boomers Archives : Page 3 of 3 : The Aging of Aquarius

“You didn’t come with instructions.”

Researchers have warned that the prospect of leaving home has left ill-prepared millennials feeling anxious and panicked.

A recent study of 2,000 young people about to enter college has concluded that millennials are unprepared for the realities of life in the real world. More than half don’t know how to pay a bill or how much they should expect to spend on rent.

61% of these young people are scared to leave their parents. 58% have trouble sleeping. 27% have panic attacks when they think about moving away from home.

These blossoming adults go off to college nervously in need of “trigger warnings” for their studies and “safe spaces” in which to live their lives. Many don’t want to learn how to drive a car.

Some expect to get a trophy for merely participating in life.

Recently on our Dallas morning radio show on KLIF my partner, Amy Chodroff, and I talked about this study and tried to figure out how young Americans went from being excited about inheriting their own lives, as we were at their age, to being seemingly terrified by the prospect of growing up and leaving the nest.

Amy, a Gen-Xer with two well-parented and supremely prepared and confident children of her own, decided her generation is to blame for coddling these kids.

We talked about so-called helicopter parents and the everyone-gets-a trophy entitlement era of today’s society. It made sense to us and we left the blame there, on the Gen-X parents of Millenials.

Something about the discussion nagged at me and it wasn’t until I got home that I realized what it was:

Amy’s generation of helicopter parents are my generation’s free-range kids.

We Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, were the beatniks of the 1950s and the hippies of the 60s. We worshiped at the altar of Do Your Own Thing in the Church of What’s Happening Now.

We had a wonderfully carefree childhood during a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity and yet we rejected every notion of our own parents’ culture from the Hit Parade music they loved to our haircuts and the clothes they wanted us to wear.

We even rejected the uniquely American idea that liberty came with a price worth paying, though that’s easy to understand if you consider our perspective.

Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall – Washington, D.C.

Politicians of the 60s sent us to a war of their making. 50,000 of us died in Vietnamese rice paddies ten thousand miles from home.

I frequently think of my high school buddies who had their lives blown away before they were old enough to grow a beard or fall in love for the first time.

Those of us who dodged the draft warned each other to never trust anyone over thirty and shouted, “Make love, not war!”

Now we’re in our sixties and seventies wondering why our grandkids are so nervous and we blame their parents, our children.

Just look at the society we Boomers left in the wake of our cultural revolution.

In some ways our kids are more traditional than we were at their age. Growing up as the children of free-range parenting they’re over-correcting our mistakes by inventing their own, insisting that every spare minute of their children’s lives be scheduled, structured and under constant supervision and by insisting that the road to happiness begins at birth with eyes fixed on the prize: a scholarship to Harvard or Stanford.

Our children’s children are leaving home, entering those schools confused and scared. And who can blame them? They were never taught that they would be challenged and sometimes they would fail. Nobody ever explained that they aren’t really bulletproof, bound for glory or as exceptional as they were constantly assured.

Nobody ever explained they’ll be paying off those student loans for the next twenty years.

We love our children. We don’t want them to ever be scared or disappointed. And yet we know they have to suffer to succeed.

Or did we forget to tell them that part?

Sometimes parents make mistakes. We can’t avoid them. We can only try to minimize them and try to make them teachable moments for ourselves and our kids.

As my Carolann likes to remind her Gen-X son: “You didn’t come with instructions.”

*Source of quoted material: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-4666794/Millennials-aren-t-ready-reality-life.html

The Age of Irrelevance

Getting older is like getting fatter. You don’t notice because it happens gradually.

One thing you do notice is suddenly being ignored. You notice because it seems to happen overnight. One day you’re a vital part of society and respected leader in your industry, the next day people merely nod at you with a perfunctory smile as if you were a greeter at Walmart.

This only happens with people who didn’t know you when you were young. Unfortunately, over time that seems to be most people.

Several years ago I mentioned this to my son’s mother-in-law, Gloria, a dear friend who is a bit older and very wise. I told her I was frustrated because my experience and knowledge of my business had always been sought by my colleagues but suddenly nobody seems to have any interest in what I think.

“You’ve reached the age of irrelevance,” she explained matter-of-factly.

I had to let that sink in for a moment.

The age of irrelevance.

Gloria could see I was stunned. “It happens to all of us,” she said gently. “I used to be the person my managers turned to for ideas. Then one day they weren’t interested in any of my observations or suggestions.”

I didn’t know what to say. It made no sense and yet this is exactly what I was experiencing.

“It’s like when your kids are growing up,” Gloria continued. “They rely on you for everything and then one day they suddenly don’t need you at all. You’re irrelevant.”

Nobody ever warned me this would happen. I don’t like it but I’ve come to accept it philosophically, if not quite emotionally. It still hurts a bit. I feel kind of useless.

Irrelevant.

It’s been a few years since Gloria explained to me this particularly jarring bump on the road of life. I’m getting used to it and so will you.

I just thought someone should give you a heads up.

Emily’s Gift

CarolAnn and I just sent a birthday gift to our daughter-in-law, Emily. Took just thirty seconds to pick it out and ship it. ?

Gift giving isn’t what it used to be and a lot of us old geezers are annoyed by it. Back in the day we’d think about it a lot and then head out to the mall to find the perfect gift for that special someone. Then we’d go home and gift wrap it. If that person lived far away we’d package it and take it to the post office. The whole process could take half a day or more but it was gratifying. It was fun to think of our loved one opening the pretty package and being surprised and delighted by what was inside.

Sending a gift card via email as I just did takes no time at all. No thought. The efficiency of it is undeniable and that doesn’t mean we love our daughter-in-law any less, of course. It just means another tradition has fallen to our modern addiction to efficiency.

We don’t write letters anymore. Heck, most of us don’t even bother with email anymore. We text. We tweet.

Occasionally we use our phones as phones and actually talk with each other but that’s starting to seem like a special occasion these days. I’ve even started texting people to make an appointment to talk with them on the phone. No kidding.

Here’s what I think:

I think adapting to change is difficult as we get older but our only alternative is to refuse to change. If you do that you’re just sitting on the porch in a rocker, watching life pass by without even bothering to wave to you.

I think wistful longing for the past is natural and fine in small measure. Nostalgia is warm and comforting but it’s no way to live.

I want to keep learning to keep living. These days I find I’m constantly learning from my children. And why not? We taught them the ways of the world with hope they’d make it better. I think they’re doing that, even if we don’t always understand or like the changes.

My Life In a Shoebox

Here in North Texas the seasons change overnight. And then they change back again. A couple of days ago we hit 94 degrees. Today we’re going to stay in the 40s. Next month or next week we might have snow, then back to 85 for a couple of days.

Texas is famous for it and I love the variety.

We all mark the passing of time with changes in the weather. If it never changed we would seem to be living the same day over and over.

And yet… the days and years of our lives often seem to change like calendar pages flying off the screen to show passage of time in old movies.

You know what frustrates me? I can’t remember everything. The past 66 years are written on my brain in fuzzy black and white memories like the photographs of my childhood. They’re all mixed up in my shoebox of a brain. I sort through them from time to time and while I can usually remember a relative few specific places and people the entire experience of my life is mostly conjecture.

I figure young people of today will have the opposite problem. When they’re my age they’ll be sorting through hundreds of thousands of pictures of cats and babies they once knew and meals they once ate.

Making sense of your life is as hard as predicting it

60, 70, 80 years…

It sounds so long but it lives so fast.

One more hug and kiss from Mom

Nancy Webster 1949 – Grant Union High School, Sacramento

Carolann and I just returned to Dallas from a one week visit with our families in California. We had a wonderful time with our sons and daughters-in-law, our grandsons, aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, brothers and assorted others.

That’s what family reunions are all about. We return home for the first time in years and laugh about old times. We share a bit about our current lives, embellish our common past and commiserate over how old and fat we’ve all become.

We can’t believe how big the kids have gotten.

We take pictures, have another drink and laugh some more.

We pay tribute to those of us who have died and when we finally say our goodbyes we share sincere hugs, promising we’ll do this again soon.

Sometimes we know that won’t be possible.

When I was a boy my mother was my queen and goddess. She was there when I woke up and tucked me in when I went to bed. She sang Doris Day songs while doing housework.

Que sera, sera…
Whatever will be, will be.
The future’s not ours to see.
Que sera, sera…
What will be, will be.

She cooked, she cleaned and she sang after making sure that I started each day with a single thought:

“This can be a good day or a bad day, it’s all up to you.”
— Nancy Webster-Williams

She kissed me good morning, fixed my breakfast and lunch and kissed me goodbye.

My little sister, Linda, Mom and me. Folsom Lake 1955.

Last Saturday, April 22, 2017, twenty of us – her children, grand children, great-grand children, siblings and extended family — gathered in a social room at her retirement home. Together again for the first time in many years we laughed and chattered and took a thousand pictures. We promised each other we’d do it again sooner rather than later.

At the end of the day when I hugged and kissed my mother goodbye she looked deeply into my eyes. No longer fuzzy headed, slightly confused or overwhelmed by the attention and the noise she said earnestly, “Take care of yourself, David. I love you.”

She said it twice for emphasis.

My brother Jim, sister Linda, me and Mom this past weekend.

She looked at me again and I looked at her. I’m 65 now but I was seeing my mommy of 60 years ago.

We both knew that it would be for the last time.

I hope I’m wrong but I don’t think so. I think we both know and we’re fine. We had a proper goodbye with just the love and none of the tears.

I’ll phone her more often now and I’ll spend less time talking about myself. I’ll talk about us.

I’ll ask her, maybe for the first time ever, to tell me about her life, her thoughts and feelings.

Bactine, Bosco and Red Ball Jets

This is an abbreviated portion of a chapter from a book I’m writing. As slowly as I write I figured I might as well put this much in blog form. Maybe it will encourage me to get on with it.

Surviving Childhood

One of the things we aging boomers love to talk about is how much safer the world used to be when we were kids.

I guess it was in some respects. Mostly, though, I wonder how we survived.

As kids in the 1950s and 60s we were allowed to roam our entire neighborhood from sunup to sundown free from fear of death or kidnapping. Nobody was ever snatched off the street.

We didn’t have drive-by shootings. Heck, we didn’t have drive-thru hamburger joints. Back then if you wanted to buy a burger or shoot somebody you had to park the car and get out first.

It was a simpler, more forgiving time. But it was also a daily horror show we never even noticed.

Cars didn’t have seat belts until the mid-sixties and by then they seemed silly to those of us who grew up literally bouncing between the back and front seats as our parents sped along two-lane highways. They didn’t mind in the least as long as we didn’t start fighting.

We had room fans with no protective covers to keep little fingers out of the whirling steel blades. If you had invented the electric fan doesn’t a protective cage over the front just seem like a natural piece of the big picture? How did they not think of that?

I never heard of a single injury.

The heat in our homes came up from the floor through metal grates that got hot enough to sear a waffle pattern into tender toddler butts and feet.

Everybody smoked cigarettes, cigars and pipes everywhere. I mean everywhere: on buses and trains; in grocery stores, movie theaters, restaurants, churches and in every room of every home in America. That’s where this attachment to “fresh air” started, you know. Think about it. No matter where you live these days, big city or wide-open spaces, the air is no fresher outside than it is inside. But you still say, “I need some fresh air,” and then you step out of a filtered, air-conditioned room into downtown San Bernardino. When we stepped outside in the fifties it was like walking into the Alps. Nobody complained about smoke. It was just a natural part of life.

Dogs ran free when we were kids.

You’d let the dog out and he was gone to who-knows-where until he eventually came back to the porch and waited happily to be readmitted to the house. That might be the next day or the day after that. If he bit somebody while he was out you never heard about it. They didn’t sue, they just swore. If he tangled with another dog you’d see him trot back into the house at dinner time, tongue and tail wagging joyously, with one bloody ear and a mangled eyeball. You didn’t take him to the vet unless he’d been hit by a car and even then if he could hobble out of the street on three of his four legs Skippy was good to go.

We had deadly toys.

We would have wars using air-powered BB-rifles that allowed us to fire tiny steel balls with enough velocity to embed them under the skin of another kid, a dog or a cat. It stung but we loved it. This is where we first heard the sentence, “You could put an eye out with that!” But nobody I knew ever lost an eye to a BB-gun assault.

If there weren’t enough BB-guns to go around, we’d just throw rocks. Seriously, rock fights. And worse.

We had toy bows and arrows. Oh sure, the arrows had rubber cups on the end. You just took those off, threw ‘em away and whittled the wooden shaft into a pencil-sharp point.

We had firecrackers. We made bottle rockets out of wooden match heads cautiously jammed tightly together into glass aspirin bottles. When they weren’t made carefully they became instant bombs, igniting in hand and shooting shards of red-hot glass dozens of feet in all directions.

I’m not making this up.

One idiot kid I remember used to lie down on the ground and have the rest of us drop a huge rock — say, the size and weight of a bowling ball — right over his face. He’d always roll out of the way before the rock hit the ground. He never failed.

We climbed trees, great cottonwoods in my grandparents’ front yard, scampering twenty feet above the ground. Once I fell, skinning my bare back as I slid down the trunk of that great tree, landing hard on its exposed roots. Grandma sprayed Bactine on my injuries and gave me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white Wonder bread. I watched Popeye on TV and felt a lot better.

We jumped off the roof of my grandparents’ house with totally ineffective home-made parachutes fashioned from a bed sheet with ropes tied to the corners. One of my goofy cousins used to climb onto the sloped roof of their two-story house and bounce up there on his pogo stick.

We made go-carts out of two-by-fours and orange crates with tin coffee can lids for headlights and roller skates for wheels. A steep hill provided propulsion, a rope tied to each side of the front axle made for a delicate steering mechanism that was just as likely to dump you into the middle of oncoming traffic as it was to steer you out of danger. There was no braking system. For that you merely had to wait until the thing slowed of its own diminishing inertia or crashed into a parked car.

When I was a kid we had plenty of playgrounds in our neighborhoods and schoolyards were never enclosed by locked fences and gates. Still, we often just played baseball or football in the street. A parked car was first base or end zone marker. Second base was a smashed tin can; a water spigot was third. We played with broken wooden bats that had been glued, nailed and taped back into service. The baseball had ripped seams and a cover peeling off. Once the tear got so big the ball made a fluttering sound when thrown we’d peel it off completely and wrap the remaining ball of yarn into a solid mass of black electrician’s tape that needed to be repaired or replaced after bouncing along the pavement a few times. Any baseball becomes hard to see after sunset, especially one made of black tape but we played long after daylight had faded to deep purple and the cars rounding the corner into left field had their headlights on.</span>

As I think back on those days fifty-plus years ago I can’t remember any boys who didn’t have patched jeans and scabs on their knees and elbows. Many of the girls, too. Blood was simply a part of everyday life through no small fault of our own. We all fell off our bikes into asphalt and parked cars because were just clutzy kids. Occasionally one of the real numbskulls in the neighborhood would intentionally ride his bike off the roof of a house or try to leap a row of thorn-laden rose bushes on a bike with the help of a pathetically engineered plywood ramp. These stunts nearly always ended in bloody failure but they didn’t stop us from trying again.

Nobody died. We seldom cried. And now we worry about our own kids and theirs.

They missed so much.

It breaks your heart

A writer who loves baseball must be careful. It’s too easy to slip into flowery purple prose about the game and I’m prone to over-writing.

Besides, the love of baseball has already been written with soul-stirring elegance by the likes of Roger Kahn, Roger Angell, Red Smith, George Will, Jim Murray, Joshua Prager and many others.

This morning I started watching the Ken Burns documentary, Baseball, for the third or fourth time. For reasons I understand in my heart but have trouble putting into words it still chokes me up. I get teary and a lump in my throat. It’s that good, cleansing, happy cry that makes you feel young, fresh and wholesome again.

The memories melt years from my body. I remember how I felt when my legs were lean, springy and swift; when my arms were powerful.

I could smash a fastball to the moon and run like the wind all day with a huge smile on my freckled face.

I can still smell freshly mowed grass under a cool March sky of scooting, fluffy clouds.

The base paths are wet from last night’s rain.

One water-soaked, torn-cover baseball is heaved toward the mud on home plate. I swing the bat held together by glue, nails and electrician’s tape.

Foul ball.

Pitcher and batter make eye contact. Both are determined, both are scared.

See? There I go, pushing the flowery purple envelope. When you love baseball you just can’t help it. It’s a disease you catch as a child and it festers inside you for a lifetime. As the great sports writer Pete Hamill once wrote:

“Don’t tell me about the world. Not today. It’s springtime and they’re knocking baseballs around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball.”

Pete Hamill has the delicious disease of his youth.

Here are more of my favorite quotes about the game from the men who played it professionally and fed the dreams of the rest of us who imagined we could.

“You can’t sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You’ve got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance. That’s why baseball is the greatest game of them all.” – Earl Weaver

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” – Rogers Hornsby

“I don’t care how long you’ve been around, you’ll never see it all.” – Bob Lemon

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” – Bart Giamatti

“During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball.” – Mickey Mantle

“The pitcher has to find out if the hitter is timid. And if the hitter is timid, he has to remind the hitter he’s timid.” – Don Drysdale

“Every player should be accorded the privilege of at least one season with the Chicago Cubs. That’s baseball as it should be played – in God’s own sunshine. And that’s really living.” – Alvin Dark

“You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too.” – Roy Campanella

“When they start the game they don’t yell, ‘Work Ball!” They say, ‘Play ball!” – Willie Stargell

“You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out it was the other way around all the time.” – Jim Bouton, Ball Four

September 2010: The nice police

I don’t know why we sugar coat things these days.

For some reason the word “cripple” is distasteful so we now say “disabled.” Frankly, I don’t see how that’s any better. I guess the nice police figure it implies strength within infirmity. It excuses us from our physical and mental shortcomings though it doesn’t help us overcome and live with them. It helps us pretend we are not less than complete; we cripples are just as good as anybody else, even though we are, admittedly, “disabled.”

In the words of my Wyoming coal-mining cowboy grandfather, that is horse hockey.

I’m crippled. It’s no shame. I had an accident, that’s all. My feet don’t work well but my brain still does. I suffer a bit but I make do and live with it. And by the way, the accident was my own fault. I need to remember that so please don’t take it away from me.

Don’t call me a senior citizen. It’s cute but condescending.

Nobody is old these days. We’re “senior citizens.”

Puh-leeze. It’s cute but I’m not a big fan of cute except in babies and puppies. You can be a “senior” if you like but don’t call me that, okay? I’d rather be “old” or, better yet, not defined by my age at all. Don’t make me cute. I’m more than that.

I think all this social nice-nice has less to do with respect for others than our own desire to seem caring so we can accept our own imperfections.

People don’t get fired these days, they get “laid off.”

I remember when “laid off” meant you could expect to be rehired in the near future. Not anymore. The fact is you’ve been fired, canned, kicked to the curb. The company you worked for just doesn’t need or want you anymore. But, it’s supposed to be somehow less painful to say you were “laid off.” Being “fired” is terribly, terribly personal.

It’s not your fault, nothing is.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Nobody is at fault and nobody is to blame for the ups and downs of what we used to just call life.

My grandson’s soccer league doesn’t keep score. They don’t want any losers.

I don’t have to explain to you why that’s so horribly twisted. Most of you are old and wise like me. You remember when your parents and grandparents watched you fall, waited for you to cry and picked you up to wipe your tears, clean your wound and say, “I told you so!” Touching a hot stove is the only way to learn to never do it again. Losing is the only way to learn to win.

It used to be, anyway. These days being on the losing side of a soccer game is considered the death of self-respect.

The only thing that seems to matter now are our fragile egos and manufactured self-esteem.

I can’t change the culture but I still have something to say about the raising of my own sons and grandsons. Here’s what I’d like to say to them:

–You will curse your mistakes and failures. I will quietly celebrate them because they’re lessons I can’t give you. You are a winner and, at times, a loser. Deal with it. You’ll be happier for it.

–You will suffer emotionally and I will try to love you out of your pain but then I’ll have to go home and leave you to sort it out for yourself. Can’t help it, that’s the way it works.

— There is not enough time in my life or yours for us to completely share our hearts. Try to be grateful for every moment we have together, especially the ones that seem unimportant at the time.

Thirty-some years ago while in the depths of my personal despair my father, my hero, told me — in these exact words, which I will never forget:

“If you don’t love yourself you’ll never be worth a damn to anybody else.”

And now, I have finally reached an age where I am qualified to add to my dad’s life-defining revelation:

You don’t love yourself for being good, that’s a given. You love yourself for falling down, getting up and living better for what you have learned.

Making reservations for the cackle factory…

For some inexplicable reason I awoke this morning at 4:48 with this song running through my head:

There’s a hold up in the Bronx,
Brooklyn’s broken out in fights!
There’s a traffic jam in Harlem
That’s backed up to Jackson Heights!
There’s a scout troop short a child,
Kruschev’s due at Idlewild!!

CAR 54, WHERE ARE YOU??!!

If you never heard those words, it doesn’t matter. Move on and have a great day!

If you do know what this is about, you’re already shaking your head and thinking, “Oh, my God…”

I awoke this morning with the theme song from a 47-year-old TV sitcom running through my head, a song I haven’t heard in at least 35 years.

My working theory is that at some point in life our mental filing cabinets start to get too heavy and the little wheels in the drawers break down. Those little folders collapse and some old piece of useless memory crap spills out all over the floor.

That’s what I’m going to tell the doctor.

I’m making the appointment right now.

Surviving childhood

One of the things we aging boomers love to talk about is how much safer the world used to be when we were kids.

It was in some respects. Mostly, though, I wonder how we survived.

As kids in the 1950s and 60s we were allowed to roam our entire neighborhoods from sunup to sundown free from fear of death or abduction. Nobody was ever snatched off the street. That possibility never even crossed our minds.

We didn’t have drive-by shootings. Hell, we didn’t have drive-thru hamburger joints. Back then if you wanted to buy a burger or shoot somebody you had to park the car and get out first.

It was a simpler, more forgiving time. But it was also a daily horror show we never imagined.

Cars didn’t have seat belts until the mid-sixties. It took years before most people used them. They seemed silly to those of us who grew up literally bouncing between the back and front seats everywhere our parents drove us. They didn’t mind in the least as long as we didn’t start fighting.

We had house fans with no protective cage to keep little fingers out of the whirling steel blades. If you had invented the electric fan doesn’t a protective cage over the front just seem like a natural piece of the big picture? How did they not think of that?

I never heard of a single injury.

I could go on and on…

The heat in our homes came up from the floor through metal grates that got hot enough to sear a waffle pattern into tender toddler feet and butts.

Dogs ran free when we were kids.

You let the dog out of the house and he was gone, who knows where, until he came back to the porch and demanded re-entry. That might be the next day or the day after that. If he bit somebody while he was out you never knew about it. If he tangled with another dog you’d see him trot back into the house at dinner time, tongue and tail wagging happily, with one bloody ear and a mangled eyeball. You didn’t take him to the vet unless he’d been hit by a car and even then if he could hobble out of the street on two of his four legs Skippy was good to go.

We had killer toys.

When I was a kid we would choose up sides and have wars using toy guns that were nearly as deadly as real ones. We had air-powered BB-rifles and pistols that allowed us to fire tiny steel balls with enough velocity to embed them under the skin of another kid, a dog or a cat. It stung but we loved it. This is where we first heard the sentence, “You could put an eye out with that!” Nobody ever stopped us from trying but the warning was issued occasionally and apparently it was heeded. Nobody ever lost an eye to a BB-gun assault.

If there weren’t enough BB-guns to go around, we’d just throw rocks.

Seriously, rock fights. And worse…

We had toy bows and arrows. Oh sure, the arrows had rubber cups on the end. You just took those off and whittled the wooden shaft into a pencil-sharp point.

And mind you, this was all going on shortly after World War II ended.

We had firecrackers. We made bottle rockets out of wooden match heads cautiously jammed tightly together into glass aspirin bottles. If you weren’t as careful as a brain surgeon they became instantaneous bombs, igniting in hand and shooting shards of red-hot glass dozens of feet in all directions.

I’m not making this up!

One idiot kid I remember used to lie down on the ground and have the rest of us drop a huge rock — say, the size and weight of a bowling ball — right over his face.

We weren’t very tall, maybe four feet. He’d always roll out of the way before the rock hit the ground. He never failed.

We climbed trees, great cottonwoods, scampering twenty or thirty feet above the ground. Once I fell, skinning my bare back as I slid down the trunk of that great tree, landing hard on its exposed roots. My grandma sprayed Bactine on my injuries and gave me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on Wonder white bread. I watched Popeye on TV and felt a lot better.

We jumped off the roof of my grandparents’ house with completely ineffective home-made parachutes.

One of my goofy uncles used to bounce on the roof on a pogo stick.

And we wondered why Grandpa drank.

Nobody died. We seldom cried. And now we worry about our own kids and theirs.

They missed so much.