Boomer Randomness

The first 8 notes of The Dance. The first six notes of Take Five. The first four notes of Friends In Low Places or Oye Como Va. The first three notes of Smoke On the Water. The first chord of Hard Day’s Night. Did you hear those songs in your head as you read the descriptions of the first notes of each? Do the opening moments any of those iconic songs instantly take you back to a moment in your life as fast as Elizabeth Montgomery’s nose scrunch in Bewitched? Music is a powerful thing. Notes, chords and lyrics tap into our emotions. A song can be a time machine, transporting you back to a concert, a first date, a wedding, a prom. Music might lead to laughing, crying or dancing. Your favorite songs can wrap around you like a warm blanket, providing a little security during the uncertainty of what’s going on right now. A song you hate can cut you like a knife. “Happy Birthday” may be the first song many of us hear. Songs our parents liked when we were kids instantly take us bac...

Fifty years ago? Yesterday, the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, we woke up to the cleanest air in, well, fifty years. It’s sad that the COVID19 has sequestered most of us, but clean air is a positive byproduct. Millions of cars are not on the roads and the air is cleaner than it’s been in decades, maybe centuries. Residents of some cities are able to see distant natural landmarks for the first time in their lives. An example: the Himalayas are visible from New Delhi. Los Angeles residents can see sky, mountains and buildings from miles away. Our country and our planet have come a long way in fifty years. Cars and manufacturing plants are more fuel efficient and less polluting. Recycling is more the rule than the exception. Yet we have so much further to go. Global warming is real and the earth’s temperature is rising, leading to sea level rises and increasingly severe weather conditions, among other things. Big businesses with short-sighted goals, enabled by an ignorant, hear...

I’m generally a home body, so being confined to my apartment because of COVID19 isn’t much of an issue for me. On the surface. Staying home for days at a time is fine when it’s a choice.  Not so fine when it’s a mandate. I understand the mandate and mostly agree with it. But it is starting to ware on me and we’re only four weeks in. I miss the option of people contact. Texting, emailing, phoning and FaceTiming are all methods of contact I am grateful we have, but I miss in person contact. Shaking hands and hugging. Seeing the facial nuances of conversation that are harder to see clearly in Zoom. Working from home is an interesting phenomenon. I’ve been slowly preparing for eventually working partly from home. I never, however, pictured a mandatory work from home scenario. I quickly discovered I wasn’t as prepared as I thought. And I hadn’t envisioned two of us working from home, a 2-bedroom apartment. Things have been pretty smooth, so far, but my space in this place...

If you’re used to going to work every day and now you’re working from home, do you lose track of what day it is? I thought that the day I started writing this was a Tuesday. Turns out it was a Wednesday. I laughed at the jokes about losing track of the day of the week, thinking that only happens to other people, but now the joke is on me. So why does this happen? My observation (without any actual research, because I just don’t feel like it) is that we lose our usual daily and hourly cues. Our normal work week pattern has a certain rhythm... work day start and end times, commute times, working out, chores, etc. Our work day might also have patterns, like scheduled meetings, project timelines, lunch. Doing our job from home should have at least a few similar patterns, like meetings (virtual) and lunch. The rhythm of the day, however, is different when your entire commute is from the kitchen to the den. No traffic, no passing scenery, no red lights. Instead of a few miles e...

The cool, foggy March morning dissolved into a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon.   Normally that would have been a perfect day to sip wine with friends outdoors at a neighborhood bar, but nothing was normal Sunday or any day for the past few weeks. This coronavirus pandemic has temporarily and radically changed our lives.   I hope it’s temporary.   Stay-at-home orders, social distancing, washing hands fifty times a day, navigating medical advice, enduring presidential misinformation, experiencing stress, fear, anxiety … that’s living in the USA in the spring of 2020. I am usually positive, optimistic ... half full not half empty … realistic but hopeful. My emotional state right now, however, is cool and foggy like the start of last Sunday.   My home is warm, inviting, mildly cluttered and a perfect reflection of the two of us.   I love being here. But except for twenty minutes here and there, I’ve been in my home for two weeks.   And this is only the ...

So I have unintentionally chosen this crazy Coronavirus panic month to start blogging again. I’ve written or started many blog posts since last summer, but I have been so busy with other things that I haven’t actually posted anything. The fear, anxiety and uncertainty surrounding this pandemic reminds me of 9/11, but this is much different. In many ways, this is scarier than 9/11, even scarier than growing up a couple hundred miles from Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s. This ‘attack’ is widespread, the ‘enemy’ is invisible, the ‘war’ isn’t between countries. Some people close to me are more freaked out than I am now, but my relative calmness is just me being me. My trouble sleeping for the past few days tells me I’m internalizing my fears, trying to be the calm on the storm. I am not as calm as I appear. As of the moment I am writing this, some states are mandating that people stay at home to help reduce the spread of the rapidly contagious COVID-19. ...

Fifty always seemed like a huge, distant number when referring to age. Now that that number has been in my rear view mirror for more than ten years, fifty still seems huge. Only now, it is a distant digit referring to events from my youth.  The OMG moment for many Boomers is verbalized with “that happened FIFTY years ago?” The youngest Boomers are now 55 years old, so they/you were 5 in 1969. They/you probably don’t remember much from that year. But the oldest Boomers were 23, just really starting a life and maybe a family. Your memories from fifty years ago are probably quite vivid. Or hazy, depending on your recreational habits at that time.  I am between those two mileposts, so my memories of 1969 are clear. But I still can’t believe that was fifty years ago.  So what happened in 1969? Without doing any of my usual research for this blog, I can tell you from memory that two very significant historical events happened that year: Woodstock and the m...