If you remember where you were when you heard, then it was probably one of those sad occasions that rocked your world. My husband had started to work and heard about it on the car radio. He turned around and came back to tell me. I was in the livingroom with the baby.

Now that baby is a musician himself and is heading north as this it written to spend another winter on the road. That leaves his mother to contemplate the bad roads conditions he and the other band members will have to brave in their old van as they drive from city to city, sometimes in the dead of night. Always on too little sleep.

John Lennon had paid those dues long, long ago. He’d gotten past the stage of dying of self-inflicted wounds, too. Who would have guessed that he was going to have to pay for his stature as a generational icon with his life?

Preparations are done. We’re almost on our way with sweet and mashed potatos and stuffing in tow. My sister-in-law and her family don’t do sweets. When they come here they bring a casserole of mashed potatos mixed with stuffing. It’s not Thanksgiving dinner for them without that. Unfortunately, our going there means bringing three dishes to make it Thanksgiving dinner for our family. Thanksgiving is such a food holiday that you kind of have to have your favorites.

That’s not the end of it. My sister-in-law is such a good baker that bringing desserts is usually a coals to New Castle kind of thing, but I’m bringing sugar-free chocolate pudding pie for my diabetic husband. That and the tofu turkey with the wheat gluten gravy for my vegetarian sister and we’re good to go. They’re never going to ask us to come again. I can see that coming.

My mother is getting dressed. She’s asked us where we’re going every half hour on the hour for about two weeks now. I think she’s got it now. Just takes a while. She’s focused on getting dressed now. Her outfit will be wasted on us, I’m afraid. We do our holildays in jeans, mostly. She just never noticed.

We’ve had a talk about avoiding too much political/religious discussion. Or at least not starting it. And not getting overly passionate if it does come up. No yelling. I made the rule. I think they suspect I don’t actually have that authority though. I think that’s everything. There’s nothing I can do about the fact that my sister will bring a book and fill conversational lulls by reading it. OK..over the river and through the traffic we go.

Played hooky this afternoon. My sister and I were extended invitations to the gypsy run-through of Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life, at the Schoenfeld Theater on Broadway. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a Broadway show - actually on Broadway, that is. I’m so glad I got to see this one.

What an experience it was. The gypsy run-through is a pre-preview, where the audience is made up largely of Broadway people. There are plenty of luminaries. Rosie O’Donnell, Liza Minelli and Hughie Lewis were there and those are just the ones I noticed. But a lot of the audience is made up of young Broadway dancers - the gypsies. This particular show is for them, about them and their lives and stars a woman who is a legend to them all. The outpouring of love, to and from the stage made it an extra emotional event, but I can’t imagine that it won’t touch all its audiences. Chita Rivera was touching, funny and still dancing in her early 70’s - and with 63 screws in her ankle as a result of being hit by a cab, no less. She carries the whole show on her shoulders, looks great, and doesn’t give out any diva vibes whatever. The friend who took us says that everyone who’s worked with her says she’s wonderful. Not everyone in that business gets those kinds of reviews from their peers. By a longshot.

The show is not just entertaining. It’s informative, too. Chita talks - and sings and dances - about her co-stars, the various choreographers she’s worked with, as well as giving very personal glimpses into her own life.

In the show, she maintains that “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.” That formula has certainly agreed with her. See the show if you can. Besides being fun, it’s just a really nice experience. It would be unthinkable if this show wasn’t a hit. A full description of the show can be found at Chita Rivera’s website. The show officially opens on December 11th.

I’ve been addressing invitations. Since they’re shower invitations I don’t actually know most of the people on the list. I just have assorted lists of names and addresses contributed by friends and in-laws of the showeree. Never has the inadequacy of our system been more clear to me.

In the distant past, we looked at the hodgepodge of feminine courtesty titles and it wasn’t good. And it was sexist. Men were all simply “Mr.” unless they used a professional title such as “Dr.” Things are more complicated in countries with an aristocracy, but so far in the U.S. the only aristocracy is wealth. Women’s titles, however, were indicators of marital status. “Miss” indicated the lack of a husband and “Mrs.” indicated that the woman in question was the property of one. So “Ms.” was coined to address that issue. Unfortunately it carried heavy political baggage and wasn’t universally adopted. Also, we don’t adapt to change when there’s still time to do it in an orderly fashion. After all, we’re still not using the metric system in the U.S.A. We prefer to wait until things have gotten totally out of hand. “Ms.” has become the title of choice for women who identify themselves as feminists and divorced women.

So, looking at this list of all female names, I have no idea about the marital status of a lot of them. And even if I did, it wouldn’t really help. When you address someone as “Mrs.”, you’re supposed to follow that with her husband’s name, not hers. “Mrs. Zelda Fitzgerald” is wrong. You’d need to write, “Mrs. Scott Fitzgerald”. But I don’t know her husband’s name, nor do I know if she’s the only Mrs. Fitzgerald in her household. She might live with mother-in-law or daughter-in-law. That’s one of the things “Ms.” should be perfect for, but frankly, it pisses some people off. Some married women prefer to be called Mrs. And when I answer the phone at work a surprising number of women identify themselves as “Miss”. There are more types of marital status than there used to be, too. There are the old standbys of married and single. Divorced has been around in large numbers long enough to be a classic now. But there’s also “married but keeping own name” and “divorced and returned to own name” and you have to know which it is to get it right. So, my mail is just going to Zelda Fitzgerald. No Mrs., Miss or Ms.

Thinking all this over made me realize why I’ve started to dislike sending holiday cards. Addressing them has gotten too complicated, too. You used to be safe just knowing the marital status of the recipient and whether there were other people in the household. A card could go to “Mr and Mrs Scott Fitzgerald” and family, for instance. If you weren’t sure about how “Mr. and Mrs.” would be received, “The Fitzgerald Family” was a reasonable cop out. Now you have situations like my own daughter’s family. She was divorced, reverted to her own name, remarried and kept it and her daughter who is a product of the first marriage, has her father’s last name. That’s three for three. One last name for each person in the household. I’m not sure about the dogs. Not every family includes a married couple either. I haven’t figured a solution to this one, other than not sending cards on purpose instead of just as a result of procrastination.

I’ve been thinking about Ronni Bennett’s post on TGB about Baby Boomers. I posted a smartass oneliner there, but it inspired some retrospective musing that won’t fit in a comment.

Baby boomers are anything but a monolithic generation. Being born in 1946 doesn’t give you anything generational in common with someone born in 1964. I was born in 1949 and my daughter was born in 1969. That makes the late boomers pretty much my kid’s contemporaries. The way I see it, we may fall into a demographic boom together, but people born at opposite extremes of the Baby Boom really don’t have much else in common in terms of their ages.

I did feel an identification with my more specific age group, I guess. It’s mostly gone now, as we’ve stopped being a generation as much as just a lot of people and a demographic problem. There were moments when I was proud to be part of it. And moments when I wasn’t. Most of the youth culture that happened during the most explosive years of the Baby Boom was Ronni’s generation’s fault anyway. It’s true, as Ronni says, that the media attention was focused on us, but the more thoughtful pieces explored influences.

Being born in 1949 makes me kind of an early boomer. We had our own issues. For one thing, there was a decided dirth of older siblings in our lives. Most of my friends were the oldest in their families. Of the few who weren’t, all were younger by just a year or so than the oldest. This held true even when we moved out to the suburbs where the families were a lot bigger than what I’d known in New York City. So teenagers were an exotic species to us. They had a tremendous mystique, since we so rarely saw them from the more intimate (and jaded) perspective of immediate family. I remember seeing what, in retrospect, were probably pimply, awkward fourteen year olds who’d come to the playground once in a while and fool around on the swings. The girls wore men’s shirts, sizes too big and dungarees rolled up to the calf. Marilyn Monroe couldn’t have looked more glamorous to me.

We were little kids when Elvis showed up on Ed Sullivan, but we knew something was happening there. The Wild Ones, James Dean, the Beatniks. Oh, we were no part of any of it, but we were aware of it and it was all simmering in our brains, under out Davy Crockett coonskin caps. (OK, I never actually got a Davy Crockett cap, but I’m over it now. Really. It hardly bothers me at all. ) The distance, the fact that none of that ever entered our homes made it all the more desirable. It was those older teenagers about whom the term “Juvenile Deliquency” was termed. We even liked that, in moderation. Rebellion was clearly cool. Coolness became the thing we aspired to most of all.

Our icons were not of our generation. John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez - all too old to be boomers. Even Jimi Hendrix was born in 1942. The Grateful Dead and the very underground but influential New York band, The Fugs, were products of the Beat sensibility.

Flower children were what you got when you took the the Beat Generation, the Civil Rights movement, the Ban the Bomb politicos, added the draft and an unpopular war and mixed liberally with electrified music and then had Timothy Leary bake it until crisp. But it all came from ideas and influences of an older generation.

Rock and roll was embraced by the generation of teens that preceded boomers and it and they prevailed against all the dire predictions of what it would lead to. It did take the boomers to make a lot of those predictions come true, but it was Ronni’s generation that provided the inspiration, the material and the soundtrack.

Jude is the first one I know to post about Christmas. I’m fully engaged in not getting a jump on the season once again.

The first thing I’m not doing is the cards. Jude is justifably annoyed by the early birds who send out their cards before anyone else. You won’t find me doing that. I’ve refined my method for holiday cards. I used to go out and buy them early and then put off addressing them until I was sending them out too late to be received by Christmas. No more. Now I have a lot of partial boxes of cards that have accumulated over the years and what I do is when I get a card from someone, depending on my guilt level when it arrives, I sometimes dig one out and send out a reciprocal card. It doesn’t sound like a method, but it is. If anyone is considering taking me off their list, I’m for it, so this way, I’m absolutely sure that I won’t interfere with that.

There’s the giving and receiving. I have no idea what to get anyone in my life. When Joey (my prospective grandson) arrives there will be one person I can shop for easily. That’ll last until he gets particular and it becomes impossible to keep track of what he’s already got and what he doesn’t. My granddaughter will be twelve going on 23 right after Christmas. Anything I get her will be wrong. I thought my perennially broke son would want cash, but he said he was so behind that nothing we gave him could possibly make a difference so he’d rather have some cool stuff. No indication as to what cool stuff he’s interested in.

As to the older adults in our family - none of us has room for anything. The place is full. We don’t have much closet space. We need to use up all the old stuff for a couple of years before we get anything new. What we really need is new kitchens and bathrooms, but those won’t be in Santa’s bag. My in-laws will send us cash gifts and we will respond with gift cerficates of approximately equal value. Similar pointless transactions will occur with other members of the family. The fact is, no one wants or needs anything that anyone else can afford, but there’s still the desire to have some shiny packages to open, so we keep doing it.

Then there are the work gifts. That’s a bit of torture. No matter how carefully you try to figure it out, someone that you didn’t get something for is going to give you a gift. And you’re going to embarass someone by giving them one when they didn’t get you anything. It’s a rule. Actually, most people at work give me gifts because it’s a tradition there to gift the receptionist. The first year I was there, that was fun. The next year, it was kind of enough is enough. I still have two or three sets of spa stuff that I haven’t opened.

In the US of A, however, we have to get through Thanksgiving before we can get to Christmas. Thanksgiving is a less stressful holiday because it’s just about food. But there’s still the fact that you can’t spend it with everyone at once. We used to have it here most years, but we gave up our dining room when everyone moved in and frankly, I don’t think I’m up to it this year anyway. My daughter has taken over a lot of our holidays, which is wonderful, but this year she and her husband are spending Thankgiving with his relatives. We’ll go to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s house. It sounds like a simple solution, but it won’t be. My mother isn’t going to be able to remember what we’re doing. She’ll start making conflicting plans with other, almost equally confused, relatives. All kinds of awkwardness will result. I can see it coming and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

Now I have to admit that last year the holidays were wonderful by and large. It was the first year my daughter and her family were living upstairs from us and we were together, but not squished together like the year before. I just don’t think it’s going to go as smoothly this year.

Weekends need to last about…oh…a week would be good. I never get anywhere near what I want to accomplished. This weekend was worse than usual in that regard. I was tired. I still get tired sometimes, although the periods of feeling normal are getting longer. Of course, goofing off still includes laundry, shopping, cooking. I washed a couple of windows, too. Still, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed. For one thing I have to write and address a bunch of shower invitations. I just can’t seem to make myself do it. I should be running out to party stores and picking up all the little touches. I don’t actually know where they keep the party stores, but I hear that they exist from people at work.

Tuesday is Election Day. It’s a “floating holiday” where I work, meaning we’re not closed but you can take it off as long as each unit has coverage. If you don’t, then you get another day sometime before the end of the year.I’d love to take it, but I need every day I can get for various medical appointments.

One day next week I have to get up extra a couple of hours early and go for monthly bloodtests. That, I do before work. They open at 7 am. That kind of makes me tired, too. It’s a fasting test, they take a lot of vials of blood and there’s the getting up at some ungodly hour to make it worse. I was thinking how getting your blood tested had changed in the last decade. It used to be that if a doctor wanted your blood, someone in his office took it and sent it off to the lab. Now everyone shows up before the lab opens and stands in line outside. Then there’s a considerable wait in the crowded waiting room before you get taken. It occurred to me that if you’d described this scene in the fifties, people would have assumed that it was yet another deficiency in the Soviet system. Now it’s the way fully insured Americans do things.

I came across a meme whereby people are posting five of their eccentricities. I don’t know if I can round mine off to a particular number. They seem to blend. Everyone’s eccentric in some way. You find out, once you get to know someone well, that we’re all pretty nuts in one way or another. Acculteration is another matter.

Years ago, a shrink my sister was going to told her she was poorly acculturated. She saw the wisdom of that immediately and also saw that it applied to the whole family in various ways. To be brutally honest, if you’re reading this and you’re not a teenager you probably have some aculturation issues as well. And I’m not so sure about the teenagers either.

Why do I say that about you? Because normal people don’t find obscure blogs, let alone write them, unless it’s part of their job. And it’s not usually part of their job. Mainstream people may have heard of blogs, but they’re hazy about what one is. And they don’t really care. They use Yahoo, Google and sites that deliver real world services. They might use instant messaging. They do not harbor desires to be content creators.

When you’re blogging, they’re watching TV. And they’re not watching CSPAN. They don’t have domain names unless they have their own businesses. “Traffic” only means cars and truck to them. Visitors come to their homes, not their blogs. Just try to talk to any of them about how you’re coming along with learning CSS and see the reaction you get.

So now that we’ve established that we’re all a little out of the mainstream, here’s my list of my personal symtoms of poor acculteration:

1. The internet thing. That would take a whole separate post, but suffice to say, I’ve rarely met an e-mail account or web service that I haven’t wanted to try. When I think about the pending arrival of my grandson, I think first about blogging his baby pictures.
2. I’ve lived in the suburbs all my adult life and we don’t barbecue. When we’ve tried, it hasn’t been a success and we always wonder why we’re bothering.
3. I see ads for cruises and resort vacations and think that I’m glad they can’t make me go.
4. I only watch one actual TV show - The Daily Show. Other than that, I catch the news on the run. There are other worthwile things on TV, I know. There’s just not enough time.
5. Fashion not only doesn’t interest me, it often offends me. I don’t care that I’m starting to look my age. I am my age.

That’s not a complete list, but I thought I’d stick with the premise of five examples. So, do you want to admit that you too have acculturation issues and tell us what they are? I’d be interested in reading them.

I might be turning a corner though. I am not - repeat not - going to check and see if any version of “poorly acculturated” is available as a domain name.

My daughter is having a baby. It’s her second, but her first is almost 12. Even in that time things have changed. The whole thing is a completely different experience than it was when I had my kids.

I went to Babies backward R Us with her and the equipment is mostly totally different. Strollers have become “travel systems” and they are. I just know I’m not going to be able to figure theirs out when they get it. Even the little infant seats for around the house are constructed completely differently. We didn’t get as far as the car seats, although I believe that the infant-size seat comes as part of the travel system. When she was a baby car seats were those little chair-like things that have since been found to be more dangerous than nothing at all. We only used them from the time the baby could sit up until about age two anyway. After that, they learned to wriggle out of them and they simply roamed free around the car. Seat belts? Most of the cars didn’t have them. We mostly felt if we arrived at our destination with the kids inside the car, we were doing our job.

There were no playpens to be seen. Instead they have “play yards” which can also serve as portable cribs or bassinets. They look very useful. They’re not as roomy as playpens, but I never knew any babies who didn’t immediately begin howling once they were placed in a playpen, at least once they were old enough to move around on their own.

They started changing recommendations about introducing foods between the births of my two kids, who were also far apart. When my daughter was born, you gave them a tiny amount of rice cereal as soon as they seemed dissatified with their all liquid diet. With my daughter, that was almost immediately. By the time my son was born it was three months or something like that and when my granddaughter came along it was more like six. Now I assume that they expect the kid to nurse until puberty. You have to ignore some things.

Even the ailments accompanying pregnancy are different. As of today she’s come down with a sudden and very painful case of carpal tunnel syndrome. That’s not good, because she’s working as a freelance grahic designer and carpal tunnel could really cramp her style, so to speak. She looked it up and it turns out it’s a common condition of pregnancy now. She’s in her sixth month and that’s when it most commonly starts. When I was pregnant no one had heard of carpal tunnel. We had to make do with swollen ankles.

They know so much more about what’s going on with the baby than they used to. We know exactly how much the baby weighs, that he’s a boy and expect to get his projected SAT scores from next month’s tests. I hope they’re good. Otherwise he’ll have to attend remedial Mommy and Me classes.

I’m not at work because I spent the morning having a second round of mammography and ultrasound for this year. Just another thing that’s cropped up lately. I haven’t got the results of that yet, but I did learn something. I learned that I need a camera phone. Cool. Now I have a Christmas list.

I was in the parking lot of the medical building - one place in the world where you never come across anything out of the ordinary - when I saw it. “It” was an older model, mildly beat up compact car entirely decorated with, for lack of a real word, Pezobilia. It had blow-ups of Pez candies kind of decoupaged on random spots along with a big photo of a vintage pez ad. It had one of those taxi top things where they put ads that just said, “PEZ” and the fenders were decorated with actual Pez dispensers.

Since I didn’t have a camera at the scene, I did a search for it as soon as I got home. I figured someone must have posted a picture of this on the web at some point. No luck on this particular car, but what I did find was a little more surprising. Maybe I’m just the last to know, but it seems there’s a large and devoted Pez culture out there. What Star Trek, Star Wars, The Grateful Dead and Phish have been to their respective audiences, Pez is to the Pezheads. And apparently their number is legion.

There are Pez conventions, Pez messageboards, some really nicely done personal sites devoted entirely to Pez, a Pez MP3 player and there is a much more famous Pez car, too. Just plug some of this into Google and see what you get.

And to think, the candy itself isn’t anything special. It was always about the dispenser. When I was a kid, I liked the dipsensers, but I often used the candy to play the role of bars of soap in my dollhouse. Tasted about the same as I recall.