The hardest part of the day for many Boomers is finding their car in the parking lot. It’s not like the old days where you simply parallel parked in front of the store you were shopping and then went inside. When you finished, you knew exactly where your car would be. Life today is full of mega-parking lots and shopping centers on multiple levels, and every car in the lot is grey.
About twenty years ago, car companies came out with the greatest option since automatic transmission. Push button, automatic door locks. Not only did the handy gadgets unlock your car with the push of a button, but they also locked the doors without using keys. And best of all, the door lock initiated a little beeping noise from the car that indicated the doors were secured. On any given Saturday at Barracks Road Shopping Center, you’ll see dozens of baffled Boomers walking up and down the parking lot, clicking their door lock buttons to locate their cars. It’s not that we are senile or anything, it’s just that there is so much else on our minds to keep up with – like taking pills.
The second hardest part of Boomer-hood is remembering to take all your pills, and at the right time of day. Most Boomers have a little green pillbox for morning medications and a white one for medicines to take at night. The morning pills are always easiest to remember, while the night pills seem to last a few days longer each month, due to forgetfulness.
There was a time when the strongest pill a Boomer took was from a Pez dispenser, but now there is seemingly a pill for everything from joint pain to high blood pressure to cholesterol. When Boomers were growing up, no one ever spoke about cholesterol, because no one really knew anything about it. They still don’t today, but if you have any at all floating around in your arteries, you better be talking a pill for it.
Another introduction into the lives of Boomers is soccer. They say it’s a sport.
For Boomers, there was baseball, basketball, and football. No soccer. Who can remembers asking for a soccer ball for Christmas? Santa’s elves would have freaked out.
“What’s a soccer ball?” they would ask Santa.
“It’s a toy for uncoordinated children” was the answer. Today, millions of kids play soccer and occasionally Boomer grandparents find themselves trapped at a soccer match.
“What’s the score?”
“Oh, there is no score. No one has scored on this field for 10 years, but there was a kick on goal just last summer.”
And kids today would simply not believe that there was no such thing as pizza when many of us were youngsters. Pizza seemed to pop up from out of nowhere, catching us totally off guard. There are thousands of Boomers today who had skin grafts on the inside of their mouths from wolfing down their first slice of this lethal “pie.”
No one warned us that the average temperature of the cheese on a slice of pizza fresh out of the oven was 700 degrees Fahrenheit and who knows what in Celsius? Yet today, pizza pie is a staple, and as soon as I can find my car keys, I think I’ll go pick one up.