Author Archive for Cafe Guys

Some of us boomers, even before we knew what generation we were part of, feared milestone birthdays. 20, the end of childhood; 30, the end of youth; 40, the beginning of middle age; 50, just a decade til 60! But writer Cindy La Ferle has shared with BoomerCafé a letter she just wrote to a friend turning 50. It’s all about the good things.

Dear D.:

Your 50th is coming up this month. Rather than send you a bunch of black balloons and one of those dumb cards with a joke about adult diapers, I’m writing you a letter with some advice. I offer it with a full heart and the seasoned experience of someone who’s all of three years older than you are.

There’s no denying that 50 is a landmark birthday. A turning point. The Big One. Over the next few weeks, you’ll be paying more attention to the mirror in your bathroom. Reading your face like a road map, you’ll scrutinize your eyelids and check the skin around your cheekbones. You might notice, for the first time, a couple of age spots that can’t quite pass as freckles. You’ll wonder if your jaw line isn’t as sharp as it used to be.

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What’s a baby boomer without a midlife crisis? Albuquerque’s Sheila Key and Dr. Peggy Spencer have just written a book about it called, 50 Ways to Leave Your 40s: Living it Up in Life’s Second Half. They’ve allowed BoomerCafé to run an excerpt which is rightly called, Okay, Have a Crisis Already!

The first “midlife crisis” I ever witnessed (though I was clueless at the time) happened around 1975, when I was fifteen. My best friend’s dad, a jolly-big fellow and friend to my whole family, suffered a heart attack, went off to some big-city hospital for what seemed like forever, and came back a trim, tanned Mr. Groovy. I’m sure I gaped to see this “old” family friend, a guy no cooler than my own dad, decked out like all the young dudes, in turtleneck, bell-bottoms, even a goatee. Suddenly I understood what people meant when they said, “You look like a million bucks!”

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Sure, today’s younger generations have a few advantages we didn’t have when we were their age, but as BoomerCafé co-founder and communications professional David Henderson writes, that doesn’t always make it a better world.

When I was a kid growing up in the Washington, D.C. area, American Airlines had one of the most romantic images in the sky, with its shiny silver planes. My family didn’t travel by air often because we, like a lot of Americans in the post-World War II era, just didn’t have the money. But I remember the … well, it was the feeling of riding on a plane back then and sitting in a seat that was actually spacious even for an adult and swallowed up a kid like me. All that is fast-changing before our eyes. We baby boomers may be the last generation with those memories of great legacy airlines … and great service.

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As active baby boomers, we feel young … but how young do we have to look? Journalist Cindy La Ferle says, not nearly as young as parts of society demand! When she looks around, she sees Women of an Uncertain Age.

Lately, my fifty-something friends and I have been rehashing the time-worn topic of aging gracefully versus aging desperately.

Even in the scant-few women’s magazines geared to our demographic, “mature” fashion models appear to be surgically altered or botoxed, then dressed to look 35. The message? Aging is shameful. To be avoided at all costs. She who looks youngest wins.

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Most of the time, BoomerCafé focuses on what our generation is doing today. But Joanne Hague is focusing right now on what we did yesterday … or more to the point, forty years ago. She’s looking for help to mark a milestone that helped shape the leading edge of the baby boomer generation. She’s rediscovering the past, at Woodstock.

Undoubtedly, if I had been just a couple of years older in the summer of 1969, I would have found my way to Bethel, New York. Woodstock, one of the greatest events of all times, was happening a mere 60 miles from where I lived. I remember watching the news reports with my mom, and her being aghast at what we were seeing. But me, I wished I was there.

A few years later, I married. Had my children, had my life … and Woodstock was something that I never thought about after those days. Until 1994. That’s when my children and I attended a festival in Bethel, and I realized exactly where I was.

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Are the kids gone? Are you having fun without them? Don’t feel guilty; David James doesn’t. He says there’s life after kids, and you’re absolutely entitled to enjoy it!

When Veronica and I came up with the idea to write about living life after raising kids, and actually looking forward to it, one of the first things I did was Google “empty nesters.” I wanted to see if anyone was looking at this the same way we are. You know, isn’t it great that the kids have moved out and we have life to ourselves again?! To be untethered and free to wander the globe. To be Gypsy Nesters instead of empty nesters.

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