By Anita Garner
A funny thing happened on our way to writing a book. We stopped and changed direction. Last fall when Dave and I decided to write The Aging of Aquarius together, we said let’s write about anything that’s on our minds, then send the essays/chapters to each other and email our comments back and forth. I figured that somewhere in there we’d write about how we both came from rock and roll radio to our new elder status, surviving the Summer of Love along the way.
After we’d written for a year, we were about ready to call it done and then we realized we’d said very little about radio. Turns out we both feel our peers have covered radio pretty thoroughly in books and websites and neither of us feels compelled to go over it again. Radio weaves through our lives, but it’s just one of the threads in our story quilt.
We’ve both made a living doing some unusual things, but we’re also part of something universal that’s way bigger than us. We’re caught up in the enormous migration from an historic then to an even more startling now. Another weekend just passed, featuring another batch of stories in the news about the tide of boomers about to swamp our current operating systems in America. The numbers of us arriving at the same place in life within the same few years are overwhelming.
I’d rather hear a story than a number any day. Not everybody has kids and grandkids they want to talk about, but everyone who gets to be 50 and then some, has an opinion or a dream or a wish or a regret or a serendipity to tell about.
We decided to post here often while we’re finishing our book, hoping to get acquainted and see how you feel about aging. I’ll be pleased if, amidst the compiling of the pre-boomer and mid-boomer and post-boomer statistics that’ll be pored over for decades to come, maybe a few quite personal stories from our book might cause someone to stop and think about the individuals who rode this giant wave.
Ó By Anita Garner