he said it, Ali turned and bent down to the woman and gave her a big, wet, messy kiss right on the lips.

Mitchell Stephens: …Bill Clinton…We pushed a piece of paper out toward him and he, hurriedly, signed. That extraordinary piece of paper became the subject of perhaps our longest running family dispute: Who the heck lost it?

A Video by Eiko Otake, John R.Killacky,

and Brian Stevenson

(Photo credit: Jeanmarie Cross)

When the wheels of the plane lifted off from the tarmac at LaGuardia that January day I sobbed as if my heart were broken. 

I could no longer afford rent in NYC and  was returning. Permanently.  To my Midwestern roots. 

That was 3 years ago.

"My life, " I thought, "is over." 

Turns out, it was.

An appreciation of the haunting power of “nothings” — in math, in love, in life, in the universe, as well as in the middle of donuts.

….I remember rushing back to the office on a Sunday because on a note I’d placed in a colleague’s box I had misspelled Rupert Murdoch’s name: “Murdock.” And I once managed to misspell, in an article, not one but both names of the then Standards Editor of The New York Times….

How did a generation that began with such idealism turn so reactionary? How did our revolutionary ethos turn into pseudo-fascism? Weren’t we the generation that marched in the streets, for civil rights and against the war? Weren’t we the generation that burned our draft cards and called for—no, demanded—change? Weren’t we the hippie generation that partied at Woodstock and didn’t trust anyone over thirty?

This is going to agitate a few of you, but I don’t care. I am just sick and tired of not hearing human voices. People don’t talk to each other anymore—they TEXT. We relate with emojis, letters for words and incomplete sentences and phrases that lack emotion. Conversation has been reduced to a “notification beep.”

My grandchildren did not hesitate to tell me which grandma they preferred. (Yes, I asked, even though I know you're not supposed to.)

"The other grandma," Jonah, then 7, answered, right away.

"Yeah," his sister, Sasha, at the time 4, promptly chimed in. "Grandma, in Michigan."

The reason? (Yes, I asked.)

" You buy us nothing," Jonah answered, again without hesitation. "Not one thing."

(The story first appeared in The Record.

_{What’s the best live show you’ve ever seen?}

Answer in the comments on the Waddaya Think page or email us at writingaboutourgeneration.com

Excerpts:

Marty Appel: …The Beatles, Shea Stadium, 1966.  Yes I was there.  It was 35 minutes long…

Lew Borman: …I had seen them on Ed Sullivan and I heard they were going to play in Indianapolis as part of their tour….

Brooks Dareff: …Best surprise (tie): Grateful Dead, unannounced, at the Oregon Country Fair in Veneta, Ore.; Eric Clapton, unannounced, filling in for the recently departed Duane Allman, Nassau Colisuem….

SDWilliams; …Lol! When I saw the title about "Best Live Show" I thought it was about television shows, since we grew up in the era of live TV. So . . . "The Howdy Doody Show," because my brother got to be in the actual Peanut gallery once. Really! Forget seeing the Stones, the Byrds, Springsteen...he met Howdy Doody!

Jeanette McVicker: …Keith Emerson literally spinning in mid-air….

Silvia Gambardella: …The Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore East in the ‘70s, the original Chicago also ‘70s….

Frank Van Riper: Murray, a slight little kid, would always play at our assemblies at PS 90 in the Bronx….

Melinda Moulton: ….A Rod Stewart concert in the Boston Garden. We were tripping on acid…..

Arthur Engoron: …From the first notes, which were the opening to Born on the Bayou….

Mitchell Stephens: …dozens of folding chairs were being hurled at the stage, at Morrison….

Neil Offen: …Bruce Springsteen was playing the Bottom Line….

Does age bring wisdom? Do you have an example.

Write your thoughts in the comments below or email us at WritingAboutYourGeneration.com.

Marty Appel: Age does not bring wisdom unless you have kept up with everything those 30 and under know. The wisdom is confined to your own bracket of age 30 to present.

Arthur Engoron: Yes. I think more deeply. I consider more alternatives. I simplify what can be. I have more self-control. I ask myself, "What's the worst that can happen." If it's bad, I don't do it.

Mitch Stephens: Well, I’m less likely to sweat the little things — like whether I said something dumb at the restaurant last night. And that’s not just because I forget many of the little things, including what I said last night. But reconciling myself with the big things – infirmity and death, in particular – may require some more aging.

Neil Offen: If age really brought wisdom I wouldn’t have ignored the crushing pain in my chest that screamed heart attack….

…Once again I bought only one ticket. It had been my practice, for various early Dylan manifestations, to bring my wife or a kid or a friend. But eventually I realized that the pleasure of their company was outweighed by the annoyance of their complaints – about his unwillingness to play familiar songs in familiar arrangements, about the unprettiness of his voice….

DAY SIX: Get a Dog

…You also will meet other people out walking their dogs and who are equally pissed off that they had to go out in the rain and sleet twice that day for that mutt their kids promised they would be responsible for and take care of. And if you have a snarling, aggressive dog that bites complete strangers, that’s always a good conversation starter that may lead to a lasting friendship or at least a long-running legal case.

A video experiment. A moral enquiry. A walk on the Upper West Side.

….In the late 1970s, when I was living in Paris. I was desperately trying to finish a manuscript that was way past its deadline. After I wrote “the end,” I raced with my box full of 300 typed pages, some marked with WhiteOut, to the local post office. It was a Saturday, and I got there right before the post office closed at noon.

I handed over my box, paid the tariff and walked home.

And as I walked, the thought occurred to me: Did I tell them to send it via airmail?

Because if I didn’t tell them, if they didn’t send it via airmail, the only copy of the manuscript would go by boat and take six or seven weeks to get to my publisher….

This is a complaint – about modern times, on behalf of my music collection.

I’m not often inclined to quote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. But, when it comes to the song “I’m Free” by the Rolling Stones (in particular), to the various iterations of said music collection (in general) and to the experience of my generation (in even-more general), Marx and Engels were onto something. “All that is solid,” as they put it, does indeed “melt into air.”

I mean, it had to have been a mistake. Yes, I’m 77, but I am the guy who completed the Great Saunter, the 32-mile, one-day walk around Manhattan island, three times. I’m the guy who works out regularly at the gym. I’m the guy who wasn’t fat and hadn’t smoked since 1974 and ate healthily, lots of fruits and vegetables, regularly checked my blood pressure, and ran every other day and drank only moderately, didn’t take many medications and finished first in my age group in a recent 5K.

But as the cardiologist said later, you can’t outrun genetics.

After screwing up the world for the last 50 years or so, we baby boomers are clearly no longer lead players in our culture. We have become generic character actors, comic relief, like Chester in “Gunsmoke,” a reference surely lost on people busy streaming “Stranger Things” and “White Lotus.” We boomers rightly sense we have become irrelevant to the central story, unconnected to the moment’s gestalt, which many of us believe may be a digestive disorder.

Is it surprising, then, that we have become the butt of “ok, boomer” jokes? Yes, admittedly, we have ruined the planet, despoiled the oceans and bear much of the responsibility for the success of “Celebrity Apprentice.”