The sign hangs in a spare bedroom decorated for my grandson whenever he spends the night at our house. Blue dino footprints march up and down all the walls and a stuffed tyranno rests against the pillows every week in between sleepovers, keeping guard and waiting for the seven-year-old who will soon outgrow the ferocious fascination he has for all things extinct and move on to something more realistic, like Star Wars.
It’ll be a sad day when that happens, just like it was a sad day when he told me he was over Thomas the Train. It’s not just that I’d finally gotten the train decorations in that room right. My heart broke because it was a kind of graduation. Grandkids grow up faster than my children did, I’ve discovered, and no matter what I do I can’t slow it down. I guess the real heartbreak behind all of that is the knowledge that every time they get a little older, I do, too.
Nothing brings that into focus more than when I take a hard look at the culture we live in today and realize that I don’t recognize anything anymore. Listen, it’s not that the era of my youth was anything worth being nostalgic about. When I was a kid growing up outside San Francisco, it was the Drug Culture, Make Love Not War, LSD tripping, Vietnam War debacle, throw-everything-that’s-ever-had-value-out-the-window culture. It was the Sixties, not Happy Days. I don’t look back on that period of my life with fondness, let me put it that way.
I realized the world as everyone knew it was a’changin’, and it could go from bad to something more bad. (Even grammar was biting the big one.) But I had roots in something deeper than the shallow culture of the time and I was used to swimming upstream, rowing against the flow. Like a puzzle piece from the wrong jigsaw, I’ve never fit in comfortably. Uncomfortable. That’s generally how I feel when my life is put in a lineup with all the other lookalikes while an unseen judge on the other side of the two-sided mirror determines who the real phony is.
I finally know who I am.
I am the dinosaur.
For example, I believe—and please don’t take offense at this—that the best people to raise children are the parents of the children. Yes. I know. Gray areas abound here. Life is expensive. Homes are headed by single moms. Some homes are horrible environments, not even worthy to be called home. There are plenty of sad scenarios about families on the extreme edge of survival. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about priorities. About the over-swing of the cultural pendulum, from “a woman’s place is in the home” to “I am woman, hear me roar.” We are no longer under the thumb of men, in general. Glass ceilings still apply, I realize.
Women are capable of doing it all. Bring home the bacon, fry it in the pan. Sixties graduate here, remember? I agree, women have been suppressed. I am a woman. Believe me, I know. It takes sacrifice to stay home, make ends meet on one income, and change every poopy diaper a baby--and society--can throw at you. I’ve been hit by a lot of poop. It takes creativity to come up with entertainment on a budget while all around are other young families who provide every cost prohibitive toy the industry can dream up so the family will have fun memories. It also takes a healthy conviction that money doesn’t equal fun. Just look at the fallout of celebrity lives who have more money than God and end up destroying their own lives with it.
Now there’s an out of place puzzle piece.
Last night we watched the Super Bowl and the highly anticipated half-time show, or at least five minutes of it. Maybe it was ten. I don’t know. I was busy trying not to feel nauseous and wondering why there hadn’t been a warning to families that it was R-rated. I know that’s not a popular perspective—lots of people on facebook told me so this morning. I’m too much a dinosaur to have seen it for what it was. An exciting display of feminine power. Extreme athleticism, especially since the stars were both middle-aged. And, above all, it was the first time that two women headlined the entertainment spectacle, particularly two Latino women. Double.Edged.Sword.
Here’s where my creaky bones try to knit together in Ezekiel’s wilderness of scattered skeletons. Just that afternoon, while working on another writing project, I’d read a list of words worthy of use in describing the strength and beauty of women. The internet page also listed words that are often confused with complimentary expressions for females. Guess what word showed up on the List of Oppression? Sexy. The very thing that highlighted the “entertainment” millions of people tuned in to see last night.
The internet article stated that women are not sex objects. The Super Bowl begs to differ. The women who performed last night see things a little differently, too. I agree that they were in superb physical condition. That they are very flexible. That their conditioning puts a lot of twenty-year-olds to shame. Actually, it doesn’t. The shame is when women of power take the opportunity to headline something as big, and supposedly family friendly, as the Super Bowl and use it to teach young girls that seduction is entertaining, modesty is stupid, and talent is only appreciated if it makes men salivate.
I warned you. Dinosaur here.
I know this is pointless. I’m either preaching to the choir or speaking in pig latin. I learned that on facebook this morning, too. Here’s the thing. Something went wrong at the beginning of my generation, about 1960. I know that’s hard to believe when you realize that Barbara Eden was forbidden to show her belly button on I Dream Of Jeannie, and that Ricky and Lucy and even Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore slept in separate beds as married couples on my black and white television set. But don’t be fooled. That was all smoke and mirrors. The evening news and popular music and Haight Ashbury and mini skirts and free love, they all told the truth. That there was no longer truth. Its expiration date had come and gone.
Like the dinosaurs.
I have granddaughters who will inherit the earth we’re leaving to them, and I am afraid for them. I have grandsons who will do the same. I’m afraid for them, too. I know when people stop to analyze whose fault it is that our blue marble has spun out of control on many levels, the finger will point at us, the Baby Boomers. We should have stopped the culture wars. We should have been more tolerant. We should have minded our own business. We should have been more involved.
Don’t worry. I’m not bitter. It’s the same criticism every generation lobs at the previous one. And I’m sure every generation on its way to its eternal reward has worried that those they’re passing the torch to are ill-prepared to run the race. It’s just a pendulum swing. Nobody trusts anybody anymore. We’re all just getting what we can while we can. Until something catastrophic happens and climate change occurs and we bury all the truth we don’t believe in anymore beneath the ground we walk on.
Like the dinosaurs.
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