Boogie Woogie Age of Aquarius

My step father went into the memory unit of a private nursing home last year. He was 79 years old. Ron went to MIT in the early 70s. While he was living his best dark rimmed glasses slide rule wielding engineering life, hippie culture was at its height.

The common area of the nursing home was decorated with 40s and 50s nostalgia. Big band music was piped in day and night. Route 66 signs and WWII propaganda posters were hung on the walls.

If you were a baby boomer born in 1945-1946 you were 24 in 1969 and in your late 70s in 2024. Most of his fellow residents were more likely to caught up in the fad of free love than doing the jitterbug to Glenn Miller. Boomers were stoned in the early 70s.

I was sitting in a coffee shop staffed by hipster Gen Zs with my son. The 80’s punk band Fugazi’s “Waiting Room” started playing. I looked at the boy and dryly spoke the first line at him. “I am a patient boy, I wait I wait I wait I wait….” My GenX dad beard is grey. I look like a boomer. Yet, in my youth I was mosh pits at punk shows.

Days later at the same coffee shop one of the Gen Zers confessed he was impressed that I knew Fugazi. I told him that the first time I dropped into a vert skate ramp their album “13 Songs” was playing. We both agreed that no one ever gets good at judging age no matter how old we are.

My parents cosplayed as hippies in the early 70s. I bought into the skate punk culture of the late 80s. As wanna-be hippies they started a food coop. At the same age I was putting surfboard wax on smooth sidewalk curbs to slide on.

What will be on the walls of my nursing home? There should be a Misfits skull and a “Star Wars” movie poster. The Talking Heads could be piped into the ceiling speakers. If nursing home nostalgia moves on a sliding scale I’ll be staring at movie poster for “Easy Rider” and listening to the soundtrack to “Hair”