I am not a Boomer – I’m a Geezer

The modern meaning of geezer is “an eccentric (unconventional and slightly strange) or irritable (easily annoyed) old man.” That’s me in a nutshell—pun intended. The original meaning is quite a bit different: “a masquerader, someone who wears a mask or is otherwise disguised.”

Each and every one of us carries the burden of any number of labels. Many are handed to us in childhood and we often wear them into old age. For example, being an awkward, often tongue-tied, heavy-set boy, I was labeled a loser. Picked last—if even chosen—for teams, ignored in the classroom and the playground, I accepted the label and became angry and bitter.

And you, dear reader, are wearing a few labels as well, probably as unkind and unjustified as mine. I hope that you had wise people in your life, as I did, who showed you the folly of allowing others to choose a label for you.

Of all the classifications and pigeonholes used to label me and everyone born between 1946 and 1964 over the years, none is more ridiculous than “Baby Boomer.” Call me a geek, as many have. Say I’m a fuddy-duddy, as my mother did. Even call me an old fogey, as my wife does, or weird, a term my father thought fitting for me. To a certain degree, I am truly all of those things.

But to call me a “Boomer” just because I was born during an 18-year period of national fertility is silly. My eldest son was born in 1978, the year of the first test-tube baby. Shall I call him a “Test-tuber?” Is he part of the “Test-tube Baby Generation? Since my second son was born in 1981, the year of the very first portable computer—the Osbourne I—must I call him an “Osbourner?” I have a third son, born in 1983, the year the Cabbage Patch kids were introduced—but we’ll go no further along that line.

No, if a label must be affixed to me to satisfy some odd American penchant to give everything a title, let mine be a genuine reflection of who and what I am. And I won’t let anyone chose it for me. Just because I’m teetering on the edge of old age, don’t call me a senior citizen, a Golden Ager, or any of the dozens of cutesy little labels worn to erase the pain of piled-up decades of time—or to dismiss us from the workplace and the world.

No, my friends—I am a Geezer, and proud to be one! There’s a touch of each part of the definition at the top of this column in me. But even though I’m from an earlier time, I don’t long for “the good old days.” Actually, in many very important ways, back then wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as here and now.

A few years back, after a particularly frenetic and discouraging day, I said to my mother, “You were lucky to grow up on a farm in the good old days—life was better back then.” She smiled at me in a way that told me a lesson in the art of living was about to be taught.

“The good old days on the farm, you say,” she said. “You mean when, if you wanted bread, you had to bake it yourself, because the closest store was 10 miles down the dirt road—and they didn’t even sell bread? The good old days when, if you wanted milk to go with the cookies you baked from scratch, you had to milk a cow? Or do you mean the days when, if you needed to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night, you got dressed and ran through the snow to the outhouse—are those the good old days you say were so much better than today?”

Silly me. I ignored her wisdom and replied, “Yes, I’d go back then in a heartbeat. Life was so much simpler in those days!” (Statements like that added to my father’s opinion that, “You are a weird boy, Tommy.”)

I admit that I tend toward weirdness at times, and that fuddy-duddy (old-fashioned, narrow-minded and pompous) and fogey (a person behind the times) are labels I deserve and wear with pride.

But never call me a Baby Boomer! I am a Geezer—an elderly, balding, feeble-bodied man with a gray scraggly beard and a cane—with a heart and mind full of fun and tricks. I may wear the disguise of a shuffling and stooped old man, but inside, I’m a real hoot. I am a Geezer, and proud to be one.