Fifty-one years ago, I attended my first gay pride festival in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. Bette Midler sang “You Got to Have Friends.” We sure needed them. At that time, queer people had no legal protections. We could not be out as teachers, could be evicted, and were often physically attacked late at night with no police protection. Same-sex sexual activity was only legalized in 1980 in New York. 

Those of us gathered that day danced on the shoulders of activists a generation before, including Harry Hay of the Mattchine Society and Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon of Daughters of Bilitis who organized in the 1950s to counter police entrapment, McCarthyism, and the American Psychiatric Association labeling us sociopathic….

There are three men and one woman on treadmills, a woman and two men on ellipticals, one man on a stationary bike, a woman on a rowing machine and two women and two men on something called a “nu-step,” which, I am later told, is sort of a seated elliptical.

From my treadmill in the left side of the cardiac rehab class, I observe them all carefully, or as carefully as I can without falling off the treadmill during my jog. Who looks in better shape than I am? Who seems to be recovering more quickly from their heart attack?

At the hospital, when I was told I’d been referred for cardiac rehab, I jumped at the chance. Well, as much as I could jump following an attack that had almost killed me. . . .

There was a time

—not that long ago—

when doing something

required leaving

your home.

Click here to see this “idea video” by Mitchell Stephens

On the bedroom wall, across from the chair I use for taking off and putting on my socks and shoes, I’ve hung an ink-paint reproduction of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.

I first saw the famous work about 50 years ago, hanging over the fireplace mantel of a new friend, Ken, one of the most remarkable people I have known. He died two weeks ago, after experiencing sustained physical pain during the end of a singular life of existential suffering, intense sentiments, exalted thoughts and peak experiences.

Ken frequently spoke of “my great teachers”: Nietzsche, Jung, Beethoven, Wittgenstein and Nikos Kazantzakis….

   C’mon man, “I sing the body electric”? Like far fucking out. I mean everything was electric, right?

    And those leaves of grass? Whitman was smoking the good stuff for sure. Then there was that guy Thoreau out in the woods protesting the war.

     Which is all by way of saying when Mitch posed his question about the origins of hippie thought, Thoreau and Whitman came to mind.     When he suggested I write a few paragraphs on the subject I jumped at the chance to … outsource it to ChatGPT. (Hey I’m not doing this for credit, just getting the info out there.) ….

Click for the introduction to this series: “The Roots of the Hippie Idea.”

Stillpoint

A Visual Poem

Rumination On Living With Chronic Pain

Click here for this video by John R. Killacky

I’ve been trying to figure it out: Are these campus protests like our campus protests? How are they similar? How are they different?

And does any of that matter?

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, some of us gathered on quads and lawns and library steps and demanded an end to an unjust war. I was one of them. (A few years later, some of us gathered on quads and lawns and library steps and demanded concrete movement toward racial justice.)

We chanted “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” and painted signs and erected barricades and marched and held teach-ins and wanted our colleges to stop collaborating with a government that napalmed a far-away nation? . . . .

Judy Collins turns 85 today, May 1st.

I saw her in concert ten days before this birthday at Symphony Space in Manhattan, just blocks from where she has long lived on the Upper West Side. And her guitar playing, piano playing, her singing were all—as before, as expected—lovely.

That voice was and remains extraordinary, as luminous, as unmuddied, as comfortable at high elevations, as any in folk or rock music. Judy Collins wrote some good songs, but she discovered and sang, always wonderfully, some of the most important songs of the second half of the twentieth century. She is a woman of impressive talent but also extraordinary taste….

Joe Biden would be 86-and-two-months old when his second term ends—if he is reelected in November and Trump doesn’t stage a more successful insurrection. Donald Trump himself—a comparative youngster—would be a presumably still-corpulent 82 at the end of a second term.

These sure sound more like nursing-home ages than productive-member-of-the-workforce ages. And, you would think, it would be useful to have someone with their wits about them in the big job.

Indeed, I had recently begun to think that I myself, at the age of 74, ought not to be president—due to some annoying short-term memory issues….

Question: How many Boomers does it take to change a light bulb?  Answer: Four.  (One to change the bulb, and three to talk about how good the old one was.) 

Young people often marvel at the path we’ve travelled.

They could not conceive, for instance, of party lines. I grew up in a Chicago suburb, about three blocks from the Chicago city limits. This was the 1950s. We had a telephone, of course, but it was on a shared “party line” with a family down the street.

Which meant that if we wanted to make a call, we’d pick up the receiver and either get a dial tone or hear the conversation that our neighbor was having with someone…..

Many of the great puzzles of the universe

have been solved by humankind.

But we still Know little about

what goes on in a human mind.

Click here for this “idea video” by Mitchell Stephens

I have worked a job since I was 12 years old.

My first job was painting the horse fencing around my dad’s 900-acre horse farm in Pennsylvania. I was paid 25 cents an hour. In high school I worked at a nursing home as the breakfast and lunch cook.

After college, I secured a plumb position in Dr. James Watson’s (yes, the DNA guy) lab at Harvard, working for a young professor named Mark Ptashne. While there, I was able to take business courses.

Eventually settling in Vermont, I secured a job at the local hospital….

Tony Kubek, Gil McDougald, Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Bill Skowron, Elston Howard, Bobby Richardson.

It’s the lineup of the 1960 Yankees. I still remember it now. I worshipped it then.

Growing up, particularly in the Bronx, baseball was my religion (so much better than bar mitzvah lessons). I lived and died with the Yankees, and—although it may seem contradictory—a few years later, a little bit with the Mets, too….

On most days, I’m more likely to smile a lot than not. I’m pretty upbeat by nature. Even so, getting older has its downsides. And while grandparents’ quirks can be kind of funny to the younger generation, they’re not all that much fun for us.

Take my mom. When my kids were a teen and middle schooler, respectively, they’d bite their lip to keep from laughing when a discreet honk or two would emanate from their Grammy’s end of the dinner table. My mom, in her full dignity, acted as though absolutely nothing had happened. The girls thought it was hilarious.

Well, I’m now 75 and personally familiar with this….

(Photo, by Devon Lanson-Alleyne, shows a granite memorial stone for the author’s parents.)

I hate my husband. I hate my husband so much that sometimes murder comes to mind. I hate him so much that, struggling to repress those murderous thoughts, I stew. Oh, how I stew.

Or I dream of fleeing—anywhere. Please, please. I want out. Out of this marriage. Out of this relationship. Out of this life with him, this man that I barely recognize 41 years after I fell for him at the (now-I-know-too-well-how-tender) age of 21.

Who is he, this man sitting across the table from me? He doesn't even look like the man I gave my heart to four decades ago. That man has vanished. In his place is a thin, bald man with white whiskers who insists, in a most irritating way, that it is I who has changed, I who can and do annoy the hell out of him….

(includes a short video)

When I look in the mirror I see me. I recognize the familiar oval shape of my face; my Dad’s big dark brown eyes (alas, along with his characteristic deep circles beneath); my mother’s mouth; my fairly nondescript nose, the bump visible only in profile; my family’s pale but slightly olive-tone skin. And I recognize my medium-brown hair.

My parents both had jet black hair, but my sisters and I all got very dark brown. When I started coloring my hair in my mid-fifties, I initially went with my natural dark brown. I’ve chosen to go a bit lighter through the years. Still, the overall look in the mirror is dark brown.

One by one, most of my women friends and my older sister have decided to let their hair go gray in their sixties and seventies. Philosophically, I am in complete agreement….

Our generation, way back when, played a major role in spreading some lovely, meaningful and transformative ideas:

 peace, freedom, equality, liberation, diversity, toleration, choice, nonviolence, sexual openness, mind-altering drugs, protecting the environment, nonconformism, lifestyle experimentation, meditation, gender freedom, the transformative power of technology and the importance of ecstatic experience.

Quite a list, no? And behind them all, maybe, an attempt to move beyond a kind of sober, constricted, work-a-day—straight—way of dressing, way of being, way of thinking.

  Where did these ideas come from?

What did you look like in the 1960s or 1970s?

Send a photo and, if you want, some background on it….to WritingAboutOurGeneration.com

Neil Offen: The above photo was taken outside on the street where I lived, in Manhattan in about 1973 or ‘74. In my defense, it was a pretty windy day and that made the hair look longer and more disheveled than it usually was (which was pretty long and pretty disheveled). It was the back cover photo for a book I had just written. Years later, when our then-teenage daughter would bring friends over to our house, she would find the book so the friends, who only knew me as a well-groomed, kind-of-doting dad, could see the photo. And then they would squeal, “your dad was a hippie!”

The picture above the story “Far Out: The Big Ideas Behind The Short Moment Of The Hippies” above is from Mitch Stephens’ NYC taxi license, circa 1969.

Click for more photos and stories

Six weeks ago, I came down with an upper respiratory illness—acute bronchitis. The coughing was uncontrollable, rib breaking powerful. My lungs felt like they were going to explode, and I had to challenge myself to get air. I lost my sense of smell and taste and dropped eight pounds from my already lean body.

      I have always been an athlete, and I work out daily. A few months ago, I was bragging to my husband, Rick, that “I have never felt stronger in my life,” and at 74 that is quite an acccomplishment.

      But in an instant, this respiratory virus clawed at my lungs, threw me to the ground and placed its fiery knee on my throat….

We were talking, a few of us, at a recent photo gallery reception when my wife walked over and joined the conversation. I would, of course, have introduced her to the woman I was speaking with except that, of course, I had no idea of the name of the woman I was speaking with.

I couldn’t think of her name despite the fact that I knew I used to work with her. I had no idea of her name although apparently she knew my name quite well, knew me quite well, easily recalling details of our long relationship.

So, naturally, I spent the next ten minutes or so finding ways to avoid introducing my wife to … whatever her name was. And this was not the first time something like this had happened.