Minding our generation gap
Who invented the generation gap?
Probably Adam and Eve. They wanted Cain and Abel to go to medical school, but Abel wanted to be a farmer instead. Cain, of course, chose butchery.
But it wasn’t until the 1960s that the divide between the old and the young got its name. Margaret Mead, the cultural anthropologist, described the “generation gap” between the youth culture and the established culture of the day. That youth culture she was talking about? Me and my fellow Baby Boomers.
Don Fisher realized this was a thing. In 1969, he opened a store on Ocean Avenue he originally intended to call “Pants and Discs.” Didn’t catch on, so he and wife Doris, in honor of Mead’s great divide, called it the Gap. And, because they understood that young people dress differently than old people, changed the world. Fisher was, by the way, on the Silent Generation side of the gap at the time, about 41. I was 11.
The generation gap is the no-man’s-land in the eternal skirmish between eras. Both sides have filled their end of the trenches with barbed wire and barbed tongues.
Zane and Aidan are two soldiers in the Battle of the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior. They live to be oppositional. Their words are hand grenades.
Let’s take stuffed peppers. When the boys were young, they actually fought over who got what color pepper. But if I make stuffed peppers today, Zane will announce, “I’ve always hated stuffed peppers.” When I remind him that last year he ate them stuffed with Rice-A-Roni (“the San Francisco treat”), he will insist he was only pretending to like them.
If I stuff those peppers with ground chuck, Aidan will announce that he has turned vegetarian. If I instead make them with quinoa, spinach, feta cheese and caramelized onions, Zane will ask: “Where’s the beef ?”
The battle cannot be won. For the Fisher-Paulsons, our war is fought on several fronts, not just generational. There is the race gap: “The Dads are listening to white people music again.” There is the preference gap: “Dad, you know nothing about dating girls.”
Sometimes, the melee is over underwear.
I own seven pairs of underwear. (And can someone tell me why they are called pairs?) I do laundry on Friday nights, during commercials of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” And each night, I lay out my clothes in the bathroom for the next morning, so I don’t have to wake anybody else up at 4:30 hunting for socks.
On Tuesday night, I opened my underwear drawer, and there wasn’t a single boxer brief to be found. I knew my undergarment math. On Tuesday night, there should have been three pairs remaining.
Neither boy wants us to go into their rooms. I get that. Conversely, neither boy wants to do laundry. Solve it yourself, we tell them. Zane thus has 32 pairs of socks and 12 pairs of underwear. He could go almost two weeks without operating our Maytag. Aidan once wore the same pair of socks for eight days in a row, and since this is indeed a war, he has no problems going commando.
But this time, Zane just waited until I left for work and grabbed my Tommy Johns. What kind of 19year-old wears a 64-yearold man’s underwear? Does his girlfriend know?
But the broader battle changes us both. Zane curses more, because he thinks it makes him sound street tough. In reply, I curse not at all. Not because I’m virtuous, but rather to claim the moral high ground. He hates it when I use ellipsis marks … and exclamation points!!! I hate it when he says “Imma,” as in “Imma keep it 100.”
But here’s the deal. I know I only have to wait them out. There was a time when my parents, Nurse Vivian and Hap, despaired of their three sons’ choices: bell-bottoms, Nehru jackets, dropping out (Brother XX), rock ’n’ roll. And so, even though to me Zane’s rap music is one big mondegreen, and Aidan’s hair is a Gordian knot, I have to hang onto the belief that they will survive. Sigh. The Dads are listening to gay music again.
In 1964, in an interview with The Chronicle, Jack Weinberg of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement said, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Six years later, he turned 30. Presumably he now says, “Don’t trust anyone over 90.”
Mind the gap, Zane and Aidan. Eventually you will be on our side. And by then you’ll be cooking stuffed peppers for your own children.
(This week’s 1960s mondegreen: Darleen Dhilion heard Jimi Hendrix’s lyric “’scuse me, while I kiss the sky” as “’scuse me, while I kiss this guy.” And I thought I was gay …)
Zane and Aidan are two soldiers in the Battle of the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior. They live to be oppositional.