Wait… I’m a Boomer Too? Part III

A short time ago a book called The Generational Puzzle was published.  It is a chapter book of sorts written by various guests and put together by Joyce Knudsen.  Joyce asked me to contribute and so I tried but, in the end she passed on my effort.  Why?  How should I know?  Perhaps I’m not really baby boomer material.  On Digital Journal I’ve posted the first two installments of this piece and below you will find my third posting.  The chapter itself is ~7000 words and this is why I’m posting it in sections.  Have a look. 

Then read some of what Knudsen accepted.  http://www.amazon.com/The-Generational-Puzzle-ebook/dp/B00A1I0VGY. 

Then let me know what ya’ think.

Saverio Monachino

http://comicfictionnoir.blogspot.com/

@Author_Saverio

Wait… I’m a Boomer Too?

Posting III

As I said, my father served in the Korean conflict.  When he returned home he attended law school at Columbia University.  After this he joined back up with the government.  This time he was assigned to The State Department.  He was in the corps, the consulate corp.  I always thought my father’s job put my family in the ‘middle class.’   The spectrum of middle class though didn’t show itself until much later as I began to visit friends who lived in different neighborhoods.  Now, the best I could say was “yes, we were middle class, but on the lower end of things.”  For the longest time I thought this was the destiny of all those who worked for the federal government.  I didn’t understand at the time how political appointees were brought on, or how much extra money those in congress managed to rake in.  My father was a government worker after all and I thought they were all under the same system.   

His first assignment was in Naples, Italy.  Just so you know, my father was born in Sicily and was brought to the U.S. when he was young.  Then his father loaded up the truck and took the family back to Sicily.  Eventually the family seesawed once again over to the U.S. around the time my father was in high school.  When he was living in America his family lived in Queens.  I always call it Long Island, unless I’m speaking with someone from Queens, then I have to mind my manners.  My mother’s parents hailed from the same small town in Sicily as my father’s family and, imagine this, they settled in the exact same enclave in Queens.  This is how my parents met, fell in love, lived together, yes for several years while growing up in Queens my father lived in the same house with my mother (and her parents), and eventually got married.  I am not sure why, perhaps to get their feet back on the ol’ home turf, but my parents waited to have their first child until they had gotten off the plane in Naples.   My brother is an Italian citizen even though he hasn’t lived outside of Virginia since he was a one year.

Two years after my brother’s birth my father was stationed back at the home office in Washington, D.C.   This was in the late 1950’s and this is where I was born.  The Columbia Hospital for Women on L Street in Washington is no longer there, no longer helping crank out the babies.  I have no pictures of the place myself but this guy named Gore, Al Gore to be precise, keeps trying to friend me on facebook, saying we were roommates at the hospital for a few days.  I wonder if he is reaching out to the other twenty or so odd babies that shared the same room.  My sister was born a few years later and about this time our nice little middle class American family of five moved into our one and only house.  This was in Falls Church, Virginia.  Way back then Fairfax County was bucolic.  It had rolling, open spaces and just a few subdivisions, some shopping centers, but no malls.  If you got in your car you could drive out to Harper’s Ferry in no time and along the way one would see horses, a lot of horses.  It isn’t like that anymore.  The metropolis came, the urban development did not.  

When I was young, Falls Church seemed to be such a long way from Washington, D.C.  My father would drive off, or his carpool ride would pick him up, at 7:30 in the morning to make sure they all made it to work by 8:00.  We wouldn’t see him again until almost 5:00 in the afternoon.  The poor guy looked so worn out.  He would walk in the door, put down his briefcase, find his way into the kitchen, and then we would eat dinner, together, as all families did.  I always thought those long grueling days would eventually take its toll on him.  It did, and so he retired, thirty years later.   Good thing for all of us my mother spent her days doing our laundry, cleaning the house, cooking our dinner and a variety of other tasks, all of which she accomplished without a driver’s license.   We were like every other household in the neighborhood back then: one car, husband worked, wife stayed home and tended house.   We had no maid and we didn’t take our clothes to the cleaners.  We did our own yard work.  The family and social structure we lived in was workin’ fine.   Slowly, more cars appeared in the surrounding driveways, but at first this was only the high school-age boys buying into the system.  Eventually the two-car family emerged and my mother, for a while, was the only one on the block who did not drive.  Once when I was running around barefoot in the yard, I had an accident and needed to be rushed to the hospital.  My mother had to rope in one of the neighbors to take us.  She could have called an ambulance, but back then, like today, ambulances cost money. 

My father’s “terrible” work schedule came home to roost when I grew up, got a job and had to commute over an hour to work, each way.  A normal work day was a wee bit longer than the 7.5 hours my father was burdened with.  The distances I had to commute to my various jobs were usually long because it was just too expensive to live closer.  When I would return home from work my wife and I would sit down to some quick dinner, if she had beaten me home from her job that is; otherwise it was fetch your own.  Once we finished slurping down the food we both usually did homework, or crashed.  If you wanted to stay employed or advance out of the proletariat ranks you needed to keep one step ahead of the Joneses, right?  This is when I realized exactly how close, rush hour traffic or no rush hour traffic, Falls Church was to Washington, D.C.  What’s worse, in our brave new world, working professionals are no longer working 30 or 40 years at the same place like my father and my wife’s father did.  These days we are changing jobs at the drop of a hat or as often as the companies come and go into and out of existence.  Along the way we reinvent ourselves, career-wise, to fit into the changing base of the jobs on hand.  Is this better or worse than the way our parents had it?  You have more freedom to find the perfect fit, but at the same time it is hard to develop any commitment to the job when the jobs change so often.  Without commitment, where is the value added?  And, to make it more interesting, we are no longer keeping up with just the Joneses, now we have to keep up with all of their relatives who happen to be living at home, with home being anywhere but the USA.  What this all means to me is there is a lack of depth in professional individuals today.  

Well take a look at the bridegroom smilin' pleased as pie
Shakin' hands all around with a glassy look it his eye
He got a real good job and his shirt and tie is nice
But I remember a time when she never would have looked at him twice.

                                                -- Nick Lowe