Lovely War

If you scan alarmist websites as I do, you may have run across the alarming news that the Seattle School Board is considering new guidelines for what might be called “social justice math.” Some culture watchers have taken this to mean that 2 plus 2 is no longer 4, but that’s not exactly the case. Math functions will remain the same, and there will still be such a thing as a right answer.

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” That was my introduction to motivational slogans, at the age of 19. It was a revelation: Hey! Whatever bad habits I’ve collected, whatever sins I’d slipped into, there was always a tomorrow. There was always a new start, a new resolution, a new opportunity to rise up from the ashes of defeat. Gotta learn how to fall before you learn to fly, right? Every journey begins with a single step. You never fail until you stop trying! The best way to get something done is to begin. Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.

Are baby boomers—the generation born between 1946 and 1964—the most privileged, spoiled, and clueless generation in history? Subsequent generations seem to think so, which is why “OK boomer” has become a thing on social media. The phrase is described as an electronic eyeroll, a dismissal of lectures from the old folks in their mortgage-free suburban homes with riding mowers and Medicare. Are you of an age to wonder why millennials can’t move out of Mom’s basement? OK boomer. To riff on the unrealistic expectations of your company’s latest 25-year-old employee? OK boomer.

When my husband and I married, after a two-month courtship, I didn’t know how to cook. Some experience with baking constituted my home-ec resumé, but man does not live on cookies alone (as much as my man would have liked to). As we were both enrolled in college, he insisted I sign up for a noncredit cooking class, an idea that would never have occurred to me. His instinct for self-preservation might have prompted the suggestion, but in practical terms, that was the best class I ever took—much preferable to food poisoning. 

Two hours among the giant sequoias of Yosemite, drinking in reams of information from a National Park ranger, will redefine anyone’s interpretation of “a walk in the woods.” 

I don’t envy others their big houses or frequent vacations (or not much!). Here’s what I do envy: Those grandparents who get to visit their grandkids more than twice a year. Living less than a day’s drive—say, three hours—away from grown children seems ideal. It’s close enough to join them for school plays and tournament games and sleepovers, but not near enough to be an imposition (or a convenience?). I’ll have to say, though, if my offspring wanted to move down the road I wouldn’t object. Instead, they both live on opposite sides of the country.

The accumulation of 20-plus years in the same house can be intimidating—not so much from the plastic bins stacked on garage shelves, but from the little stuff, the mementos that weep when you think about pitching them. Do you have boxes of old photographs under the bed or in the closet? Vacation pics from the Grand Canyon or that collection passed down from Great-Aunt Susan that never got labeled (who are these people)? As I was sorting through my last box of photos, and categorizing them to put in another box, it struck me that none of them were more recent than 2008.