With the Thoughts I’d be Thinkin’ I Could be Another Lincoln

I’m a man of a certain age but you wouldn’t know it to look at me – in part because the very idea of looking at me frightens you. But guess what? I arise at 5:30 in the morning and go to a gym and it shows! On any given day, gather your courage and step into my office at around 8 in the morning. There you’ll see a man of a certain age seated at his desk, wearing a blank expression and pouring a pot of coffee into his lap. It’s the scalding and screaming that upsets you and I get it. 

Okay, yeah. I am a Boomer – I think you youngsters pronounce it “Bewmer” somehow. Where’d we come from? From WAR, kid! Haw haw! The procreative party at the end of WWII produced a generation of what are properly called Baby Boomers. I like to think of us as Joy Babies. Unfortunately some of you younger people are obliged to work alongside dissolving Joy Babies, and I know how that is. Still more unfortunate is the very name given our socio-historical cohort, as it summons the terrible suggestion of our parents in a room somewhere doing the Lindy Hop. This can curdle the Boomer’s blood, but only every darned time the phrase Baby Boomer is uttered. You Gens X, Y, and Z got off easy. So to speak.

But we Boomers and you Alphabet Munchkins (excuse me) are not so unalike. To invoke the old saying; we put our pants on in the morning just like you do – by leaping up into the air with a victorious shout, desperately seeking leg holes, and charging headfirst through drywall in a hollering burst of gypsum. You see, we are not so different. 

Kitchenette 

Heck yeah, I’m the chattiest guy in the office kitchenette. I fling conversation-killers like a wildly flailing, pre-litigation Wham-O Water Wiggle^® once flung children’s teeth across verdant summer lawns. Take your pick: 1] Hoo boy! Now THAT’s a cup of Joe! 2] Oh that Lee Trevino (spoken dolorously)… 3] Guess what lucky so-and-so just bought an electric can opener? 

I’ve seen these spoken phrases paralyze the gathered faces of the young and merely middle-aged. I’m also pleased to be the stooped figure who barges in on your carbon fiber bike frame conversation with excited gestures and the overpowering, workplace-inappropriate scent of Drakkar Noir. “Is there a bike that can beat a Schwinn? Heh heh heh! Heh heh!” And so on. 

More poetically, time is like a river. I came up with that and I think it’s a terrific metaphor. As you are borne along, the peaceably meandering stream slowly (at first) becomes a widening, mildly rollicking thoroughfare, then a racing cascade of white water and sharp rocks and bears swinging their big ol’ claws around your face as they grunt and grasp at the staring, underbitten fish leaping out of the violently foaming water. Then the terrifying bears thin in number, the waters calm and you relax beneath fragrant pines, lulled by what sounds like a brisk wind in the treetops. Soon enough this mesmerizing hum is understood to be the approaching waterfall. Not to bring you kids down. (Hey… you done with that?)

Patricia Owens

One day a colleague here at work was talking about his great-grandfather having only recently passed, and we all marveled. It seemed the wrong moment to point out that my own great-grandfather had served as a soldier in the Civil War. Yes, that Civil War. I almost pitched in with this comment, but my Spidey Sense© informed me that the remark would be met with icy stares, or the open-mouthed horror with which Patricia Owens greets an insectoid David Hedison in The Fly. When a colleague’s father visited the office one day, this alleged parent looked like he could be my Junior Achievement mentee. He had dark hair and it covered his entire head, for instance. “Hey everybody. This is my dad,” my co-worker said with enthusiasm. “Yes, well, has dad cleaned his room?” I wanted to say. It’s all a little disconcerting.

Mr. Popular

In my working life I have always been the light-stepping, humor-filled Mr. Popular in whatever office was lucky enough to host me – a happy-go-lucky colleague whom my co-workers daily regarded with frank wonder and delight. I would jauntily stride in every morning with my elbows aloft and my happy fists lightly clenched before my solar plexus, like a soft-shoe fella about to snap his bowtie. 

My conversational litheness was legendary, my bon mots received with the rippling laughter of genuine pleasure. Nowadays when I have the ill-advised courage to lob a careless one-liner into the happy melee of office conversation, my comments are met with a sudden, smothering silence – an acoustic absolute zero so complete you can hear the crickets stealthily tip-toeing out of the room. “What on Earth is Jack talking about now?” my young and vibrant compatriots collectively wonder, to which my own chatterbox id replies “Hey, my name is Jeff.” So, yeah.
I’m working on my repartee. Note to self: leave the Johnny Mathis impression at home.

Autumn in New Work

The enlightened company I work for is not averse to hiring the Autumnal, and there is thankfully a peer group of the fellow-wizened that I can turn to for support and esprit de corps. We wintry-haired denizens remember, as in a distant dream, the antediluvian pre-computer Age of Legend, when televisions had only three stations and “remote control” meant throwing your dad’s ashtray at the buttons, when flirting and typing were wildly unrelated activities, and when the kitchen phone was bolted next to the pantry at about shoulder height, the receiver attached by a long cord. “Roaming” in those days was defined as the distance you could excitedly run into the next room with the receiver in hand before you reached the end of the tether and loudly tore the phone off the wall. 

These are different times. In olden days, for example, we would have thought it strange to convey grief or commiseration by sending someone a yellow cartoon face squirting cartoon water out if its eyes. But this epoch of abbreviation does have its upsides. I checked out a copy of Moby Dick from the library the other day – a classic I’ve long wanted to read. It was a single laminated sheet of paper with two emojis; a frowning whale and a peg-legged guy shaking his little fist. So… that’s a glass half-full, I guess.

Future Tense

When we Joy Babies see each other around the office we’ll exchange rueful smiles in passing, or we’ll stop and engage in bewildering secret handshakes. Actually, these are the standard, brief handshake of olden-times, but to our co-workers, with their elaborate four-minute finger wiggling and knuckle-bumping hipster greetings, a simple clasping handshake can look positively Masonic. We more seasoned workers revel in appearing momentarily interesting on those occasions. And, hey – we are very interesting, darn it! Both generationally and as terrifically alluring individuals, we Joy Babies are possessed of real verve. Yep. Lots and lots of verve.

We are, after all, emissaries of a more vibrant time, a time when an Apollo astronaut would sneak a Wilson six-iron onto his spaceship and later drive a golf ball two miles across the surface of the moon. Yeah, baby; the moon! The gulf between this workforce generation and my own can be bridged if we’ve the will and the heart. Or hearts, I guess. 

Bottom line? The other Joy Babies and I are… well, We are You. Whoa! Easy, there. Your raised jazz hands and despairing cries of No! No! No! No! No! will summon security! You know what I say is true. We hunchbacked Joy Babies were once like you; fresh-faced and given to happy laughter that didn’t end in a fit of consumptive coughing.

Circle of Tassled Loafers^®

Hey. C’mon. [slow blinks and reaches out withered arms in frightening gesture of ‘70s-era come-hither] We know what you’re feeling, because we once felt it, too! We looked with curiosity and mild pity on the older co-workers with whom we were occasionally entrapped, they of the ash-flecked knit tie, push-broom mustaches and Tassled Loafers®. “Oh holy cow!” we would whisper in the elevator. “Didja get a load of those Tassled Loafers^®?!”

Later that same “day” we find ourselves older and awkward and inexplicably wearing Tassled Loafers^®. It’s the Circle of Tassled Loafers^®! So, we do feel your pain. When one day you have reached middle age and find yourselves working alongside swinging younger folk who make fun of your old musical heroes Taylor Quick and MouseHead (or whatever), remember, always, that life is a cycle. It’s a unicycle, unfortunately; difficult to master and nearly invisible to garbage trucks.