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The Real Deal

June 8, 2025 By admin

babies in cribsI never stopped to think about it, but apparently the baby boomer generation has been labeled as more “authentic” in how we relate to our world.

Really? Yes, we are more real. Okay, I can think of worse things that we’ve been labeled but how did psychologists come to this conclusion?

First off, we grew up with fewer distractions. No social media, no digital anything really. Without all that chatter we had to focus on real interactions. That won’t be the last time you see the word real. We listened to each other and had to communicate face-to-face.

Next, we grew up without Google. That meant we had to look things up and learned a lot of things by trial and error. So add self-reliance to how we are more authentic.

We also grew up with a lot more face to face contacts than later generations. That was how we played and socialized and it helped us entertain ourselves.

We never had to experience the performance pressure that later generations felt. The absence of social media meant we could figure out who we were and who we wanted to be without excessive external pressures.

Another major factor in our world view were the major societal changes that affected our maturation. Womens’ liberation, the civil rights movement, and the war in Vietnam all had an impact on our world view. These events helped us clarify our values and world view.

In the absence of social media, we were able to develop a sense of self that didn’t rely on some curated views. We modeled ourselves on people we knew and admired in real life. It helped us remain true to ourselves and gave us a sense of security.

There wasn’t much oversharing as we grew up. We kept a lot more of our lives private than generations do now. We were a lot more measured when it came to deciding what we would share and what would remain private.

The last factor cited for boomer authenticity is trust. We met and encountered people for many years and really got to know them. Because we stayed in the same neighborhoods or with the same company/organization, the bonds formed could run very deep.

Ultimately, many boomers sense that they are more authentic because we are less filtered – less influenced by digital distractions. Boomers can’t claim to be the most authentic generation, but being nurtured in a world without social media and digital diversions certainly helped. As someone observed, the lesson we can take from the way we grew up is that being genuine means being present.

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.

Filed Under: ESSAY

Seen Enough??

June 8, 2025 By admin

Zoom meeting participants and Zoom iconOur book group used to gather once a month for discussion followed by dinner and wine. But of course, aging has pushed us to find technological alternatives: aka ZOOM and dinner on our own. Turns out, there’s nothing wrong with ZOOM. It just that we see too little and too much.

Too much—For example, if one of us has a laptop pointed up, we see nostrils, huge looming nostrils, as if we were at the dentist. Unhappy association. Also, we forget that we’re not on a telephone and others can watch us primping and puckering as we study our image on the screen like it was a mirror. And cats can scooch up to stare in the screen. Not to mention someone’s partner whisking by with a bath towel around her head. TMI…Too Much Information.

Too little—we only see each other’s faces but not our feet. Feet can tell a lot. They’re like a ‘tell’ to a serious poker player. I learned that as a kid sleeping on a mat in the dining room of our tiny house. I could lie there and watch the feet of our neighbors as they played cards in the kitchen. I could tell who had a good hand. Who was going to fold. Who was bluffing. And now, when our group gets together, sitting in each other’s living rooms, I’m back in my childhood home, reading the crowd.

Pete’s feet line up like a perfectly attentive student at his desk but his fingers are drumming on his knees…bored. When Mary Lou shuffles her feet back and forth, you can tell she is all excited and can’t wait to jump in with a new-old idea we’ve all heard before. Matt crosses his feet at the ankles. Eyes closed, he folds his arms on his chests a pose he might have learned in his yoga class. His right foot gives him away. The closer we get to dinner, the more his foot waggles in anticipation of his urge to dig in. Janet wears slacks. Just as well, because it would look bad if she wore a dress. As a discussion drones on, she invariably drifts off, her eyes stay open but her knees flop apart in complete relaxation.

So, yeah, it’s good to see our buddies online. Say hi and exchange ideas. ZOOM’s better than nothing. But there’s so much more to notice and share in person.

Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/

Filed Under: ESSAY

Up The Down Staircase

June 8, 2025 By admin

long staircaseI pile up clothes, shoes, mail, jewelry, bits of paper with reminders. I bring a water bottle and a snack and pack everything in my tote. I’m not going on a road trip, I’m just going upstairs. When you age out of multi-level living, this is how you travel. Every time you head for the basement or go upstairs to the bedroom, it’s a trip. I keep a canvas tote on the steps and fill it during the course of the day so when I do make that climb, I won’t forget anything and only have to do it once.

When I get upstairs, I’m unpacking my tote, putting things away, and organizing. Then I go from room to room gathering things I need to bring downstairs, and I refill my tote. Don’t want to forget anything because my knees can’t deal with more than one trip.

Same with the basement. I check the kitchen for low stock on things I’ll need — our backup pantry is in the basement. For this I have a bigger tote, which makes me wish I had a bell boy to carry it, especially on days I’m maneuvering the laundry hamper up the steps, too.

Multi-level living when you’re on the road to old age is a trip.

If I forget to take the clean clothes out of the dryer, I make do with what’s around on the first floor when I get out of the shower. Though I may look like I grabbed anything within reach to run from a burning building, I’m just trying to cover my nakedness to watch an hour or so of TV before making the trip upstairs for bed. I need my rest to arm myself for the next day’s ups and downs.

I wonder if an architect could design a house that works like a Lazy Susan. I stay put, and when I need something, I slide the wall, and the rooms move to bring my need within reach. Not only would I not have to climb steps, but I’d never even have to leave the chair. I haven’t seen anything like this yet. You’re welcome, HGTV.

So, for the time being, I’ll keep my tote bags handy, will look like a fabric collage when I get out of the shower, and switch my menu rather than make a trip downstairs if I’m out of olive oil.

Maureen Mancini Amaturo lives in Rye, NY

Filed Under: ESSAY

Boomers to the Rescue

May 25, 2025 By admin

accessory dwelling unitGuess what? We can solve the housing crisis. Seriously. Millions of single-family homes (and boomers own most of them) are underused and on spacious lots. If they were retrofitted they could be converted into “roommate houses” and accommodate backyard cottages.

A developer in Dallas converted his 2,400 square foot home into four studio apartments, each with an outside entrance. Each has connecting doors to the rest of the house that remain unused. He didn’t do it for the income. His purpose was to allow him to claim he lives in a single-family home and is in accordance with local zoning. He calls it a suburban retrofit.

America needs between four and eight million more homes. Meeting that need by building new homes and apartment complexes is too slow and ponderous. But we have 145 million homes that already exist and two-thirds of them are single-family. The loophole then, is to allow the single-family homes to become multifamily.

It’s not clear how many of these single-family homes are owned and occupied by baby boomers, but if they started renting out their empty rooms – voila – big problem solved. Many boomers are already living with one or more of their offspring who are unable to buy homes of their own. How much difference would it make to take in boarders the way people did post-depression?

I’m looking at you baby boomer living in 3,000 sf 4-bedroom house. Why not take in one or more renters? The space is going unused and the extra income can go a long way to reducing your property tax burden. Co-habitation a little to crowded for you? At least consider an accessory dwelling unit out back. More and more communities are altering zoning to accommodate this trend.

Boomers have often been tagged with the bad rap of being selfish, but if we opened up our homes to renters, it might prove to everyone that we can be part of the solution rather than the problem. Just saying.

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.

Filed Under: ESSAY

Para-Crustaceans

May 25, 2025 By admin

There was a creek behind our house. Looking back, it was more of a drainage ditch that has since been covered in cement and turned into a culvert. But for us, it was a natural wonder. This was not a group of kids who got to visit Yellowstone or Glacier National Park each summer! It was a place to ice skate and play a very linear form of ice hockey in the winter, a place to build tree forts along the banks, and a place to dream of starting adventures that would lead to faraway places.

In that creek lived many wonderful creatures. Among them, and probably largely limited to only these, were snakes and crabs. I really don’t know if they were officially crabs, but they had pincers, and that’s what we called them. A lot of people near the Texas Gulf Coast where I live now eat creatures that look a lot like these did. This is probably not only a better use for them than described below but may, in fact, even be more humane.

About the same time that we were in the early stages of experimenting with launching ourselves off structures in attempts to parachute to the earth, we were also using the handkerchiefs our moms forced us to carry in our pockets as parachutes for smaller, non-human items, like toy lead soldiers we made in our basements. In retrospect, this creative work with lead may explain some of our behavior. These parachutes were very simple to construct. The handkerchief would have light strings tied to each corner, and then the lead toy soldier would be fastened to the free end of each of the four strings. The strings would be wrapped loosely around the toy and the handkerchief, and the whole thing would be thrown high in the air or dropped from a tree. With practice, these worked pretty well.

It occurred to us that with slightly larger pieces of cloth, like those cut from an old sheet, we could conduct transitional experiments between the proven results already obtained with the toy soldiers and our dreams of parachuting ourselves—much like NASA would eventually use chimps in the space program. Sadly, there were no chimps living by the creek behind our homes, but it seemed to us that the small crabs we were pulling out of the creek were just the right size.

Surprisingly, it’s not that easy tying four strings around an unwilling crab without getting pinched, and the snapping of the crab on your fingers severely limits the quality of the toss. While the personal sacrifices were great, there were some limited technical successes in that, on the very best combinations of throws and perfect wrapping of the strings around the cloth, some crabs would fall back to the ground noticeably slower than others.

After the experiments, the crabs were all released back into the creek, where the stories of their bravery and historical significance are probably still repeated by their descendants, living much less exciting lives under the cement culvert covering their creek.

Bob Marksteiner was born in Chicago and grew up in Franklin Park, Illinois

Filed Under: ESSAY

The Difference Between Men and Women

May 25, 2025 By admin

TopTen graphicMATURITY: Women mature much faster than men. Most 17-year old females can function as adults. Most 17-year old males are still trading baseball cards and giving each other wedgies after gym class. This is why high school romances rarely work out.

HANDWRITING: To their credit, men do not decorate their penmanship. They just chicken scratch. Women use scented, colored stationary and they dot their “i’s” with circles and hearts. Women use ridiculously large loops in their “p’s” and “g’s”. It is a royal pain to read a note from a woman. Even when she’s dumping you, she’ll put a smiley face at the end of the note.

BATHROOMS: A man has six items in his bathroom–a toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, a bar of Dial soap, and a towel from a Holiday Inn. The average number of items in the typical woman’s bathroom is 437. A man would not be able to identify most of these items.

REST ROOMS: Men use rest rooms for purely biological reasons. Women use rest rooms as social lounges. Men in a rest room will never speak a word to each other. Never in the history of the world has a man excused himself from a restaurant table by saying, “Hey Tom, I was just about to take a leak. Do you want to join me?

CHILDREN: A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments and soccer games and romances and best friends and favorite foods and secret fears and hopes and dreams. A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.

SEX: Women prefer 30-40 minutes of foreplay. Men prefer 30-40 seconds of foreplay. Men consider driving back to her place as part of the foreplay. Women like to have sex when they’re in the mood. Men like to have sex when they’re in the room.

LAUNDRY: Women do laundry every couple of days. A man will wear every article of clothing he owns, including his surgical pants , before he will do his laundry. When he is finally out of clothes, he will wear a dirty sweat shirt inside out, rent a U-Haul, and take his mountain of clothes to the Laundromat. Men always expect to meet beautiful women at the Laundromat. This is a myth perpetuated by reruns of old episodes of “Love, American Style.”

THE TELEPHONE: Men see the telephone as a communication tool. They use the telephone to send short messages to other people. A woman can visit her girlfriend for two weeks, and upon returning home, she will call the same friend and they will talk for three hours.

NICKNAMES: If Laura, Suzanne, Debra and Rose go out for lunch, they will call each other Laura, Suzanne, Debra and Rose. If Mike, Charlie, Bob and John go out, they will affectionately refer to each other as Fat Boy, Godzilla, Peanut-Head and Stinky.

ARGUMENTS: A woman has the last word in any argument. Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.

(From the Best of BoomSpeak, 2014)

Jack Goldenberg is a prolific Copywriter, innovative Creative Director and consummate, strategic marketer. Read his blog at  10 minutes of brilliance. With all he’s done, he still believes his best efforts are ahead of him.

Filed Under: ESSAY

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