Wrinkly Bits
A Blog by Gail Cushman
Sixty years is a long, time, but we made it! Our high school graduating class held its 60-year class reunion this week, and about sixty of my fellow classmates and spouses showed up. A good showing, I thought. I attended Emmett High School, near Boise. Our graduating class was about 135, and about half are still with us and half have gone to greener pastures. We are all 78 years old, a lot of water under the bridge but the grass has not grown under our well-worn feet.
Every week, I send my blogs to a group named Class of 64 and I have a vision of the people who are on the receiving end. Athletic, tall, lean, tanned, smart with a glow for whatever future might hold. Imagine my surprise when the room was filled with a bunch of creaky, squeaky old people, most of whom I didn’t recognize. Except Melinda who was always short and cute and still is, but the rest were totally different and it was a challenge. I slapped name tags on everyone which was met with groans, “Name tags, whatever for?” But here was the reality:
I was talking to someone and said, “Who’s that guy?”
“Which guy are you talking about?”
I pointed across the room, and said, “That guy, the one with the white hair.”
She said, “Which white-haired guy? There are five.” Uh oh.
Beyond the gray hair, wrinkles, and crinkles, we have done a lot with the skills and knowledge we obtained from our teachers. We went to the same classes and listened to the same lectures, but all of us ended up going different directions. At the same time, we had many commonalities: we were parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. We joined the military and went through the Vietnam conflict. Some of us traveled the seven continents and others stayed home, keeping the home fires burning. We had adventures and survived all kinds of diseases and accidents. We watched the birth of the Internet, computers, cell phones, and, thankfully, the demise of pink foam hair curlers. We watched Ed Sullivan introduce the Beatles to America, Chubby Checker teach us the Twist, and danced the Watusi and the Stroll. Elvis, too, in his younger days. Bouffant hairdos, miniskirts, duck tails, the birth and death of bell-bottoms, and all the boys wore buttoned shirts, except for a couple who wore white t-shirts with cigarette packs rolled into their sleeves. We passed notes in school and jammed people into the trunk of our car at the drive-in movie. We used a standard typewriter and were among the first users of the microwave.
We hid under desks, added the words “under God” to our Pledge of Allegiance recitations, lived under 14 US Presidents, and saw two stars added to the American flag, Alaska and Hawaii. We were told that the Russians were closing in, they had already arrived in Cuba.
We rode bikes without helmets, roller skated on sidewalks and weathered skinned knees. We walked to the bus stop or to school, and our mothers said, “Go outside and play, get some sun, sunburns will make you healthy. Come back before dark. Don’t get in trouble” We did a lot of things that are considered dangerous today, but we turned out okay.
We are the Boomers, born after WWII. Gray hair, wrinkles, and a lot of experiences that no one will ever replicate. I for one, wouldn’t trade it for anything. But I don’t think our cellphone-addicted grandkids quite understand. They giggle at our attempts to open a file on the computer or delete a caller from our cell phone, saying, “Oh, Grandma, don’t you know anything?”
Gail is a novelist and blog writer living in Columbus, Mt. You can see all her writings at gailcushman.com.
