Lifestyles

Renaissance Redneck: So I’m a Boomer, okay

By DAVID KITTREDGE
The first clue that I’m a boomer is that I took an extra millisecond to actually spell out the word okay, which is somewhat of an anomaly in today’s digitally enhanced society. I must admit that I am reacting to the newly coined phrase “OK Boomer” which is a humorous but, patronizing response by younger generations toward the boomers for being judgemental and condescending when giving advice.

I am glad that I am a boomer or a baby boomer, a member of the generation born between 1946 and 1964, a time when life was simpler and when children remained enshrouded in innocence until their late teens. Other boomers I have spoken to feel much the same way as I do and are glad not to be a child growing up today.

As boomers, we could create our own toys, although a vivid imagination often came in handy when trying to shaping a stick or a bar of ivory soap into an intended outcome. The boys toys we did have were made of durable metal and could be passed on to a younger child, intact. Plastic toys were essentially nonexistent back then.

If we sent in a cereal box top and a quarter for the toy advertised on the carton, we had to wait four to six weeks for delivery. We knew the true meaning of “snail mail.” The time waiting was filled with anticipatory glee or at times with a bit of angst when we started to check the mailbox after three or four weeks and our expected package hadn’t arrived. But, we learned patience and valued the trivial trinkets all the more because of the waiting period.

We were taught back then that, “Fools names and fools faces often appear in public places,” an old adage that has apparently been shooed out the door with the advent of selfies and the social networks. These days we consider ourselves lucky if the face is the only unclothed body part we see splashed onto our electronic screens. I have recently read where people are now incurring a malady upon themselves called “selfie wrist” due to the multitude of selfies taken as they clutch their smart phones at an odd angle while shooting portraits of themselves.

I remember the days when between the hours of five and seven o’clock in the evening the phone wouldn’t ring because it was considered impolite to call someone during dinner time. I remember when receiving a telephone call the caller would introduce themselves so you knew to whom you were speaking. Of course, we now have this new fangled option known as “caller ID,” which I sort-of have (mine only displays the caller’s phone number). Some day I may catch up, but what’s the rush?

Before I risk going all Crabby Appleton sitting on his front porch and yelling at the kids to stay off his lawn on you, I would like to lighten things up a bit. With my apologies to the great comedian, Jeff Foxworthy, I am going to borrow his shtick for a series of boomer observations, some of which you might find amusing. Oh, and by the way, Crabby Appleton was a character in the Tom Terrific cartoons which started airing on television in the late 1950s.

If you are a boomer, then you may have never surfed the internet, or if you have you may still be referring to this action as such.

If you are a boomer, you might remember when bad actually meant bad and didn’t mean good. As a boomer, you might remember when sick referred to an illness and not to something considered to be excellent or cool.

If you are a boomer, you might recall looking forward to seeing the new and distinct car models from the Detroit automakers, which changed every year. The car models today are cookie cutter designs that are seemingly static configurations. And speaking of cookie cutter designs, I chuckle when I see photos of newest cell phones when they hit the market. Advertising photos are supposed to entice us into a purchase, but the only noticeable change with the phones is the wall paper background on the display screen. If you grow tired of your surroundings, you don’t bulldoze your house because your sick of the wallpaper in the dining room.

If you are a boomer, you might remember having to get up out of your easy chair, walking across the living room and turning the knob on the television console to change the channel. Also, after changing the channel you might have to adjust the fine tuning knob to actually see the televised programming. It was a difficult life for a wannabe couch potato back then.

If you are a baby boomer, you might remember the Christmas season starting after Thanksgiving and not immediately after Halloween.

If you are a boomer, you might recollect when the retail sales discounts started after Christmas.

As a boomer, you might have been threatened with getting nothing but a chunk of coal in your Christmas stocking, if you misbehaved. I was faced with this dilemma a few times when I was a child, but I tried to look on the bright side, thinking if that did occur I would just take a hammer to the piece of anthracite coal to see if it held a diamond inside. And if I did find a diamond, that would certainly show my parents a thing or two. But, I never did actually end up with coal in my stocking, somehow I always managed to steer clear of the indelible naughty list, wander back into the good graces of my parents and never needed to delve into the science of gemology.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

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