Happiness today is having a large, caring and loving family… that lives far, far away. But it wasn’t that way back when I was your age. Back then if my mother needed a place to send me after school it was to my grandparents house, not to a day care center. There was no such thing back when I was a kid.
If you looked up a person’s name in our phone book it was a little confusing, for every last name there was a John, a Johnny and a Johnny Jr.,Three generations living in the same neighborhood. A phone call to a ‘distant’ relative was not even “long distance” and you didn’t need an appointment to stop by and visit an uncle, an aunt, a brother or a sister. Close relatives really were… sometimes right next door.
Sundays were for beef roasts, penny poker, Uncle Charles’ homemade ice cream and my mom’s berry cobbler. The meal was always spiced with an assortment of family members from both sides of my family. Sometimes there were just as many people over on Monday to eat the leftovers. Christmas and Thanksgiving were mandatory family affairs but so were birthdays and anniversaries.
When I was your age we didn’t know anything about Alzheimer’s disease. We just thought Grandma was getting a little senile, so we all took turns taking care of her. It was no big deal. When grandpa fell and broke his hip he couldn’t get any rest for all the friends and relatives that showed up to sit and chew the fat with him.
Now days when a youngster wants to spend a week’s vacation with his parents he probably has to be shipped off, boarding a plane with a name tag around his or her neck to visit a divorced parent in a city far away. The nuclear family has blown apart. It scares me to know that city kids have to join violent gangs to feel wanted, as if wearing the same color hoodie can replace the family feeling. When I was your age the only gangs I joined were Little League, Cub Scouts and the FFA. Family members filled the bleachers and bought the Girl Scout cookies.
That was when I was your age… but now I am my age and like the rest of the baby boom generation, I moved away from home. Just like the brother who left the farm or the sis who moved to the big city, I pulled up my own roots and left in search of fame and fortune. Most of us did. A person will do almost anything for money it seems. I haven’t been back home in years and find I miss the place. I’ll go back someday, probably in a padded rectangular box to lay beside my grandpa and all my old school friends, acting as if I never left.
Although I have a great wife, a nice home and a successful career I am at that stage in my life when I feel like I’m missing something. I miss my family. I think my whole generation does. I have a wonderful aunt and cousins I haven’t seen in decades and, sadly, some I’ve never even met. We get Christmas cards from people I think are strangers, until I realize they are my very own kin folks. Once upon a time there were these things called family reunions but I’ve never actually been to one.
We have bigger homes and more cars than our parents and yet we are not as rich. A Navajo Indian once told me that you can’t get rich if you have taken care of your family. And that’s what worries me. Who will take care of my generation?
As the baby boomers get older it will be the parents who are the orphans. We cannot expect our good friend ‘what’s his name’ to be our caretaker, he’s got the same problem. And so we’ll be cataloged in rest homes and forgotten in warehouses for the aged, unable to reminisce with nurses we never knew. It will be lonely out there… growing old and hating it. We have pursued the American dream with gusto but forgot to bring our families along for the trip.
Just think of all the fun we missed.
