My first car, a standard model Chevy Nova—manual transmission, air conditioning, and AM radio—was never the jazziest car, but it got me to school or helped me escape my parents’ house on weekends. Cruising the streets in endless loops around town on Saturday nights wasn’t total freedom, but it was the next best thing.

AM radio was okay for the fifteen-minute drive to school. Okay wasn’t cool for riding the streets. During the late Seventies, I lived in a small Mississippi town, and my friends and I relied on Memphis radio stations for our music. Top 40 tunes fizzed in the static of AM airwaves. I wanted FM, but new stereos were expensive. With an Audiovox FM converter from Western Auto, I had the next best thing to hear the cleaner sounds of FM’s experimental, frenetic, rebellious, and sometimes just plain weird soundtrack. My dreams and ambitions found voice in rock-n-roll poetry.

Installed under the dash, the converter was simple to operate: turn your AM dial to 1400, push the On button on the right and turn the left knob for your stations. Multi-taskers could dial and drive at the same time.

Signal strength produced occasional fade-outs. When one station’s signal waged combat with another, I eased off the accelerator, giving the intruding signal time to identify itself, hoping I had entered a zone of geographic and atmospheric perfection to grab the signal from the rock station in Chicago. Memphis FM stations played plenty of great music, but because of the distance its signal traveled, this one Chicago station became the Holy Grail of rock stations. My friends and I never caught it every night. We never caught it in one specific area. We searched every street, hoping the night sky was clear for its signal to shoot into the atmosphere and capture our radios. For a fleeting moment Mick Jagger stormed the stage and strutted through the static until Springsteen or Meatloaf regained the mic in Memphis. We longed to hear one song in its entirety. If we lost the signal and circled back, chances were it was gone.

We loved those Memphis stations, but we listened to them every day. Chicago’s signal brought hopes of hearing something different, something out of the ordinary, not just the usual songs. So, we drove the streets, searching for the signal from that Chicago station in the land beyond our reach that we were sure played music no one else in town listened to.

Isn’t that the stuff of rock-n-roll dreams?

Dale Davis retired from teaching and writes from Mississippi.

I quit pretending to sleep and got up about 4 o’clock one morning. Thinking to snack and then to write, I turned on the bright dining room light. Outside, my rooster saw the gleam shining through two newly installed chicken house windows and tried to awaken the sleepyhead hens beside him.

He sent long farewells to the black of night and welcomed the absentee sun, sounding like his voice box was on autopilot, and with each call directly linked to the one before it for the rest of the wearisome night.

I didn’t get a lick of writing done and finally turned out all the lights and played Tetris on my phone. When I finally went to bed, I turned on a noisy sound machine and even donned a headset.

I still sought sleep as the sky grew paler and Ricky Ricardo, my charming and very handsome rooster, was still crowing and I was trying to ignore him and reminded myself what a sweet rooster he is and that he is good for our farm.

But, oh, the insanity of his rhythmic, still-audible crowing. And I wondered if I ought to give him a new name, perhaps something like, Thanksgiving Dinner. But, no, my grown kids love Ricky and probably wouldn’t forgive me.

Note to self: Hang room-darkening window shades in the chicken house for my sake as well as for my sweet little red hens.

Carol Rice can’t get to sleep.

Boomers once gave their kids the sex talk. Now it’s time for them to speak frankly about dying.

Baby boomers who have children may remember with fondness or embarrassment having the “sex talk” with their offspring. They were more embarrassed than you were, but you got through it and life moved on.

Speaking of life, the roles may be reversed now. Well, not the roles actually. More like the final assignments. It might be time for boomers to let their children know exactly what they have in mind for the final disposition. That is, what do you want your kids to with you when you’re gone. So that would be the “death talk” as opposed to the “sex talk.”

It’s time to recognize the next boom for the baby boomers, and that would be the illness, dependency and death boom, and that is NOT in the distant future. It’s a good time to communicate with the offspring/caretakers exactly how you want to go out of this world.

Just like the sex talk, it should be the time for candor as opposed to squirming. Sit the kids/caretakers down, take a big breath and tell them straight up what to do if/when you slide into dementia and how you want to be buried, cremated or rebooted. Do you have a plot for the time when you’ve lost the plot? If you’re going the ecologically sound cremation route, where do you want the ashes flung?

Do you know what a DNR is? It stands for Do Not Resuscitate and if you are near death’s door in a hospital, your near and dears ought to know that is the acronym you prefer. Gen Xers and Millennials have enough aggro in their lives right now, so it would be so kind of boomers to spell out exactly what we want in sickness and in death.

Thinking about the unthinkable kind of sucks. Leaving your offspring or designated caretakers in the dark about what to do when you go dark sucks even more. It’s time to get over it and do what baby boomers have always done – marched to a different drum. Let everyone know that when the “beat doesn’t go on,” here’s the plan. As soldiers going into battle were told, “goodbye and good luck.”

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

If you do any sort of email blasts and/or marketing, you are most likely getting inundated with entreaties to use A.I. to create your message. Really. Really?? How does that work? Does A.I. know what I want to say? Will A.I. read my mind? Can A.I. write an essay or fiction that somehow represents what is in my brain?

Here’s some samples of what A.I. promises:

Constant Contact’s new AI Content Generator leverages artificial intelligence to automate the copy drafting process for marketing campaigns.
Get instant ideas, create emails and social posts in seconds, and have all your messages written for you.

Beat writer’s block for good.  Plug in a few words and get fully written content — all with the tone you want.

I’m tempted to take them up on it just to see what an A.I. robot would come up with, but the downside is it could be brilliant, albeit way off topic. So just for the hell of it, I asked ChatGPT to give me a blog post about the trials of being a baby boomer. Result? Decent. It combed the internet and discussed how we’ve gone from stability to uncertainty and struggle to keep up with relentless technology as well as ageism in the workplace.

So yes, by absorbing anything ever written about baby boomers, it produced a darn good summary of the challenges we face. By the way, it did it in about 20 seconds which was equally impressive.

But – a huge caveat here – it wasn’t what I was thinking. It wasn’t my viewpoint. It wasn’t the work of my brain. It was a mechanized harvest of what thousands of people on the internet and elsewhere had written on the topic. And don’t forget, some of us consider much of this harvesting to be theft. If you create any type of art, you must already be aware that A.I. may steal it.

If that wasn’t sad enough for me, I’m writing this on the same day that the New York Times ran an op-ed about the suicidal young woman who used a ChatGPT A.I. therapist called Harry. It did not end well.

A.I. most likely has a brilliant future ahead, but it will be of no use to me when it comes to producing BoomSpeak, writing original content, or featuring other baby boomer authors. We may have to add a line to our submission requirements stating that A.I. produced work cannot and will not be accepted.

As Walter Cronkite used to say, “And that’s the way it is.”

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

Happy families are all alike. – Leo Tolstoy

The framed cross-stitch on Granny’s kitchen wall finally caught my eye after I learned to read. Like her pancakes with yogurt, her peach-chicken tacos and her pork chops with kale, the motto filled me with comfort. We were a happy family, weren’t we? Granny, Aunt Annie and me. I envisioned other kitchens like ours, the meals served with a warm, laconic “There you go, precious,” and my day’s chores listed for my agreement.

When I got to be ten, though, I’d been in other kitchens, some crusted with baked-on crud, others fancier but with anger in the air and stinky beer cans in the wastebaskets. Most had more than one kid – and either a mom or a mother and dad. I asked Granny, were other families unhappy because they were not like us? She smiled. “What the man said, sweetheart,” she said, patting my head.

In high school I discovered who Tolstoy was, a Russian author who portrayed clashing armies and mixed-up lovers in brick-sized novels. I also learned that in a trick called irony, writers sometimes put words together meaning the opposite of what they said. Or just getting you to think. We obviously didn’t have a happy family, with my Mom in prison for stealing and Uncle Bill abandoning all of us. We would have been giddy with togetherness had those two come back, right? “Life is complicated, dear,” Granny replied, giving me a side-eye.

Years later, when Granny went into hospice and I visited her empty kitchen, shadowy with spiderwebs, I examined the now-grayed lavender, pink and yellow needlepoint, so precise and meticulous. Being tall enough now to reach it, I unhooked it from the wall and took it to Granny’s bedside with a litany of grown-up questions. She silenced them when her eyes fluttered open like paper lifted by a breeze. “Hello, love,” she whispered. That was all she could manage.

Marcia Yudkin publishes the weekly substack, Introvert Upthink. (https://www.introvertupthink.com).