An appreciation of the haunting power of “nothings” — in math, in love, in life, in the universe, as well as in the middle of donuts.

….I remember rushing back to the office on a Sunday because on a note I’d placed in a colleague’s box I had misspelled Rupert Murdoch’s name: “Murdock.” And I once managed to misspell, in an article, not one but both names of the then Standards Editor of The New York Times….

How did a generation that began with such idealism turn so reactionary? How did our revolutionary ethos turn into pseudo-fascism? Weren’t we the generation that marched in the streets, for civil rights and against the war? Weren’t we the generation that burned our draft cards and called for—no, demanded—change? Weren’t we the hippie generation that partied at Woodstock and didn’t trust anyone over thirty?

This is going to agitate a few of you, but I don’t care. I am just sick and tired of not hearing human voices. People don’t talk to each other anymore—they TEXT. We relate with emojis, letters for words and incomplete sentences and phrases that lack emotion. Conversation has been reduced to a “notification beep.”

My grandchildren did not hesitate to tell me which grandma they preferred. (Yes, I asked, even though I know you're not supposed to.)

"The other grandma," Jonah, then 7, answered, right away.

"Yeah," his sister, Sasha, at the time 4, promptly chimed in. "Grandma, in Michigan."

The reason? (Yes, I asked.)

" You buy us nothing," Jonah answered, again without hesitation. "Not one thing."

(The story first appeared in The Record.

_{What’s the best live show you’ve ever seen?}

Answer in the comments on the Waddaya Think page or email us at writingaboutourgeneration.com

Excerpts:

Marty Appel: …The Beatles, Shea Stadium, 1966.  Yes I was there.  It was 35 minutes long…

Lew Borman: …I had seen them on Ed Sullivan and I heard they were going to play in Indianapolis as part of their tour….

Brooks Dareff: …Best surprise (tie): Grateful Dead, unannounced, at the Oregon Country Fair in Veneta, Ore.; Eric Clapton, unannounced, filling in for the recently departed Duane Allman, Nassau Colisuem….

SDWilliams; …Lol! When I saw the title about "Best Live Show" I thought it was about television shows, since we grew up in the era of live TV. So . . . "The Howdy Doody Show," because my brother got to be in the actual Peanut gallery once. Really! Forget seeing the Stones, the Byrds, Springsteen...he met Howdy Doody!

Jeanette McVicker: …Keith Emerson literally spinning in mid-air….

Silvia Gambardella: …The Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore East in the ‘70s, the original Chicago also ‘70s….

Frank Van Riper: Murray, a slight little kid, would always play at our assemblies at PS 90 in the Bronx….

Melinda Moulton: ….A Rod Stewart concert in the Boston Garden. We were tripping on acid…..

Arthur Engoron: …From the first notes, which were the opening to Born on the Bayou….

Mitchell Stephens: …dozens of folding chairs were being hurled at the stage, at Morrison….

Neil Offen: …Bruce Springsteen was playing the Bottom Line….

Does age bring wisdom? Do you have an example.

Write your thoughts in the comments below or email us at WritingAboutYourGeneration.com.

Marty Appel: Age does not bring wisdom unless you have kept up with everything those 30 and under know. The wisdom is confined to your own bracket of age 30 to present.

Arthur Engoron: Yes. I think more deeply. I consider more alternatives. I simplify what can be. I have more self-control. I ask myself, "What's the worst that can happen." If it's bad, I don't do it.

Mitch Stephens: Well, I’m less likely to sweat the little things — like whether I said something dumb at the restaurant last night. And that’s not just because I forget many of the little things, including what I said last night. But reconciling myself with the big things – infirmity and death, in particular – may require some more aging.

Neil Offen: If age really brought wisdom I wouldn’t have ignored the crushing pain in my chest that screamed heart attack….

…Once again I bought only one ticket. It had been my practice, for various early Dylan manifestations, to bring my wife or a kid or a friend. But eventually I realized that the pleasure of their company was outweighed by the annoyance of their complaints – about his unwillingness to play familiar songs in familiar arrangements, about the unprettiness of his voice….

DAY SIX: Get a Dog

…You also will meet other people out walking their dogs and who are equally pissed off that they had to go out in the rain and sleet twice that day for that mutt their kids promised they would be responsible for and take care of. And if you have a snarling, aggressive dog that bites complete strangers, that’s always a good conversation starter that may lead to a lasting friendship or at least a long-running legal case.

A video experiment. A moral enquiry. A walk on the Upper West Side.

….In the late 1970s, when I was living in Paris. I was desperately trying to finish a manuscript that was way past its deadline. After I wrote “the end,” I raced with my box full of 300 typed pages, some marked with WhiteOut, to the local post office. It was a Saturday, and I got there right before the post office closed at noon.

I handed over my box, paid the tariff and walked home.

And as I walked, the thought occurred to me: Did I tell them to send it via airmail?

Because if I didn’t tell them, if they didn’t send it via airmail, the only copy of the manuscript would go by boat and take six or seven weeks to get to my publisher….

This is a complaint – about modern times, on behalf of my music collection.

I’m not often inclined to quote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. But, when it comes to the song “I’m Free” by the Rolling Stones (in particular), to the various iterations of said music collection (in general) and to the experience of my generation (in even-more general), Marx and Engels were onto something. “All that is solid,” as they put it, does indeed “melt into air.”

I mean, it had to have been a mistake. Yes, I’m 77, but I am the guy who completed the Great Saunter, the 32-mile, one-day walk around Manhattan island, three times. I’m the guy who works out regularly at the gym. I’m the guy who wasn’t fat and hadn’t smoked since 1974 and ate healthily, lots of fruits and vegetables, regularly checked my blood pressure, and ran every other day and drank only moderately, didn’t take many medications and finished first in my age group in a recent 5K.

But as the cardiologist said later, you can’t outrun genetics.

After screwing up the world for the last 50 years or so, we baby boomers are clearly no longer lead players in our culture. We have become generic character actors, comic relief, like Chester in “Gunsmoke,” a reference surely lost on people busy streaming “Stranger Things” and “White Lotus.” We boomers rightly sense we have become irrelevant to the central story, unconnected to the moment’s gestalt, which many of us believe may be a digestive disorder.

Is it surprising, then, that we have become the butt of “ok, boomer” jokes? Yes, admittedly, we have ruined the planet, despoiled the oceans and bear much of the responsibility for the success of “Celebrity Apprentice.”

Once upon a time, we were parents, unquestionably wise. Now we are grandparents — and apparently know nothing.

The knowledge we supposedly had gained by raising those kids who now have their own kids, has been replaced by mom groups, sleep consultants, bloggers, Google, gadgets, you name it.

What we did as parents — time-outs, (over)praising our kids, making them drink milk, putting them to sleep on their stomachs, letting them cry themselves to sleep, ordering them to do things they didn't want to do — was all wrong.

How's that for a Mother's Day present for you, grandma?

If we could reverse time as we can the other three dimensions…. Speculations on Einstein, entropy and aging.

In 1977, when I was in my late twenties, my husband and I met an “elderly couple” (he was in his early seventies and she was younger) who impressed us so much that we recently coined a word in their honor. Their last name was Cornyn, and we have paid tribute to them with the word cornyng: when older travelers (that’s now us) are sufficiently adventurous to venture off the beaten path.

I’ve been planning my death for a while now. Decades actually. But then, you’re looking at a guy who has had more imagined terminal illnesses than baseball cards over the span of a lifetime. And I had a lot of baseball cards — that is, until my parents, without asking, decided to throw them all out when I was in college.

Still, there’s important stuff to sort out. Somewhere in the underwear drawer of our Cape Cod home are letters to Kathy, my partner and love (on most days) of 52 years, to my two daughters and to my three grandkids. I write these whenever I fly alone.