Weed. Grass. Pot. Smoke. Ganja. Reefer. Herb. Dope. Bud.

Whatever you called it, you can’t deny baby boomers were all over it. It was our drug of choice back then and you’d be lying if you said you never even tried it once. Okay, maybe a tiny minority of boomers never lit up.

Back then you had to put a towel under the door so that your parents, dorm mates, or your neighbors would not know you were inside getting high.

Contrast that with what’s happening now. More Americans aged 65 and older are using cannabis (so that’s what it really is!) than ever before. It increased 46 percent between 2021 and 2023, so you can assume it’s still increasing in 2026.

Boomers are rediscovering cannabis in retirement and women and wealthy boomers in particular are a big portion of that renewed interest. Why not you say? It’s legal so the risk factor is gone. No one is going to break down the door and toss you in jail. Then there’s the analgesic effect. Aches, pains, and sleep issues often plague the over-65 population and many boomers are convinced that weed/gummies can help.

For those of us boomers who have difficulty remembering what we ate for breakfast or the name of that speckled bird that comes to the feeder every morning, the other draw of the ganja is that it can help with memory function. The THC component of weed has been shown to  enhance neural communication between the cerebellum and hippocampus.

In other words, boomers with pain, sleep and memory issues may find there really is some therapeutic value to pot, but there needs to be more research on the potential negative effects.

One way to look at it is that you survived cannabis use in the first go around in your twenties, so if it can help you remember where you’re hiding your stash in your eighties, go for it. And you don’t have to hide it anymore or put a towel under the door (unless you have neighbors adjacent).

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His most recent 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.

For me and my four sisters, laughter was always the string that tied us tightly together. Letterman had nothing on our daily coffee-talk banter or our silly family holiday gatherings. Get us together and we could laugh about mostly anything. However, many of our shared fits of laughter over the years did not always come at appropriate times. One of my earliest memories is when the five of us lined up in a pew during Lent to hear The Stations of the Cross in the old dark church in Sparrows Point. Anyone who is familiar with this Lenten ritual, knows full well that when the priest says with severity that Jesus was beaten, scorned, and nailed to the cross, the proper response is certainly not unbridled laughter.

Or there was the time we were at the dinner table and we were being sternly scolded by our father for something we had done earlier in the day. The proper response, again, was not uncontrolled laughter laced with guffaws of disrespect, but the angrier he got, the harder we laughed.

Then there was the time the old lady down the street slipped on the ice, or my sister backed into my mother’s car, or the time our brother forgot his lines in the school play. Each time, as inappropriate as our laughter was, my sisters and I relished this bad behavior with a fervor.

So appropriate it was, oddly enough, when four of us erupted into a frenzied burst of raucous laughter at the fifth sister’s funeral. We stood by her coffin, clearly aware of the sadness and sorrow of this scene. Yet in the midst of the solemn prayer service, all we needed to trigger a fit of girly laughter from days of yore was a simple exchange of glances among us. That’s all it took. There we were, standing with our heads bowed in front of the large group that gathered, and the laughter exploded from every pore. We knew our sister was laughing with us, which made us carry on even more. As it turns out we were spared any reprimands from friends and family, as they thought we were hysterically crying, which I guess is what we were really doing on the inside.

Every time my sisters and I think back to that coffin-side moment, darned if we don’t burst into one of those fits of uncontrollable laughter. I don’t know what to say about it except, I guess you had to be there.

From the Best of BoomSpeak, vintage 2007.  

Susan Pompa is a PR lady born and raised in Baltimore.

I’m confused, and you can’t say that it’s because I’m a baby boomer and we’re all in a confused pre-Alzheimers state. I just heard that there is a new demographic known as Generation Z, AKA the Silent Generation, and I’m worried that they have run out of letters for the next generations.

Generation X I get. Supposedly, it came from a study of British youth who “sleep together before they are married, don’t believe in God, dislike the Queen, and don’t respect parents.” Sound like nice kids. Then Douglas Coupland picked it up in his book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture and the term was off and running. Then came the term “twenty something,” but however you slice it, Gen X refers to the demo that was born between 1964 and 1979, although many will and do argue about the exact dates.

So just as surely as night follows day, Gen X has to be followed by Gen Y, and you can begin to see how we are going to run out the alphabet here. Also referred to as the Millenials or Internet generation, they would be the Class of 2000, having been born in 1982. They also have been referred to as the Second Baby Boom, because as I don’t need to tell you, they are our kids. You could hardly call Gen Y rebels, but it would be safe to say that authority figures have only marginal success with Gen Yers.

That brings us to Z, and it would appear, the end of the line, the 26th letter, the last straw, good old Zed. Born mid to late 1990s, the Zeds are being called the new silent generation if you read Generations, the book by Struass and Howe. Their theory is that generations are cyclical and this current crop is going to behave more like the first silent generation (many of whom were our parents). It’s sad to know that they are already being called the Homeland Generation because they must grow up with a hyper ventilating sense that we are fighting terrorists “there” so that they won’t come “here.”

For some reason Gen Z is also known as the Alpha Generation, and while that may not be cause for celebration, it does give me hope that at least there’s room at the head of the alphabet for many more generations to come.

From the Best of BoomSpeak. 2007. Even back then the generation appellations were confusing. Now it’s worse. 

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His most recent 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.

Add blue jeans to the list of things that aren’t as good as they used to be.

When I was a kid, blue jeans were blue. Dark blue. Navy blue. And they were stiff.

Oh, they could be folded. One could, with some effort, stand or sit while wearing new blue jeans. But it was a workout.

Everyone at school knew when you had new blue jeans. It was not, as I seem to recall, entirely favorable notice. Of course, when you’re an adolescent, unless you’ve just scored the winning basket at the big basketball game, almost any notice is unwelcome, at least initially. Coming to school in a new pair of blue jeans was nothing like winning the big game.

Everyone else, in their more faded, softer blue jeans was far more comfortable.

There was an element of risk the first time a new pair of blue jeans were washed, too. My mother always wanted them soaked in a vinegar solution to hold the color.

That was just like parents: Darker jeans were definitely less cool than faded jeans; therefore parents instinctively favored darker jeans. Whether vinegar was used or not, however, anything washed with the new blue jeans was apt to turn at least a robin’s egg blue.

Faded blue jeans were celebrated in songs during the 1960s for a reason: By the time a pair of blue jeans were properly faded, they’d been lived in. Your favorite blue jeans were privy to your habits, good and bad, and even your secrets, if you had any. When the knees went, applying a patch was much more than garment repair; it was first aid for a friend.

The modern blue jean is neither particularly blue nor particularly stiff. Today the garment is marketed to us Baby Boomers as ‘relaxed fit’ and ‘stone washed.’

It turns out that relaxed fit doesn’t just mean that six of your high school selves could occupy those pants. And it turns out that “stone washed” is literally true.

On one of those “How Its Made” programs aired on the Science Channel I learned that new blue jeans are pre-washed in what amounts to giant washing machines. Instead of fabric softener sheets, actual stones — small boulders, even — are washed with the jeans to ‘break them in’ before they’re foisted on a lazy public.

Either the modern jeans consumer is too sensitive about the reaction obtained when wearing new jeans or too lazy to break them in as we did in the 1960s and 70s. Blue jeans fade now after being laundered only a few times — and why not? They’ve already gone through extraordinary wear (and even tear) before getting put on the shelves.

And every parent knows that pre-torn jeans are more expensive.

When a patch is required, as it will be all too soon on the modern blue jean, the item is not an old friend; it’s hardly even a casual acquaintance.

If anyone knows where old-style, sturdy denim jeans may be obtained, please let me know. Of course, the jeans would have to come in aircraft-carrier sizes….

From the Best of BoomSpeak, March 2011

Curmudgeon is a self-described dinosaur — an Ozzie and Harriet person living in an Ozzy and Sharon world. And sometimes it confuses the heck out of him.