The Upstory

I was 15 years old and easily embarrassed by my mother, the unflinching Sarah Gorby.

Mom didn’t like hippies, or as she called them “feeble-minded freaks.” Any male with long hair was a hippie. The teen baggers at our grocery store were hippies if their hair was over their collar and thus Mom wouldn’t let them carry her groceries. “The bags are too heavy for you girls,” she’d tell them, while I told future me to find a good therapist.

My mortification was complete the day she drove past an actual hippie with waist-length hair, love beads, and tie-dye. “Get a haircut you feeble-minded freak,” she yelled out the window. Of course, the guy flipped her off and the Generation Gap grew ever wider.

Mom was Greatest Generation and none too keen on the next generation, my people, the Baby Boomers. She didn’t like the short skirts, the protests, the communes (that’s communal living, something the dratted hippies did, but more on that later), or the general attitude of these young whippersnappers.

So naturally, I wonder what she’d think of Millennials. I wonder if she’d complain about them the way Boomers do. She didn’t stick around long enough to meet her grandson and granddaughter, both of whom are Millennials.

Maybe she would have joined the Boomer chorus of “they’re entitled, they’re lazy, they’re disrespectful.” Or maybe she would tell the Boomers they dropped too much acid way back when and have forgotten what they were like.

Mom tended to stereotype unless she liked you and she usually liked you once she got to know you. One of her biggest about-faces came when she fell in love with Mana-ware,  gorgeous pottery made by people living in Benson. In a commune. And yes, they were hippies.

Somehow she and the pottery-makers crossed paths in Tucson and she bought a few pieces of what they called their “ceremonial earthenware.” Then they invited her to come to Benson to see their kilns and meet Mana, their spiritual leader and commune founder.

I kid you not.

Mana was a few years younger than Mom and a lot of years older than the rest of his followers. He not only was Head Honcho but he was also, according to his business card (who knew hippies had credentials?), head of the Peyote Way Church of God. Naturally, he was the frontman for Mana-ware. 

Watching pottery deals go down between Mom and Mana was highly entertaining, what with both of them so completely in charge of their worlds. They’d go eyeball-to-eyeball and neither one would remove their sunglasses, even when they were indoors. Mana’s eyes likely couldn’t take much light because of all the pharmaceuticals running through his system. Of course, Mom, a master of brinksmanship, would never remove her sunglasses during pottery negotiations with Mana.

But back to Boomers and Millennials and Generation Gap 2.0.

As a card-carrying Boomer, you’d think I’d also be talking smack about Millennials. But for some reason I like Millennials. I am mother to two of them, I count a number of them as friends, and I run into them constantly. They work in the restaurants I go to, they’re at my gym, they’re on the trail I hike, and before I went to Retiree Heaven, they were my colleagues in the workplace.

Millennials are good people who get bad press. I don’t recall Generation X getting the negative reviews that Millennials do. And I hope that Generation Z, which is coming up fast, doesn’t catch this kind of fallout.

I don’t know what my Mom would have said about Millennial bashing, but when I hear it it I like to adopt a Walter Brennan voice. Walter was a three-time Oscar winner who often played characters who were older than he was in real life. It helped that he had an old man’s voice that was much-parodied because it was so distinctive.

So I get my Walter Brennan on and say his famous line defining the generations:
“Gol-durn young whippersnappers.”