Back to the beginning

Go ahead. Call me a publicity whore. Others do. Or a BE whore–just invented that one. Here’s a link to the letters in The Long Island Press about me

Somebody told me that he heard the term baby boomer all his life, but other than the approximate demographics, really didn’t know much about baby boomers. Being one I was beyond shocked.

We are the center of the earth, the people who will change old age. As I’m a Geriatric Social Worker, licensed and all, I really don’t buy into that last phrase of the last sentence. There are too many variables that we can’t control, -/*and baby boomers do like to control. There are other variables such as stem cell research that we should be able to control. As we have a fundamentalist government, we can’t, and yes it does make me want to kill because I’m a control freak.
I feel justified being scared of old age. Though I have saved more than most single women, it’s not nearly enough. But I am a baby boomer so let me not dwell on the future, but the past. My past.

I can’t speak for every baby boomer, but as I’m from North-East Queens and Nassau County, I can speak for some North Shore Long Island baby boomers, and some Manhattan private school ones as our lives were so similar.

Though I did spend the pivotal years from four to twelve in a garden apartment complex in Queens, and until I turned eleven and weird did count my best friends from one through twenty.

This is where Lucia who is from the Bronx chimes in with “pizza was 35 cents a slice, two slices and a coke came to a buck.” But we were New Yorker’s so most of us said “dollah.”

By the time I was eight I would take two buses with my friends to go to the movies in Fresh Meadows where a matron guarded the children’s section by shining a too bright lantern type flashlight on us, while telling us to be quiet and looking for contraband. Contraband being any food and/or drink not sold by the theater. I’m trying to imagine any eight year old then trying to sneak in cigarettes or pot and I find myself laughing. I had never heard of the later and knew cigarettes were something evil that other adults might do, but I was brought up to fear. The lesson didn’t take.

I will skip the rah, rah, we were the first TV generation, and I so wanted to be Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and wish I could find the picture of me dressed as her when I was seven. I will skip the truly gross Davy Crockett metal lunch boxes which picked up the smell of lunches kept cold with round plaid metal things kept in the freezer.

I’m not particularly sentimental about objects though both my sister and I wish that our mother hadn’t given away the Elvis Presley sneakers our mom found so cute, and we being, seven and five found a mite too sexual or something that we weren’t ready to deal with. The sneakers were in perfect condition as we wore them once. Kids spent all day, the one time I wore mine, making Elvis the Pelvis jokes. Nobody really knew what a pelvis was, though my mother did explain after I came home crying. It turned into a family story still recounted today.

Today I finally realized that I realized my Sheena get-up worn for Halloween that same year was much more overtly sexual. My leopard skin dress had one sleeve, and my mom let me wear my wild hair loose and made even wilder, black smudged eyeliner, way too much lipstick and the bat I carried was decorated in leopard skin.

When I was under three my dad and I were in Macy’s. A man said something sexual as he threw water on me. This confirmed my dad’s worse fear that I was a girl men wanted to do things to. I remember being allowed to pick out clothes for myself for the first time. I picked red jeans, a red and white plaid flannel shirt, and red sneakers. I also remember being humiliated about something, and always assumed that I had peed. The incident itself must have been too grown up for me to process, and we can only remember what we were able to verbalize in some form.

About ten years ago I asked my mom. She laughed and said that I never had accidents and told me the story. This explained why my dad insisted that I have short hair until I was mistaken for one our first day in the garden apartments. It also begins to explain my parents insistence that I wear my hair back, and my father’s too early talks about sex and sexuality. I had assumed that it was because I was adopted and that my dad was scared I was going to be a fast girl. Though at twelve, only the gardeners had any desire for me.

Apparently the incident at Macy’s wasn’t the first but the most overt. However the effects on my sexual psyche were nil as I spent more time than most teenage girls thinking about sex. While my father lectured, he couldn’t get himself to say anything negative about sex itself.

If you saw my parents bedroom on Long Island, and I gave tours, you would see red with red velvet flocked wallpaper, a gold leafed headboard that looked suggestive to me. The whole room felt like sex.

Truthfully my teenage years were more like yours than most baby boomers. As I lived in the North Shore of Nassau County and went to one of the best public school districts in the country, and many in Nassau where and are, it was very competitive. Because more kids went to college from Nassau than any other county in the country, there was something called “the Long Island quota” in many colleges.

Admission guidelines were tougher for us. My parents and their friends called it “the Jewish quota,” but I think it might have applied to all kids from Long Island. My school was over 90 percent Jewish, and other school districts had similar rates.

I do feel very connected to generations that came after mine. I went to three undergrad schools over eight years with time off for work and travel. My father believed in the parental subsidiary as long as my sister and I were in school and/or working. Preferably both before I finally graduated.

My relationship with my father is one of the focal points of my book. The man drove me crazy. He was interfering, and wanted to live my life for me. I had a strong rebel streak, and I was a baby boomer who was seventeen in the fall of 1967. My parents insisted that I go to charm school on Central Park South. I immediately made a friend. Her parents owned a legendary club near Saint Marks Place in the East Village.

My mother would call her mother to see if it was alright for me to spend the night. I used to practice dying when my mother would do that. My friend’s mother would cover for me and I would spend the night actually on Saint Marks Place with my 28 year old boyfriend. While I found him to be lacking, I delighted in being introduced to Tuli Kupferberg, Ed Sanders, Allan Ginsburg, and other personal heroes of mine.

Some people find it amusing that my ambition in high school was to be a beat poet. How was I suppose to know that I was years late, and they only let girls be girlfriends? I made a better hippie anyway. I thought I was awkward. Other people thought that I moved well. Don’t really know how to explain it.

My dad took me to see my maternal great-aunt who managed a Hotel on Eighth Street where Dylan had lived. My dad rushed me out after she invited me to move in. My mother was the only woman in her family to find contentment as a suburban housewife/store owner, though even she needed to go to galleries often, devoured books and emulated Truman Capote’s Black & White Ball, at The Plaza, with my sister’s Black & White Sweet Sixteen in the rec room, several years later.

We were an extended family of women who couldn’t live by society’s rules. It was difficult for me to understand the concept of fitting in, or even why anybody would want to by the time I was fifteen, when one of my mother’s sisters was a Bohemian, and the other a Beatnik turned hippie.

Though my mom encouraged me to work against the VietNam War, to hang out in The Village, suggest books for her to read and movies to see so that we could discuss them, it was difficult for me to see my mother as anything but a suburban housewife and my mother who I adored.

There was something that I was looking for, something that was missing, something that I couldn’t quite understand then. Though my dad was interfering and attempted to be over protective, he and my mom didn’t present life as something that was predictable or that they had all the answers.

Things were changing too fast in the 60’s and all of us were being spun around too quickly until we would fall with exhaustion. There is the tired cliche that people who remember the 60’s weren’t really there. I was, and was an active participant in the last third.

I remember it too well, and am scared that I’m examining the memories which once seemed so wonderful, and still do to an extent, through the eyes of a jaded woman who has stayed in Manhattan too long.

Really have to begin listening to The Jefferson Airplane, Moody Blues, Joplin, and all the great 60’s music that can make remember the wonder in a flash.

Nights in white satin,
Never reaching the end,
Letters I’ve written,
Never meaning to send.

Beauty I’d always missed
With these eyes before,
Just what the truth is
I can’t say anymore.

’cause I love you,
Yes, I love you,
Oh, how, I love you.

Gazing at people,
Some hand in hand,
Just what I’m going thru
They can understand.

Some try to tell me
Thoughts they cannot defend,
Just what you want to be
You will be in the end,

And I love you,
Yes, I love you,
Oh, how, I love you.
Oh, how, I love you.

Nights in white satin,
Never reaching the end,
Letters I’ve written,
Never meaning to send.

Beauty I’d always missed
With these eyes before,
Just what the truth is
I can’t say anymore.

“Nights in White Satin” has always been and will always be the ultimate 60’s song to me. Though there are many I like much more.

While I had a boyfriend, the year I was seventeen was the last year in many that I wasn’t going to fall at least a little in love, or a lot.