Neil Offen, one of the editors of this site, is the author of Building a Better Boomer, a hilarious guide to how baby boomers can better see, hear, exercise, eat, sleep and retire better. He has been a humor columnist for four decades and on two continents. A longtime journalist, he’s also been a sports reporter, a newspaper and magazine editor, a radio newsman, written a nationally syndicated funny comic strip and been published in a variety of formats, including pen, crayon, chalk and, once, under duress, his wife’s eyebrow pencil. The author or co-author of more than a dozen books, he is, as well, the man behind several critically acclaimed supermarket shopping lists. He lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.
Neil Offen
Neil’s Posts
Taking Tech For Granted
A few weeks back, Mitch and I were talking, going over the details of this new website we wanted to launch. We were on a Zoom and the images and the voices were as clear as could be. Only thing was it was Friday for Mitch and it was Thursday for me, because Mitch was in Brisbane, Australia, and I was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
That is, he was almost 10,000 miles away, in a different hemisphere, on a different day, and we were talking like there was no big deal about it.
Because, of course, there wasn’t. We may complain sometimes about the intricacies of tech, about how intractable it can be for those of us who didn’t grow up with it, how we miss the simplicity of transistor radios and the human fallibility of our old scratched-up LPs, but at the same time we pretty much take the extraordinary glories of tech for granted.
The phone is always within arms reach. We GPS going anywhere new. We google anything we can’t remember. We command Alexa to do the simplest of tasks, like turning on the news. We FaceTime with the distant grandkids and we run with podcasts in our ears and stream what we want to see when we want to see it.
And that all makes it difficult to remember a time when all that wasn’t the case.
Yet it’s true: we couldn’t always just hit send. I couldn’t 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.
And I would be screwed.
My wife and I spent the rest of the weekend worrying. On Monday morning, right at 8 a.m., I showed up at the post office to ask the agent to check the records and see if my package had gone via airmail.
It had.
We celebrated that night—not the good news, really, but the absence of bad news, the sense of getting very close to the edge of the cliff and not falling off. There’s probably a German word for that. I’m sure there’s no tech term for it.
On New Year’s Weekend, I Died
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 worksout regularly at the gym. I’m the guy who wasn’t fat and hadn’t smoked since 1974 and atehealthily, lots of fruits and vegetables, regularly checked my blood pressure, and ran every otherday and drank only moderately, didn’t take many medications and finished first in my age groupin a recent 5K.
But as the cardiologist said later, you can’t outrun genetics.
There were no indications. Well, maybe one small one. A couple of days before, I had gone for a run and felt a very minor tightness in my chest. I figured I was just tired, and only ran a mile and a half instead of my customary two.
The next day, absolutely fine, a perfectly normal day. Had dinner with my wife and newly arrived visiting daughter. We ate, we talked, we drank some wine, I went to bed at the normal hour. A half hour later, I had severe chest pains. I figured it would pass – I didn’t want to wake my wife up – and after a half hour or so, it did.
Heartburn, I thought. I laid back down in bed and went to sleep. I felt ok.
Got up at about the usual time, had breakfast and then decided to take a nap because I was pretty tired from my truncated sleep. Half an hour or so in, the extreme chest pains returned. Maybe even stronger than before. This time they brought with them profuse sweating and nausea.
I took some Tums because, obviously, this had to be bad heartburn, because what else could it be?
But the Tums didn’t work and the excruciating pain continued. My wife wanted to call 911 and get an ambulance. I didn’t want an ambulance, because … well, I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m stubborn. Maybe because I was embarrassed. Maybe because I’m an idiot.
But not a complete idiot. I reluctantly agreed to let my wife drive me to the emergency room. She roused our daughter and we left — but not before I could change my pants into something I thought might be more appropriate for an ER. Idiocy knows no bounds.
We’re lucky we live only 12 minutes or so from a major hospital and lucky that it was New Year’s weekend and lucky there was little traffic and I got to the emergency room just in time. Ten minutes more, ten minutes later, the cardiologist said, and I don’t make it. If my wife was less persistent, less determined, wasn’t just as stubborn as I am, I don’t make it.
And I almost didn’t.
I walked into the ER, refusing a wheelchair, because of that stubbornness. Moments later, lying on a gurney, I was whisked down corridors, around sharp corners, through whooshing doors, up an elevator, into a hyper-bright room with what seemed to be cellophane-wrapped pillow-like machines hovering over me.
The rest is pretty hazy. I have vague memories of someone telling me “you’re doing great, buddy,” and people I couldn’t fully see shouting at each other.
I thought I was on that bed in that room for maybe 20, 25 minutes. I figured ok, it probably wasn’t heartburn and I must have had a heart attack. It wasn’t good, sure, but I figured it wasn’t that big a deal.
Afterward, in the cardiac intensive care unit, my wife and daughter told me I had been in that room, the cath lab, for around two hours. My heart had stopped. I was, essentially, dead on the table. They had to shock my heart five times to get it going again. They had to do CPR for two full minutes to get it working again.
The main artery to my heart had been 100-percent blocked. During those two hours, the doctors put in a temporary cardiac balloon to help my heart pump more blood. They put in a permanentstent to open up the artery.
Afterward, one of the doctors called what had happened “the big one.” Another said this was indeed “the widowmaker.” And a third termed what had happened “a massive, massive, massive” heart attack.
Yet when the new year came, a day later, I was still alive. Now, a month later, I’m going for brisk walks, doing some squats, eating and talking and joking and writing and, most of all, immensely grateful. Happy new year, indeed.
On the Difficulty of Remaining Young
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.” But does all that justify becoming the coronavirus’s target demographic, constantly referred to as the elderly, the fragile, the at-risk and worst of all, the dead?
Not that long ago—when old people were just called old people before the word seniors was invented—age and maturity were revered. Youth was something to grow out of, like tie-dyed pants and Nehru jackets.
Older generations consequently weren’t obsessed with staying young forever. They were content to watch the world pass them by. They knew they had wisdom, perspective and 5-percent off on senior day at the supermarket. They were OK with slowly fading away, as long as they could do it from their La-Z-Boy recliners.
Us boomers, not so much.
No longer young, many of us continue wanting to seem young, trying to act young. And it’s not easy.
Inundated with how-to-stay-healthy advice, we use anti-aging face cream and regenerative moisturizer (SPF 132!) and drink bottled water from pristine springs rather than Mello Yello from god knows where. We eliminate gluten from our diet and try ingesting more antioxidants and fewer oxidants, if we could figure out which are which.
We hire a personal trainer, then check our target heart rate on a Fitbit as if we understood what’s a target heart rate. We play pickleball and are disappointed to learn no gherkins involved. We go to yoga and Pilates and Zumba and Tai Chi and would do downward dog if we could figure out how to do upward dog immediately afterward.
We play brain games to ward off dementia and do Qi Gong to ward off osteoporosis. We get new knees, replace our hips and swap out our rotator cuffs.
Awash in unfamiliar popular culture, we nevertheless believe we can distinguish between Dua Lipa and Doja Cat before admitting we have no idea who either of them is. We have a bunch of Spotify and Pandora playlists but also a stack of old 45s, Guess Who cassette tapes and three non-ambulatory Walkmans. We imagine we’d get all the references in Saturday Night Live skits, but of course it’s on too late for us to watch it live.
At sea in a high-tech storm, we Zoom with friends, Skype with former colleagues and WhatsApp with family but still don’t know how to find those digital photos from that trip to Greece. We’re finally on Instagram when everyone has migrated over to TikTok. We now have so many gizmos and a bounty of complex thingamagigs, along with several completely unnecessary doohickeys, but still can’t figure out how the QR code works. And when something goes wrong with our iPhone 32, we have to find a nearby 12-year-old to fix it.
We do all this trying to hold on to our youthful past, but it’s hard, especially when our past happened back before we were paying attention. Plus, when you get older, there’s a lot more past to remember. And now there’s a lot more complicated present to deal with.
In addition to the traditional problems involved with getting older—increasing bodily frailty, faulty memory, root canals—our generation also confronts some unique challenges, including kale-flavored instant waffles, mounting LinkedIn requests from people we’ve never heard of and receiving mail with an invitation to a complimentary dinner where you can learn about cremation (I chose the salmon entree.).
We find ourselves living in a world where the print size of menus seems to have become smaller and restaurants appear to have become louder and frequently we feel much less capable of dealing with it all, particularly if there are acronyms involved. How do we navigate this scary world and make believe we really understand text messages that end with KMN?
I looked it up; it’s Kill Me Now.
FIHNI. (Frankly, I Have No Idea.)