Tony Kubek, Gil McDougald, Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Bill Skowron, Elston Howard, Bobby Richardson.

It’s the lineup of the 1960 Yankees. I still remember it now. I worshipped it then.

Growing up, particularly in the Bronx, baseball was my religion (so much better than bar mitzvah lessons). I lived and died with the Yankees, and—although it may seem contradictory—a few years later, a little bit with the Mets, too….

On most days, I’m more likely to smile a lot than not. I’m pretty upbeat by nature. Even so, getting older has its downsides. And while grandparents’ quirks can be kind of funny to the younger generation, they’re not all that much fun for us.

Take my mom. When my kids were a teen and middle schooler, respectively, they’d bite their lip to keep from laughing when a discreet honk or two would emanate from their Grammy’s end of the dinner table. My mom, in her full dignity, acted as though absolutely nothing had happened. The girls thought it was hilarious.

Well, I’m now 75 and personally familiar with this….

(Photo, by Devon Lanson-Alleyne, shows a granite memorial stone for the author’s parents.)

I hate my husband. I hate my husband so much that sometimes murder comes to mind. I hate him so much that, struggling to repress those murderous thoughts, I stew. Oh, how I stew.

Or I dream of fleeing—anywhere. Please, please. I want out. Out of this marriage. Out of this relationship. Out of this life with him, this man that I barely recognize 41 years after I fell for him at the (now-I-know-too-well-how-tender) age of 21.

Who is he, this man sitting across the table from me? He doesn't even look like the man I gave my heart to four decades ago. That man has vanished. In his place is a thin, bald man with white whiskers who insists, in a most irritating way, that it is I who has changed, I who can and do annoy the hell out of him….

(includes a short video)

When I look in the mirror I see me. I recognize the familiar oval shape of my face; my Dad’s big dark brown eyes (alas, along with his characteristic deep circles beneath); my mother’s mouth; my fairly nondescript nose, the bump visible only in profile; my family’s pale but slightly olive-tone skin. And I recognize my medium-brown hair.

My parents both had jet black hair, but my sisters and I all got very dark brown. When I started coloring my hair in my mid-fifties, I initially went with my natural dark brown. I’ve chosen to go a bit lighter through the years. Still, the overall look in the mirror is dark brown.

One by one, most of my women friends and my older sister have decided to let their hair go gray in their sixties and seventies. Philosophically, I am in complete agreement….

Our generation, way back when, played a major role in spreading some lovely, meaningful and transformative ideas:

 peace, freedom, equality, liberation, diversity, toleration, choice, nonviolence, sexual openness, mind-altering drugs, protecting the environment, nonconformism, lifestyle experimentation, meditation, gender freedom, the transformative power of technology and the importance of ecstatic experience.

Quite a list, no? And behind them all, maybe, an attempt to move beyond a kind of sober, constricted, work-a-day—straight—way of dressing, way of being, way of thinking.

  Where did these ideas come from?

What did you look like in the 1960s or 1970s?

Send a photo and, if you want, some background on it….to WritingAboutOurGeneration.com

Neil Offen: The above photo was taken outside on the street where I lived, in Manhattan in about 1973 or ‘74. In my defense, it was a pretty windy day and that made the hair look longer and more disheveled than it usually was (which was pretty long and pretty disheveled). It was the back cover photo for a book I had just written. Years later, when our then-teenage daughter would bring friends over to our house, she would find the book so the friends, who only knew me as a well-groomed, kind-of-doting dad, could see the photo. And then they would squeal, “your dad was a hippie!”

The picture above the story “Far Out: The Big Ideas Behind The Short Moment Of The Hippies” above is from Mitch Stephens’ NYC taxi license, circa 1969.

Click for more photos and stories

Six weeks ago, I came down with an upper respiratory illness—acute bronchitis. The coughing was uncontrollable, rib breaking powerful. My lungs felt like they were going to explode, and I had to challenge myself to get air. I lost my sense of smell and taste and dropped eight pounds from my already lean body.

      I have always been an athlete, and I work out daily. A few months ago, I was bragging to my husband, Rick, that “I have never felt stronger in my life,” and at 74 that is quite an acccomplishment.

      But in an instant, this respiratory virus clawed at my lungs, threw me to the ground and placed its fiery knee on my throat….

We were talking, a few of us, at a recent photo gallery reception when my wife walked over and joined the conversation. I would, of course, have introduced her to the woman I was speaking with except that, of course, I had no idea of the name of the woman I was speaking with.

I couldn’t think of her name despite the fact that I knew I used to work with her. I had no idea of her name although apparently she knew my name quite well, knew me quite well, easily recalling details of our long relationship.

So, naturally, I spent the next ten minutes or so finding ways to avoid introducing my wife to … whatever her name was. And this was not the first time something like this had happened.

Monday:  

Oh Freedom!

You wake up and begin reading—leisurely!—what passes, in the third decade of the 21st century, for a newspaper: that Krugman-plus-Spelling Bee digital amalgam much talked about by your already retired friends: Hmm … the government is worrying now about “forever chemicals”? Alright, I now have time to take the time to find out what the hell these “forever chemicals” are!

Drink your coffee. Damn, savor your coffee. And revel in the absence of that feeling that has been with you since they started assigning homework in second grade: that feeling that there is something you have to do that you do not want to do.

It’s gone….

I’ve been given a great gift, and now I’m trying to figure out how to unwrap it.

I met with the cardiologist the other day, exactly three months after I had an almost-fatal heart attack. He told me, again, how very close I had come to not making it. And he told me as well that if I had gotten to the ER even five minutes later, I probably wouldn’t have made it. And then he added, maybe for the first time, or maybe it was the first time I really listened, that the doctors who feverishly worked on me after I got to the ER thought at several instances I wasn’t going to make it.  

But then, in a reasonably quick segue, the cardiologist began telling me how very good I am doing now, 90 days out….

Click here for video

One of several experiments in “idea videos” by Mitchell Stephens on this site. See also a video of ideas in a very different style by Eiko Otake, John R. Killacky, and Brian Stevenson.

It has, I am well aware, a lousy reputation.

      It is not just that the last minute tends to be frantic; it’s that it often gives birth to the half-assed, if not the wholly inadequate.

      And, yes, I also realize that people my age—a particularly advanced one, as ages go—are supposed to have learned, if nothing else, that putting off something, something unpleasant, has a way of poisoning the entire period of procrastination with that anticipated unpleasantness.

      So—on this day, April 15, Tax Day—I want to announce…that….

Judy and I have been with our internist Mitch for more than 30 years—hell, we shot all three of his sons’ bar mitzvahs—and Mitch and his wife Susan now are grandparents.

Still, it came as a shock a few weeks ago, after Judy and I each had had our annual physicals, to hear Mitch say he was going to retire in the fall.

Certainly, he was entitled. He is about to turn 70 (though he’ll always be a kid to us) and would be leaving (one assumes comfortably) the thriving multi-physician practice that he and his partners had built on K Street in downtown Washington.

“What are you going to do now?” Judy asked….

Twenty-eight years ago, I had spinal cord surgery to remove a tumor at C2 that left me with Brown Séquard syndrome. My right side has no sense of touch or temperature. My left lost proprioception. I have no kinesthetic connection to the ground. 

After six weeks in the hospital, I was sent home in a wheelchair….

We all know we should get enough sleep. But as we get older, we sleep less and less and frequently sleep badly.

And chronic sleep deprivation can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes, dementia and staying awake at night worrying about chronic sleep deprivation. Lack of adequate sleep can contribute to increased risk of heart disease and serial yawning during presentations on exchange-traded funds by your financial advisor.

(photo by Rehina Sultanova, Unsplash)

This website would like to officially apologize for its recent foray into the overtly up-to-the-minute, the decidedly topical. Our stories on the death of the writer John Barth, the Republican presidential candidate and the solar eclipse were, we insist, just momentary lapses from our traditional focus on existential kvetching about being, somehow, old. We will now return to our regular diet (Mediterranean, low in sodium, high in Omega-3s), but cannot promise that we may not again stumble into the annoyingly contemporary.

(photo © Frank Van Riper)

Well, we drove from the outskirts of New York City, to Ithaca, New York, and then further north to get under the total eclipse, then northeast to a town called Old Forge, New York. That added up to about seven hours of driving.

Old Forge had become our destination that morning because it was possible to read the various weather forecasts, which uniformly foretold clouds, as allowing that there just might be a break in those clouds in the neighborhood of Old Forge in the neighborhood of 3 p.m. on Eclipse Day.

And there was indeed some blue in the sky when we arrived….

(photo by Joshua Rosenheim)

I have too many books.

They fill a long wall in the family room and are jammed into available corners of the living room. They dominate two sides of the office, a number of shelves and populate bookcases all over the house, including on the landing between the sets of stairs. They are stuck in nooks and crannies wherever we have found a nook or a cranny.

These are, of course, real books, not flickering lights on a technologic marvel where you can adjust the font and the brightness. They are not words you hear from a disembodied voice while doing the long drive to the beach. These are tangible books, where you can feel the pages as you turn them….

As a professional couple, raising two daughters, my wife and I did little in the way of volunteer work. At the end of each year, we gave a few thousand dollars in charitable contributions to the needy and less fortunate, a way of lowering our taxes a little and making us feel a bit more generous.

One year in my 60s, I joined members of my chorus in singing with homeless women at a Boston lunch place for them. And a couple of times long ago we served the homeless on Thanksgiving with our younger daughter.

But that was about it. Volunteering was not a significant part of our lives.

Now, two of my favorite hours each week are spent at the Falmouth Service Center, a remarkable support program on Cape Cod for those in need.

With the death of the novelist John Barth, the 20th century—the century in which I spent the bulk of my life—experienced one of its numerous belated endings.

In his review of Barth’s “Giles Goat Boy,” written way back in 1966, New York Times book critic Eliot Fremont-Smith noted the book’s cold-war critiques and its allusions to Joyce, Nabokov and the Beatles, among others. And Barth’s fiction or “metafiction”—which moved, in his heyday, from a modernist bleakness to post-modern razzamatazz—was as buffeted by that century’s larger literary currents as anyone’s. John Barth was peddling prime, grade-A 20th century.

I doubt I ever enjoyed a novel as much as I did “Giles Goat Boy” upon its appearance about two-thirds of the way through that century…..