Tangled Up in ME

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It's finally happening. In spite of the plastic surgery, the Viagra, the three-wheeled motorcycles -- the baby boomers are feeling old. As the Wonder Years fade to the Blunder Years, they're gazing deeply into the unflattering mirror. They're seeing wrinkles and gray hair. And they're saying, 'Hey, we're elders! Far out! Let's mentor someone!'

Forgive me if I don't camp overnight for tickets to that show.

Isn't it enough that we'll be the underpaid and uninsured chumps who'll wheel them to the 'bongo room' at the assisted-living facility? Do we have to listen to them drone on about their acid-drenched weekend at Woodstock, too?

This is the generation that exhorted us to never trust anyone older than 30 -- then grew up and proved the point by ushering in the long nightmare of social conservatism and permanent war that is our current reality. They promised a revolution and boy did they deliver. Safety net: shredded. Social Security: squandered. Liberalism: perished. Fairness: forgotten. Great Society: whatever. Do I even need to mention climate change? AIDS? The Monkees? So now they want to pass on their wisdom to the rest of us. Uh-huh.

OK, OK. I know I'm trading in gross generalizations here. I mean, some of my best friends are baby boomers. In fact, one of them just informed me that all alternative rock can be traced to Rubber Soul. (Really? Even Motorhead?)

I'm actually pretty invested in the notion of mentorship; I've always had a soft spot for geezers. I'm the afterthought child of pre-boomer parents, so I spent most of my childhood with a couple of taciturn members of the 'Silent Generation.' When they and their peers finally lurched out of their collective coma and began talking about the past, it was riveting.

My mother told me about her father's struggles to find a job during the Great Depression, and about the hobos who came to the back door to beg for food. She spoke about her work as a Dorothy Day-style Catholic, and how the dawn of World War II, while it ended the Depression, plunged us into conservatism after a long and hard-won battle over fairness and class consciousness. My dad told stories of stumbling into anti-aircraft nests hidden in the woods in Central Park, and about the rumors that Japanese subs were in the harbor off the coast of Long Island. He told me about his search for college, and how he was turned down by one school after another because they'd filled their quota of Jews.

These stories had value because they were remote from my experience and therefore became a measure of it. They opened up the history of my country and my people like a knife opens a vein. It's hard not to roll my eyes at the notion of boomers as mentors because their history is so pervasive. Is there a three-minute period of their collective experience that hasn't been made into an hour-long VH1 documentary? I have my own acid-drenched weekends to (blearily) recall, thank you very much.

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