A
birthday musing
Georgia Green
Stamper
Georgia:
On My Mind
I’ve blown through
another birthday. It was bittersweet because it was the first
without my mother, but special because it fell in rare happenstance
on Easter weekend. Our three daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren
came home to help celebrate the dual occasion.
As my family was discussing “The State of Mother”
at her new advanced age, one of our daughters remarked that
I didn’t seem like a Baby Boomer. Apparently, I’m
more “old-fashioned” than her image of a typical
Boomer.
“That’s because I’m technically not one,”
I replied. “I was born eight months too soon to qualify
for that defining demographic.”
“Then who are you?” she asked.
That question stopped me. Like a modern-day Colossus, I grew
up with one foot in the World War II era and the other in Vietnam.
The week I was born, Franklin Roosevelt was still alive, still
president of the United States, and the country was still very
much involved in a hot war. Indeed, the phrase “Cold War”
had not yet been uttered. The atomic bomb had not yet been exploded
on the population of Japan. The United Nations did not yet exist
and neither did the modern state of Israel. But then the earth
shifted when 1945 became a seismic line drawn across history.
Babies born that year graduated from high school in 1963. Ours
was the last small class to move through the nation’s
school system, and no one paid much attention to us. No one
had to hire an extra teacher for our class or build a larger
building. Born in the waning hours of WWII, we were supposedly
exempt from any childhood anxieties related to being a child
during the war. And in truth, we were a docile group, demanding
little, doing as we were expected.
I entered college in the fall of 1963, perhaps America’s
last moment of moonlight and roses. I owned a wardrobe full
of madras plaid and dyed to match cashmere sweater sets. John
F. Kennedy was living in the White House, and Jackie (this was
way before she morphed into Jackie O) was my role model in all
things even down to the pill box hat I wore to church. I was
vaguely aware of the Vietnam conflict (that is what it was called
then) but no one I knew had been sent over there.
Coeds, as female students were called in those quaint days,
were required to wear high heels and a dress for dinner in the
dining hall each evening. We had a nightly curfew, too, and
woe unto the wayward girl who wasn’t inside the dorm when
the doors were locked. And just like a Bing Crosby movie, fraternity
men with roses in their arms came to serenade us beneath our
windows after “lights out.”
We all know how 1963 ended. My classmates and I lost our collective
virginity when a rifleman cut loose in Dallas, Texas. By the
time I graduated four years later, college women were burning
both their bras and college buildings. The Pill was rapidly
making curfews and locked dormitories superfluous; “pants
suits” (not to mention love beads and denim) were replacing
cashmere; the Beatles were revolutionizing pop music; and the
Vietnam War was dividing the country into two camps, roughly
the young and the old. Coeds no longer dressed for dinner –
instead, we marched in peace rallies, or volunteered with Vista
to help the poor.
I thought about trying to tell my daughter about the strange
but wonderful ride I’ve had through life. I wanted her
to know how privileged I felt to have glimpsed the world that
was swallowed up by the vast numbers who were born after me.
But I wanted her to know how proud I was to have traveled with
the Boomers, too, as they pushed for important and necessary
changes in our society – from civil rights to women’s
rights.
But instead I only laughed, and said, “I guess, as Emily
Dickenson once put it, I’m Nobody.” But I could
have added, “How dreary -- to be -- Somebody!” Neither
War Babies nor Boomers, we Nobodies have had a one of a kind
– and amazing – journey.
