I like the gap.\u00a0 Differences between generations feel right to me.\u00a0 I enjoy being with our children and then I enjoy being with people closer to my own age, who\u00a0begin sentences with “Remember when?”<\/p>\n
Remember when\u00a0we danced to Motown?\u00a0 And sang\u00a0Doo Wop together?\u00a0 Remember that first Bob Newhart album?\u00a0 Remember when Richard Burton\u00a0appeared on Broadway and all the women fell in love with him but Elizabeth Taylor got him?\u00a0 Remember how our parents weren’t interested in Elvis, but then they were?\u00a0 Remember when Ray Charles had his first big hit?\u00a0 Remember our favorite kids’ shows on radio that turned into television shows?\u00a0 It’s comfortable having history together.<\/p>\n
When I was in my teens, we didn’t call the progression from child to adult anything at all.\u00a0 We weren’t teenagers or adolescents.\u00a0 We weren’t known as anything except somebody’s kid.\u00a0 Since our generation didn’t have a name, we also didn’t call the spaces between us and others a gap.\u00a0 The term “generation gap” began to be tossed around during the blooming season of the flower children\u00a0when we were cautioned not to trust anyone over 30.<\/p>\n
Too late.\u00a0 I was already looking forward to being an adult.\u00a0 In my teens I admired women\u00a0who were 20 and\u00a030.\u00a0 I wanted to look like them, dress like them, and somehow achieve the mysterious sophistication those women seemed to own.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Today, adolescence is so prolonged\u00a0that sometimes the new generation doesn’t seem to get started at all, and it’s\u00a0eaten away at what I consider a natural\u00a0distance between kids and parents.\u00a0 Terms like\u00a0“rejuvenile” and “boomerang babies”\u00a0describe people in their 30’s and 40’s going back to live with their parents.\u00a0 But while their grown children were away, some of \u00a0the older folks were taking care of themselves, eating right, exercising, developing new interests, buying new clothes, and generally making it harder to tell who’s who.<\/p>\n
I’d hate to see us close the gap completely.\u00a0 What have we got to look forward to, if kids don’t want to grow up and parents don’t want to be their own age either?\u00a0 Just a long, blurry couple of decades where each generation waits out the other to see who’ll blink first?<\/p>\n