(The word “Aging” in this title does not mean that these thoughts are necessarily about aging. Rather, these particular posts are comments that occur to me as I have time to reflect on life, not thoughts about aging, but thoughts that have, I hope, like good wine, aged appropriately.)
First, I want to make clear that I am not a “boomer.” I am among the small number of Americans which demographers barely squeeze into the category of “Silent Generation,” which ends in 1945. Born in 1943, I am a tail-ender to that generation just as my wife Deanna, born in 1946, is a pioneer boomer. We are both, as the as the astrologers say, on the cusp.
Our parents were shaped by the Great Depression, bequeathing to us a certain sense of scarcity (in my family anyway, where “money didn’t grow on trees”) while we were simultaneously growing up in what was to become the most prosperous period in American history, never experienced before or since.
If you think that perhaps this made some of us just a bit “skitzy” at times, you may be correct.
We grew up in a world in which college was cheap and summer jobs to pay for it were easy to find. We took prosperity for granted and some of us (especially we Catholics) who had young religious teachers who took morality and equality seriously, saw no reason why that prosperity should not be shared. So, we supported the Civil Rights movement and the War on Poverty and opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
But as we reached adulthood and mid-life, some of our classmates abandoned their youthful idealism—it takes the energy of youth to maintain the emotional high necessary to be a real change agent after all, and not all of us could manage that. One of my college classmates who had been a radical in our small Catholic college wrote me some twenty years after we graduated (1965) saying “we are all Republicans now.”
Alas, that did happen to many, although not to me. It helped that I was an academic by 1969 and most of my History Department colleagues were liberals, before Republicans (and a few “neo-conservative Democrats) poisoned and tried to destroy the usefulness of that label in the 1990s.
Those of us who raised families from the late 1960s through the 1980s were surprised when some of our children, or nieces and nephews, became political conservatives, even to the point of voting for Donald Trump in 2016.
For some of us, that divided sense of identity may be a legacy of the time in which we were born as “almost-but-not-quite-Baby Boomers.” Whether from nature or nurture, the tension came alive again as we watched our country begin its long slide into economic and political, not to mention climatic, decline by the 1980s.
So here I am, in my eighth decade, having lived the somewhat sheltered life of a History professor in a small town in what folks like to call the “mid-South,” presumably because it is said to be between the Midwest and the South. Don’t be fooled. I live in the South, where a twenty-ton statue of Robert E. Lee is planted on the courthouse lawn.
All things considered, however, the small town of Murray, Kentucky isn’t a bad place to raise a family and then retire. We have lived here now fifty years, in sickness and health, and will probably stay here “till death do us part” from the planet. We can now see it on the horizon (death, that is, not the planet).
We decided to stay in Murray when my teaching career and Deanna’s social work with Head Start ended, although many friends were moving to places like Florida or North Carolina. We stayed here because our son lives here and after our daughters went to the North and West to attend college and get their M.A. degrees, we lured them back to Kentucky.
To the extent that we considered moving, it would have been to North Carolina. Of course, now we are delighted we stayed here, since our friends in Florida and North Carolina are doing the quick-step to avoid COVID. Instead we purchased a thirty-foot motorhome and have spent ten years traveling in the North, East and West.
“Aging in Place,” as one of our TV commercials for a nursing home calls it, isn’t too bad, even though the phrase conjures up for me a picture of a person visibly becoming wrinkled, infirm, and turning to dust right there in the living room as the camera remains running.
This is the first of a series of posts, God willing, that will appear on this blog. “Watch this Space,” as Rachel Maddow says just before one of the two-minute commercials that punctuate her show.
3 replies on “Aging Thoughts: Introduction”
Do NOT like your ‘aging in place’ image. yuck
I came back.
I think it was the late Senator/Governor/baseball Commissioner, Happy Chandler who is credited with saying there are two kinds of people from Kentucky, those who live here and those who are trying to get back. (or something similar).
I grew up in Paducah, KY, the son of Son. My father, a printer for the Paducah Sun- Democrat, was “Son Usher” ( His given name was William). Later when dad was very ill, my mother LaVerne was hired by the Sun-Democrat as proofreader. We were middle class in a middle class neighborhood in a boom growth time for Paducah. Just after WW11, The Atomic Plant was being constructed and kids were jammed in schools with no space and many ill qualified and retread teachers.
I finished a degree at Murray State after two years at Paducah Junior College (the college used the annex of Broadway Methodist Church as its classroom building).
I eventually went to graduate school to study the Psychological Foundations of Education at the University of Florida in Gainesville. I had married a nurse, Mary, while teaching in Owensboro, KY and she had enough income as a nurse to see us through financially. So I did a Master’s degree at UF and stayed right there to complete a doctorate. When my degree was finished we moved to Greeley, Colorado, to my first University job, the University of Northern Colorado (at the time, 1965, it was Colorado State College). I spent 12 years there in the department of Psychology, Counseling and Guidance.
Mary and I returned to Kentucky in 1977. My mother was killed in a auto accident, my grandfather was in a bad way, Mary’s mother and father had mounting health problems–we needed to be around we thought. Our daughter, Letitia, was 8 years old ( little did she know what she was in for with the move!) We eventually moved to a farmhouse in Marshall County on my grandparents’ old farm.
I inquired at Murray State, not having any idea what was happening, just wondering if there might be a position for a Full Professor of educational psychology (or something). To make an already too long story shorter, I was hired and stayed until full retirement in 2000.
I had grown up and left Kentucky with a middle class, southern-tinged, Baptist church, public school background (but curiously with a liberal slant) and returned as a staunch liberal after years (1960s-1970s) of civil rights agitation, social upheaval, folk music, rock music, protests, demonstrations, “consciousness-altering” drugs, education reform movements, and the awful Vietnam war. In Colorado I had been involved in a strong, viable and highly respected Faculty Senate–when I came to Murray the campus was struggling to mount any kind of real Faculty Senate.. It was new and formed mainly as bitter opposition to the policies of the current President who had hired me–Constantine Curris. Coming in from the outside I had no inkling what I was getting into when it came to campus politics. I got involved and was never completely clear on the sources of rancor.
So I came back and I stayed but I certainly only barely survived politically. Much of it is still a mystery to me, but many of my colleagues were cordial and some were close; and I was happy for the most part with my work with students. But, I missed having deeper contact with professors of psychology and counseling, I missed working with doctoral students and departmental divisions among faculty were somehow much deeper than I had experienced in Colorado. All in all the years were fulfilling and productive.
So much for The House of Usher. Still standing.
Dick, thanks for your story. I can hear in it some echos of my own, although I was clearly more of an outsider than you, having grown up in Iowa. I share your comment about political discomfort during my years at MSU, but–after trying and failing to get a job elsewhere–we found reasons to stay and raise our family. All in all, probably a good decision, but then, as we age, we are more likely to see our past decisions as good, right. It is a psychological defense mechanism!