Why Club6290?

Few Euro-American families living in major cities have a third generation living within earshot.

Time was when a subdued fifteen year old lad, aching from his first romantic rejection, would find himself out in the back forty helping Gramps and Great-Uncle Frank replace a fence post. Unbidden and without explicitly commenting on the boy’s sullen cant, Uncle Frank would spin a yarn about his first lovesick heartbreak. Seems a slightly older neighbour boy had just completed repairs on a 1946 Indian Chief (motorcycle) that hadn’t worked in years and he offered Frank a spin.

"Fifteen minutes later, I couldn’t even remember her name!" says Frank.

Gramps laughs so hard, tears come to his eyes.

The young lad picks up the shovel and spiritedly starts back filing the post hole.

There are some things a son can discuss more easily with Grampa or Uncle Jim than with Dad. There are certainly things a daughter can discuss with Grandma, or even a female peer, that might ruffle Mum too much.

Thus, my motive in starting this blog is to offers aging boomers some sweaty, fly-swatting third generation lore from the virtual back-forty.

Awash with existential angst over our disappearing roles as parent or professional prodigy, people entering the third round in this life will find Club6290 a useful reframing of what it means to live the proverbial three score and ten... and then some!

That task will begin in earnest with my next post and will depend, even more than most blogs, on input from us all.

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Zero to sixty? What's next?

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Remember when all young men thought about was 'zero-to-sixty'?

We measured life in miles-per-hour (mph) in those days, lazy afternoons when a Chevy Belair was coloured olive-green and mustard yellow and had tailfins that only lasted a year. GM bent them all out of shape in 1958, then filled in the gaps in 1959. Nothing has been the same since.

Girls were still on the horizon, approaching slowly we thought, but faster than we knew.

What happened?

Suddenly it's zero-to-sixty in ... well, in sixty years damnit. How the hell else do you measure it?

We faintly remember noticing hair growing in our armpits and figured, "Well, that's it. We are Men." We were then left to saunter off, oscilating between ecstacy and despair, with nary a clue about other milestones along the way.

I wonder if that is peculiar to our generation, the one that has grown up with only two generations at home.

When our parents were kids, most of them had grandparents and granduncles and greataunts all within earshot. Our kids have virtual connections to similar resources. But we, products of the post-war-but-pre-boomer generation, have crawled, clawed and flown our way through life more alone and more on auto-pilot than possibly any generation before or since.

Women aren't quite so lost or clueless, until they reach sixty anyway. They've gathered that primeval green slime in their belly every moon, a regular tweet from the original universe that provides a substantial and persistent reminder that life happens, even when it stops.

Men stumble upon sixty. Without lunar, or solar, or saturnian reminders, we bumble along, oblivious to change or real other, until, suffering from the indescribable illusion and pain of thinking we cause everything, our carefully constructed parts (roles) begin to fall apart.

The real Boomers haven't a clue yet. They still think they're twenty-two, or forty-three, and won't begin looking to us for ideas until they're sixty-five or seventy.

That gives us about five years to get our third act together and, perhaps, offer them a more dignified example than we otherwise might.

That is the intent of this blog. To banish forever the mistaken idea that life spans only two parts. A debilitating model visited on us by the clueless term 'middle aged'. If life has a 'middle', it must come in two halves, right? Wrong! That model leaves us stranded. Too young during the first half and too old during the second.

Remember, one you're stuck, two is a dilemma, choice begins at three.

Thanks largely to science and prosperity, our generation is the first that will routinely expect a third act. Unless we are to be the only such generation among humans on this planet, it's time to map the way.

Club 6290 (sixty-two-ninety) is here. Call for a tow if you hit a bump on the road. Better yet, become a volunteer cartographer and help us map the terrain. The boomer-brats aren't far behind.

Sixty to Ninety is here.

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