I once spent my birthday with a new photographer I hired for brochure and poster work. His name was Jim Block. And he was an artist (pronounced arteest). He was a baby boomer by statistic and experience and I am a boomer by bare statistic. He was fifty, I just turned thirty eight. Our whole conversation reminded me of the Steely Dan song “Hey nineteen. No we have nothing in comon, no we can’t talk at all.”
Jim was still in the throes of the child debate. His girl friend’s biological alarm just went off, yet they were still thinking. He explained how he had researched the subject throughly. He thought that babysitting his 8 and 10 year old spoiled niece and nephew would give him a fair taste of what parenting was all about. He thought he may take the children to Disneyland. He and his girlfriend weren’t married but jointly own a house. They exchanged rings beaten out of quarters. “In God we Trust” could still be read along the thin edges of the ring. He had followed many careers. Photography was the latest.
I thought, I am not his generation at all. How could I be? There’s 12 years between us, which is a long time in adult consciousness, an unfathomable gap in childhood. Andrew and I are of the opinion that six years between siblings constitutes two only children, and six years in family time, produces great differences in income and in attitude. Wouldn’t that be the same for a generation?
It was interesting to talk with him, or rather listen to him. He spoke at length while I drove, analysising his life, his girlfriend and the clients we were setting up to photograph. He took up all the oxygen in the car, I had no air to speak.
And it was my birthday, something I loathed to tell him because he’d make it all about him.
Was this the difference between a Boomer and an Xer? The inability to listen to another life, another way of experiencing the world? It seemed it was all about him, hour after hour. He was stifling. His story of searching for the perfect rice cooker made me want to leap from the moving car. And I was driving.
I don’t have a resolution for this, I’m just recording a day.
My best friends are Boomers and one person does not a generation make.
But one experience can make a hell of a great character sketch.
