June 19, 2007 -- Let the record show that I loathe shopping for clothes.  Much of my wardrobe is older than most of my friends; I have kept it in good condition and since I don't care if I am fashionable or not, it does me very well.

This month I have had to buy two items that have brought home to me forcefully that Time Marches On and fashion has not marched with it -- except when, to my secret delight, it has.

First, I had to buy a bathing suit.  The only shop left on God's Green Earth that realizes that a woman who is nearing sixty should be, as Daddy says, Covering the Subject, is Lands End.  They sell what is known as the "tugless tank suit" that does not need to be tugged upward to cover the boobies or downward to cover Evrything Else.  Finding a bathing suit off the rack that is not either ludicrous on someone my age or reminiscent of something peoples' Bubbes wore in the 1950s is a task fit for the Gods.  I have found something that will do; however, it is neither fashionnable nor even smart and just looking at it makes me sigh.  I think I will have to go to Lands End again eventually, as they alone realize that the fact one must cover things up does not mean that one wants to look like Summer in the Catskills.

The other thing I had to buy was a slip.  Well, I still have to buy one.  Apparently while I was wearing the one I bought in the 1970s, which is actually too short and has been for about 30 years, they stopped making them because girls don't wear undergarments anymore.  Perhaps that is the purpose of the Thong, which is neither comfortable nor attractive, so that the buttocks which are no longer concealed by anything can be clearly visible to the world.  Which may be fine if you have perky, toned buttocks but give me a break.  Anyway, none of the shops downtown have this garment for sale and the young store clerks looked at me as if I had asked for corsets.  Perhaps when I am in Alabama next month, where the population is considerably older, I will find something a little more modern than what I have.

But the funny thing I did notice while in Winners (which does not sell undergarments at all) is that the Seventies have Come Back.  In fact, I saw a cheap knock-off of a Ralph Lauren suit I bought in 1974 that I still have (God alone knows why) -- modeled on the Nehru Suit, khaki with large brass buttons with some quasi-military symbol on them, it hangs in my closet along with my paisley Granny Dress with the empire waist and crocheted cream lace collar (which I wear with a straw cartwheel hat and look rather like a collision between Her Majesty the Queen and Miss Haversham).  The sailor version I had has long ago worn out and been discarded; besides, i had shortened the skirt to the point where nobody my age would wear it.  Winners is rife with examples of Seventies Chic.  Fortunately I have kept my sense of humour and realize that things that didn't look good on me when I was under 30 will certainly not look good on me now that I am just barely under 60.

But it does tickle my sense of fun to see the signs saying "New for 2007!" over stuff that is recycled from 1972.

Time marches on, but apparently some people never learned that if it didn't look good on your mother, it won't look good on you.

June 14, 2007 -- I am happy to stand before y'all today secure in the knowledge that the security people have shaken you down and removed all your electronic Binkies, so for the next ten minutes I will have that part of your attention not engaged in blabbering to your neighbours.  I can't require you to shut up; your mothers never taught you that skill.  But I can remind you that God gave you two ears and one mouth so you can listen twice as often as you talk, and this is a time to listen.  Because when you leave your dorm room or apartment with TheGuys for the last time today, you will be entering a world that doesn't give a rat's patootie about you.

For all your life until now, you have been told by everyone from your adoring Mommy to the professors and minders at school that you are special.  Tomorrow you will find out you are not; in point of fact, tomorrow you will not only not be special, you will be  invisible.  Far from having a hand to hold, you will be on a plank footbridge in a hurricane.  Nobody will hear you hollering for rescue.  The hurricane doesn't care about you; it doesn't care if you hang on or if you let go.  Neither does Life.  Once you leave the safety of the campus, you are on your own.

You are looking at me and thinking that I am older than your grandmother and I don't know anything about YOUR world, that tomorrow you will step out of your dorm room into an apartment like the one on Friends and a job as a network anchorperson or an NBA basketball star, and it won't matter that you can't even change the toilet roll or that you don't understand that toilet paper doesn't grow there.  I'm here to tell you that tomorrow you will be homeless and unemployed, and most of you have far less marketable skill than you think you have, and half of you will end up working at Borders or Starbucks.  And if you think you can afford an apartment like Friends on what will be left when the taxes are removed from that paycheque, think again. 

The other shock you have coming to you is that you have to go to your job every day, whether you want to or not, and you don't get summers off.  In fact, you won't get any vacation at all unless your boss (who IS the boss of you) says you can have it, and when you do get time off, you won't be able to afford to go anywhere.  Remember those college loans?  Even though you majored in rock and roll or Gender Studies or some other equally useless nonsense, and you find that you're unqualified for real work, you have to pay that money back.  And if that means getting a night job cleaning offices in addition to the day job at Starbucks, so be it.  From now on everything you do is going to be aimed at not letting that hurricane wash you off that plank footbridge, and likely it will be that way for the next five years.  And every day when you get up, what that day contains is wholly up to you.  Nobody is going to phone you and tell you to come to work; if you don't come to work you will lose your job.  For most of you, nothing you do will be 'meaningful' and even those who majored in useful subjects will find that work is drudgery for that first five years while you learn how to cope with that hurricane.

The point to remember is that it is all up to you from now on and the world doesn't care if you fail.  If you get washed off that footbridge, the world will continue to turn.

Now for the good part.  From now on there's nobody in the world who has the right to tell you how to make your way off that footbridge.  If you want to strap on your backpack and travel through the world, working at menial jobs to keep body and soul together and learning foreign languages and customs on the fly, being fleeced by people with 'special deals' and catching parasites and diseases you never heard of until you have them, you can do it.  If you want to join the Army, the Peace Corps, the Salvation Army or the priesthood, go for it.  In fact, if you want to squat on a street corner with a tin cup and sleep in the park, nobody will say you nay.  You are the boss of you.  Until you voluntarily put yourself under the command of a higher boss, not a one of us has the right to tell you which direction to go.  But with that freedom comes responsibility.  You are still responsible for those college loans; you still have to eat and sleep and dress and transport yourself; you still need medical care and likely you need friends.  It's up to you and nobody else to take care of those needs.

And the biggest shock of all is coming to you when you realize that Mommy and Daddy worked for 40 years to get the life you took for granted -- and just like happened to them, life is not going to hand it to you.

My Daddy did not graduate from high school; instead he worked on the family farm until he went off to World War II.  But he taught me a few things that enabled me to make my way off that footbridge and out of the hurricane without being washed away.  The first thing was that the world may be round like an orange, but that orange does not belong to anybody -- and if you aren't quick, you'll be lucky to be left with a piece of orange peel for your share.  The second thing is that Popularity is a waste of time unless you are running for Miss Universe.  The world is a big place and 90% of the people in it have never heard of you, and of the 10% who have, 85% of those people will hate you no matter what you do.  Forget it and move on.  And the third thing is that when you get off that footbridge and out of the hurricane, the satisfaction you will feel is the biggest high you will ever know.  It doesn't matter to Life how you accomplish that feat; it doesn't matter to Life if you accomplish it at all.

What matters is you, looking back at that footbridge lashed by the storm and seeing the people still making their way and some of them being washed away, and knowing you have made the journey and you didn't get beat.

Men and women of the graduating class of 2007, prepare yourself for the anonymous epic battle of your life, and prepare to do it alone.  You will look back on that adventure when you're my age and marvel at the depths you had in you that you never suspected until Life kicked you out onto that plank footbridge in that storm.

Go and enjoy the battle.

 

The Boomers are retiring, and here enters Generation Whine, the GrabbyBabies reared by helicopter parents who countered all efforts to discipline them by sending lawyers to scold that "It's not her fault!" Consequently, when they misbehave and end up in serious trouble, they have no idea how it happened, since nothing has ever been their fault. Saturday at the park I saw a future leader of Canada screaming and flailing in his stroller. The instant Mommy set him down on the grass, he ran right straight into the street. Fortunately the cars passing by were only going 20 mph but if Mommy hadn't had an all star sprint and tackle born, one suspects, of experience, Little Precious would now be a grease spot on the park road and Mommy would be shrieking that cars should be banned from the park. Because of course it was not his fault that he was run over just because he wanted to play on a highway! Later in the afternoon as I rode on the train, a Mommy read a story to her little boy, aged about seven, who sat beside her and kicked me. Every time Junior swung his foot, MOMMY said automatically, "Sorry." Finally I engaged Junior with eye contact and said "Please quit kicking me. Please." Then Mommy changed seats with Junior -- without speaking to him about his behaviour of course -- and continued to read. You are expecting these "liberated" brats to take responsibility when from infancy they have been schooled by everyone around them to believe wholeheartedly that absolutely nothing that goes wrong anywhere is their fault? Coupled with P.J.O'Rourke's "Toddler Liberation" (the freedom to pull down your pants in public and shove everything you can pick up into your mouth) this helicopter parenting-by-lawyer has made the world in which we live today and in which you (not us Boomers) will have to work. Hope you enjoy things when we retire and your whole world is made up of text speak, vulgarity and people who take no responsibility for anything. Talk about reaping the whirwind!

TORONTO (June 4, 2007) -- The various writings on the Tienemen Square anniversary has reminded me of an anniversary much closer to home.  This is the eighteenth anniversary of a cruise Daddy and I took to Alaska.

Daddy has had a bad heart for a long time, and this was before his first pacemaker was installed (he's had four or five since then).  The doctor had told him how the land lay, and advised that if he had things left in life that he had been putting off, it was time to start doing them. (My sensitive younger sister called me to demand that we sue the doctor.  I finally convinced her that she was overreacting.)  One of the things Daddy had still on his To Do List was an Alaska cruise.  Mama would have nothing to do with cruise ships; she saw the Poseidon Adventure, and the fact that I had taken a four month round the world cruise 19 years before and had returned completely unscathed (as far as swimming out of upside down ships go anyway) buttered no parsnips with her.  I was fresh from my first triumph against American Express, convincing them with my best feminist rhetoric that I knew why every time I met their financial requirements and applied for their Card, they turned me down and said I needed to make more money; within hours they called me back to confirm that I was the proud owner of an AmEx Card after all.  I was scheduled to take my usual trip to England in July, but I discovered that cruises were not that expensive and that Holland America Lines catered especially to elderly people with health issues, so I booked the cruise and told Daddy we were going to fulfill one of his remaining dreams.  (I flew so regularly that I had air miles enough for free air fare to and from Seattle, where we would catch a bus that took us to Vancouver to catch our ship.  We booked into the Sheraton Hotel, another first for Daddy, and spent the waiting time for the plane in the Admiral's Club, a third one.  Despite the fact that, in Daddy's estimation, the plane we flew in was the one Moses used to ferry the Children of Israel across the Red Sea, and despite Daddy's costly misunderstanding about the mini-bar in our room (and the panic stricken hotel clerk who looked at us and finally blurted "Do you and your, your, your, um, husband want one bed or two?"  I informed him politely that this was my father and we wanted two beds please -- having done plenty of travel with boy chums I was used to this kind of question, believe it or not -- we had a nice trip out and a wonderful cruise.  I was under 50 at the time and was about the youngest passenger on board, but we had an idyllic ten days and saw some beautiful sights, met some interesting people, and enjoyed ourselves every day.  Mama was sure we would wear tennis wear to the cocktail party and bathing suits to dinner, and everyone would blame her; we agreed early on that we would not nag each other about clothing and would tell Mama that we had kept a sharp eye on what the other person was wearing at all times.  We met a woman of 80 at the cocktail party the captain threw for those who had cruised Holland America Lines before, who told us she had asked to be seated at a dining table with all the single men on board and had ended up at a table with the priest.  We met a couple of gay businessmen -- the first time Daddy had sat at a table with gay men and he handled it beautifully -- who made the big mistake of letting the wine steward choose a bottle of wine for them and having to grope around the floor for their eyeballs which had popped out fo their sockets at the size of the cheque that resulted.  We had a young woman Indian guide who could not start the bus; Daddy advised her how to do it (problem with the clutch) and joked that no General Motors product would run with him on board (he is a Ford man now that Kaiser has gone out of business).  We had a wonderful cruise.

And on the daily update on board we saw the word about the death of the Ayatullah and the face off in China.  And Daddy reminded me that it was time I started teaching the kids why we fight.  Today they are both fascinated by Daddy's stories of World War II and the fact that he was a teenager when he went to war.

On the way home we stayed with some people from the Hospitality Exchange, an organization originally started by hippies that allowed a person to stay with a fellow member (at the member's discretion)  for free in cities and towns everywhere in the world.  And there for the first time I heard the full story of the time Daddy and Mama were kidnapped by a deranged Black prison escapee -- Daddy had lost his license to drive temporarily due to his I Can't Drive 55 Mantra and Mama had to drive him to work, leaving four of us under the age of 8 peacefully asleep alone in our beds at home.  Justice was meted out by our local Mafia Judge, fortunately, once the situation had been resolved with no harm other than Mama's lasting terror of strange Black men.

It is 18 years later and Daddy is still talking about that trip; and incidentally, he is still reminding the doctor that reports of his impending demise were definitely premature.

Yes, revolution is worthy of note.  But the anniversaries of adulthood and family dreams are worth remembering, too.