When did boomers get to be such fuddy-duddies?
This nightmare could become your reality any day:
You go to a festive gathering of adults, and you’re the oldest person there.
Mark my word. The day is coming when you’ll be the only soul at the clambake who remembers JFK’s assassination, 45-rpm records, Sonny and Cher, Siddhartha, Country Joe and the Fish and J.R. Ewing.
Generally, I avoid writing about aging because it bores anyone younger than me and insults anyone older.
On the other hand, Denver is the unofficial baby-boomer capital of the nation, so a pretty big swath of you can relate to what I recently experienced at 53.
I was at a holiday dinner party.
Snow was on the ground. A real fire burned in a real fireplace. A majestic 9-foot-tall blue spruce Christmas tree stood in a corner of the beautifully renovated turn-of-the-century Craftsman home.
After greeting the hosts, I eased into a mission-style chair by the fireplace, and someone brought me chardonnay in chilled Riedel stemware.
Guests, mostly architects and financial-planner types, began arriving.
But instead of mingling, I sat. I parked myself in my chair, just like I remember my great aunt used to do at family gatherings.
Now, I may not have her hip problems, her one-size-fits-all-Nebraska-farmwife perm, her apron or her church-lady shoes, but the truth was I definitely had that same old-lady smile, the one that says, “Don’t anyone lift a finger on my account. I’m just tickled pink no one’s carted me off to the home.”
The epiphany came at the dinner table, when I saw all their faces. I was Margaret Thatcher, and everyone else was Sacha Baron Cohen.
To be surrounded by people in their prime – late 30s and early 40s – well, it was intimidating.
Their high-powered careers didn’t help. One guy’s full-time job was managing a family’s estate. Several others were bringing down six figures.
Once upon a time, my newspaper job was mildly interesting to people. But that was before 24-hour cable news, the Web and blogomania, before anyone with a Palm Pilot and two fingers could post a thought and declare himself a journalist.
And, of course, my dinner companions were in diapers when Woodward and Bernstein begot a generation of idealistic government watchdogs.
I might as well have worked in an auto-parts store.
“So what do you write about?” asked one as we dined on a professionally prepared German meal of red cabbage, elk and dumplings.
“Uh . . . family, relationships, trends,” I said, feeling more like my great aunt by the second, instantly regretting I hadn’t lied and said I cover the International Monetary Fund as it relates to CIS countries, focusing on large external debt incurred by Armenia, Moldova and Tajikistan.
Later, I inexplicably found myself praising obituaries as some of the best-told stories in the paper.
My hits just kept coming.
I scraped bottom when I hid behind my son. Will is a hard-core high school debater. He uses nouns like hegemony and extinction impacts. He uses fiat as a verb.
The trust-fund manager engaged him in a discussion about America’s Mideast policy, and Will held his own.
In fact, he seemed to be winning, but then he hadn’t had three glasses of wine like I had. I was prepared to jump in, but the conversation never swung around to Medicare Part D.
Later, as I deconstructed the evening, I concluded I’m simply a product of my times, a boomer who, like my fellow Me Generation members, refuses to believe the aging process applies to me. The only thing missing that night was my Davy Crockett coonskin hat.
I think I’ll host my own party next year and invite my old friends Led Zeppelin, Timothy Leary, Maxwell Smart, Angela Davis and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. We’ll throw back a few Harvey Wallbangers and talk about the good old days in our est seminars.
After all, 50 is the new 40. Isn’t it?
