Byline: Annette Kurman

I’ve been reading how Facebook has become a land of baby boomers reaching out to their grammar school buddies since Millennials, Gen X, and Gen Z have moved on to more recent and trending online spaces: Tik Tok, Instagram, AI ChatGPT, WhatsApp, and other trendy (read: few seniors) platforms.

With the holiday season upon us and so many people out and about, it won’t be uncommon to hear frequent cursing at the mall, at the highway rest area, or walking your kid to school.

For those unfamiliar, Karen is a slang for an  irritating, entitled, and demanding woman exhibiting obnoxious behavior in public settings. According to Wikipedia, Karen is used as a slang typically for a middle-class white woman perceived as entitled or demanding beyond the scope of what is normal. According to a popular meme, Karen sports an asymmetrical bob who is always asking to speak to the manager. 

I can barely get the word out of my mouth: seven-ty. It sounds so, um, old, and it’s coming up faster than a Disney bullet train.

Do you remember watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, ogling Elvis as he  gyrated his hips, or Mick Jagger as he frowned while singing “Let’s spend some time together”? 

I feel I am dancing on the edge of a knife (the unsharp side, of course) where one side is retirement, and the other side is work. I’m playing the middle at this point as I garner the benefits of each side: I work as a nurse on my terms, not constrained by full or part-time work, but being available as a substitute nurse or for working full-time for a specific period of time. (Look out, I may be administering flu shots at your CVS!) At this point in my life, I need that structure, collegiality, and the ability to work with the public. Okay, and the money doesn’t hurt.

Many of us grew up watching three television stations and UHF, along with the necessary rabbit ears that always needed tending. Free television now consists of (according to strength of signal) ABC, MeTV, followed by PBS, CBS, NBC, HSN, ion, FOX, and some others originating from New York.

For us, one of the factors is that we often spend more time leaving a venue than we spend being entertained. Too much hassle at our age.  So we have added tribute bands to our concert-going ventures.

Do you still have a box full of mixed tapes you made back in the ’80s?

Is your mind overwhelmed with so many numbers, passwords, and other minutiae that if someone asks for your license plate number, you come up blank? If you give me a minute or two, I can visualize the last four numbers.

If you’re like me, you had the album Tapestry vertically lined up on a shelf, perhaps arranged alphabetically if you were a bit OCD and maybe even on a shelf created with several cement blocks. Maybe your parents even had a copy. Some considered it a ground-breaking generational crossover album.

I remember some years ago when the media celebrated New Jersey’s Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, who was considered to be the nation’s first baby boomer, when she was expected to formally apply for Social Security benefits in anticipation of her 62nd birthday on January 1, 2008.

You may recall that several months ago I expressed my desire to create a calendar featuring my favorite album covers. I covered January, February, and March.  Now it’s time to showcase April, May, and June!

Do you remember dropping a quarter into the machine and you and your friends cramming into one of these photobooths? Do you still have those photo strips hanging around in a box in the basement? Or perhaps you were at a holiday party recently where they had a “photo booth” where you donned props, and the results were sent right to your Facebook or email?