Wall Street Journal  – dateline Sat/Sun November 30-December 1, 2013 . REVIEW section, front page feature article , THE BOOMER BUST, by P. J. O’Rourke – essayist.

P.J. O’Rourke has a thing or two to get off his chest about  being one of and observing the 75 million odd baby boomer generation. He seems to be deeply troubled by our  existence and wallowing in baby boomer’s remorse  while he speaks for ALL of us. His musings embrace  his own self- loathing and our collective one as well. Thanks for worrying about us  P.J. O’Rourke.

The baby boomers have an exact definition. Did you know that? A precise demography we are told in his essay.

‘We are the children who were born during a period after WWII when the long-term trend in fertility among American women was exceeded.’

This definition is further broken down into the following catagories.

Seniors – those born in the late 40’s.

Juniors – those born in the early 1950’s ( your’s truly)

Sophomores – those born in the late 1950’s

Freshman – those born in the early 1960’s

This time span from the late 40’s to the early 60’s was  generally characterized by a profusion of opportunity concurrent with a collapse of traditional social standards. Mr. O’Rourke opines that this perfect storm of opportunity and social standard breakdown led us ‘en masse’ to become …” greedy for love, happiness, thrills, fame, inner peace and money.”

Furthermore, we are ‘NOT a generation who listens to anybody, including God.’

We are ‘the generation who insisted that a passion for living should replace working for one.’ All we cared about was our ‘personal universe.’

                                    Hey! Baby boomers…are you feeling BAD about yourself yet?! 

P.J. concludes his essay by pointing out that we now must come to the obvious conclusion that in our dotage, ‘everything you were told , was wrong and we must despair!’

I will hold off on the despair for just a bit while I make some of my own observations… from a Junior’s point of view.

We were most definitely born in an age of wondrous opportunity – certainly more than our parents ever could have imagined for us. We were, however, just children born into that time with no knowledge that it was a ‘golden ‘ era of prosperity or that we were destined to be the gigantic know- it -all generation of selfish leeches on society that according to P.J., we have become. Anyway… as we were growing up, mysteries did still abound. Like, why did our father’s spend hours on the couch watching old black and white movies about Hitler? Why would you watch that when the Three Stooges could entertain you so much better? Hitler was boring, and we had no way to relate any of that piece of history to our young, shiny, hopeful lives that our parents had born us into. They wanted to shield us and move us on from that dark time in both our history and the world’s. It was a new day and we were destined to move it forward with their help. We added hope to our ‘personal universe’.

Much like many of my generation and the seniors before me, our parents did not go to college. Yet they were not so uneducated that they did not see the great value it would be to us in the new world we were born into. So off to colleges we marched in great numbers, as much to get educated as to spare their young sons the horror of fighting in the Vietnam War. A war, as a generation, we questioned. We added education to our ‘personal universe’, with a healthy dose of questioning authority.

Now equipped with fine college educations, hope, and a questioning mind we went on to advance technology, medicine, religion, sexual equality, racial equality, women’s choices, career stereotypes, music, arts, literature, science , and the quality of life for 75 million people – just here in our country alone.

My goodness…what had our parents wrought? We were certainly NOT the Greatest Generation. We know who they are and what they did and sacrificed for us, and they deserve that title. The Greatest Generation gave us the age of opportunity and we embraced it whole heartedly. I’m frankly mystified by what perfect world we were obliged to create to satisfy P.J. O’Rourke’s viewpoint of our wasted lives. We have clearly been negligent to his thinking.

It is my contention that the best thing we learned and then shared as a generation was to QUESTION EVERYTHING. We questioned authority endlessly and on every front until we got answers that led us to a better understanding of our world and those on the planet that we shared it with.

                                   I believe as a generation, we learned to’ live in the question’.

And in doing so, we have kept an open and hopeful mind to the future. That is personally what I believe I have passed on to my son and his generation.

I do not share P.J. O’Rourke’s snarky, sad viewpoint on the 75 million baby boomer’s impact on society over the last 67 years. Perhaps his own personal expectations and achievements have led him to this rather dark and unfulfilled viewpoint. All I can say is, cheer up P.J., and peace out.

( featured image , WHAT HAVE I LEARNED? , canvas collage by Catherine Massaro)

So my winter migration is complete and I have settled back into my Texas home /studio.

When I’m here, I get to reconnect with printmaking, an art form near and dear to my heart. I actually started out as a printmaking major and was 2 years into the program before I started painting. I ended up with a double major, not being able to choose. I must admit, choosing a major was a real botheration to me as I wanted to keep on playing and exploring as many creative processes as I could. I loved photography and ceramics and it seemed limiting at the time to focus on just one, but that’s the way school works. So I chose painting primarily to learn about color as intimately as possible. And it helped with my printmaking, because you need to know how to mix colors and what layers of colors are going to do to understand what will happen on a print. Unlike painting, there is a great deal of thinking ahead and I liked the process and discipline of that thought process. My favorite form of printmaking is the monotype – the most painterly of printmaking types, and that makes sense for me, considering my love of painting. The spontaneity suits me, the painterly feel as well. But unlike a painting, the surprise element when you pull a print off the press ,for better or for worse, it’s never quite exactly what you thought you were going to get. And when it’s better than  what you anticipated, it’s like Christmas morning – both  a wonder and a surprise.

These are the things I most appreciate about making art and it’s a mirror of how I like to live my life. Filled with wonder and surprise. Migrating back and forth like this shakes  up my routines , forces me to be in a different mind set and environment, seeing again with fresh eyes. We need to give ourselves time and space to play and expose ourselves to a place or space where the unpredictable can happen.

” For whatever you’re doing for your creative juices, your geography has a hell of a lot to do with it. “Neil Young

Today was the annual Italian Festival in downtown Reno. There are numerous ethnic festivals throughout the year here, celebrating the Hispanic culture, the Greeks,  and more, but the Italian festival is the last big street fair event of the year before the town rolls up the streets for the long winter ahead. In my 5 years here, the event has always been lucky enough to have had a simply gorgeous Fall day, and today was no exception. Before you even park the car you can smell the garlic and food preparations and hear the music. There is of course a ‘best of ‘ cook-off for sauce, and fresh pesto is being made from one end to the other with giant vats of sauce  bubbling up and down the street,  all competing for the honors.

The smells are nothing short of heaven.

My father was a first generation Italian and the Italian side of my family was how we leaned . It was large and wonderful, teeming with Aunts and Uncles and a small army of cousins. Family mattered when I was growing up  as a child and  nearly every Sunday was spent at Gramma & Grampa’s house. I have nothing but wonderful ,  sweet memories of that part of my youth. Gramma spoke hardly a word of English, though it didn’t matter to her or us. Her goal was to make sure we were fed as often as possible before we left her house in spite of my mother’s protestations of, “Ma, they just ate! ”

There was always room for another bowl of my Gramma’s pasta.

I have only two dear Aunts left now, and all but one of my cousins. Sadly, I hardly ever see any of them, and when I do it’s to hear of yet another passing of these lovely people who made up such a big part of my young life. I’m sad to have grown so distant from my cousins and regret not being in touch as we now grow older.

They say every journey begins from home. I ventured out into the world as a young adult very confident of who I was and where and who I came from. I had a  solid home base as a launching pad in life. I had a culture and a family with a history to relate to. They gave me so much by simply  being there. I’m sorry that so many are gone and I no longer have the opportunity to thank them for that. And if they were here,  I would let them all know, that  family mattered  – very much.

(featured photo , canvas collage – WISH YOU WERE HERE , by Catherine Massaro)

“Of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.” John Ruskin

To my memory, I grew up in a pretty colorful environment. In  the 1950’s, our  house was turquoise,  and our car was fushia. In our living room – bright lime green chairs and flamingo pink curtains. In the kitchen, colorful Fiestaware dishes. But the experience of color that lit the fire of an artist in me, was watching my mother paint a trio of circus themed paint-by-numbers for my soon-to-be baby brother’s nursery. I watched at her elbow daily as the paintings took shape, mesmerized by the tiny color- filled paint pots, the smell of turpentine, and the magic as she placed one color next to the other until forms took shape as a giraffe,  an elephant, a circus pony. It was nothing short of magic to eye of a six year old. I watched till the very last brush stroke was placed ever so perfectly on the end of the giraffe’s tongue  – a tiny dot of  shiny white. My mother was a genius! I wanted to do that someday too, and as time passed, I did that and much more.

Fast forward to me an artist in 1972,  a new mom, setting up my soon-to-be son’s nursery, hanging that sweet and colorful memory on his wall. I still own that treasured set of paint-by-numbers, and they have photographs taped to back of them.  One of my mother proudly propping up her new son in his blue polka dot diapers with the circus paintings on the wall behind them and another, me with my new baby boy, and  the same set hanging behind us.

Now, it’s 2013 and that set  of paint-by-numbers hang in my Texas studio as a constant reminder of  how color can in fact, be the greatest gift to the sight of man, and a nod to my mother, for raising me in such a colorful, joyful environment.

There is a Hindu festival called Holi, during which crowds of celebrants hurl colored powders at each other in commemoration of Krishna’s pranks. It’s a frenzied scene of crowds with whirls of color and the faces of people covered in hot pink, yellow,  and orange. So as solemn and holy as John Ruskin’s comment on God’s gift of color is, I prefer the Holi celebration where worship is a loud and joyful festival of color. But he is most certainly correct on the divine part.

May you live in a world of  joyful color.

“I’m a member of the last generation of American children whose parents, especially mothers, did not worry about us almost constantly .” 

These are words from one of my favorite column writers on parenting, John Rosemond. www.rosemond.com

How I  loved the freedom I had as a child. Especially in the summer when our only requirements were to be home at 6 o’clock sharp for dinner, know where your brother and sister are, and don’t bleed out. Cuts were fine, bruises were fine, anything that required stitches or expensive trips to a doctor were not fine. We survived summers on great big bandaids and hydrogen peroxide. That’s that great stuff that bubbles up when it hits your wound and disinfects whatever evil you fell into. We looked like wild animals by the end of summer, just in time for school to start. Then came haircuts, hard shoes, and a return to schedules and accountability. Yet checking in was still slim. Dinner at 6 sharp NEVER changed, but it was up to us to seek out mom if there was trouble, and that was to be avoided if at all possible. Mostly because she was busy working and expected us to figure it out ourselves – which we did. It made us independent  in behavior and independent thinkers as well.

My mom was there for us though, solid as a rock, both soft and prickly. My independent streak drifted well into high school where I was consistently in trouble as I tested the boundaries of just how far I could go with practicing adulthood. I had many hard landings, including one very memorable expulsion. And just when I thought I had pushed the boundaries way past tolerance for even my father, I found a greeting card on my bed, with my dad’s handwriting on it. My father rarely, if ever, got involved with discipline problems which were my mother’s realm. So it was a surprise, to say the least , that my father had commented on my expulsion.

The picture  on the card was the famous Norman Rockwell painting of the little pig tailed girl, bruised black eye, all disheveled from a schoolyard skirmish, waiting on the bench outside the principals office – she had an impish smirk on her face. The inside of the card read simply,

HANG IN THERE.

Signed…

Love, dad

I still have that card, and still value how few words it took for him to tell me that it was my battle to fight , no matter what form it took, and love would be there to back it up.

Parenting back then was both soft and prickly … just like real life.

Thanks mom & dad.

( featured photograph by Catherine Massaro)

Many, many years ago, ( when I was in my early 20’s) I took a battery of psychological tests, one of which was to ascertain skills and interests.
My three highest rankings came out like this:

1. officer in the military
2. homemaker
3. artist

My lowest score was nursing.

I was initially mystified by these results. What did these three seemingly unrelated professions have in common? It was explained to me that all three of these loved organizational behaviors. In the military, following organized thinking is very important when large groups of people must follow suit to accomplish a common goal. An officer though? Well, it showed I wanted to be in charge of the goal, leading rather than following.

The homemaker, having been raised in the bra burning era stunned me as well. But here it was again – organizing a well run home, replete with children, is highly organizational. Martha Stewart created an empire on this very premise. ( I love you Martha)

Now to the artist. Artists are lumped into the crazy bin of those living on the edge of madness and poverty. To the uninitiated in the arts, nothing could be further from the truth. The process of printmaking for instance, requires tremendous organizational thought both in the mind as well as the act of printing. Artists are forever trying to figure out the organizational principals of creating ideas that begin in the mind, but end up as a sculpture, a painting, a song.

So back to the happy homemaker. I have always enjoyed my living spaces. Apartment or house, boat or campsite, it was an organizational challenge to both decorate and create a refuge. It should be a happy place, and indeed, anywhere I could set up a ‘home’ environment was a happy place to me. I like to think all my mother’s efforts to teach my sister and I the skills of homemaking contributed greatly in my appreciation of this realm. But as it turns out, it was never the ‘home’ that made me happy, it was the exercise of organizing the space. And as it turns out, organizing space , color, shapes on a canvas was not any different for me than organizing furniture, plants, or rugs in a room. Organizing things settles my mind and helps me make sense of things. So while a home can make you happy, it’s sole purpose should not be ‘happiness’. What does that mean then if we become suddenly ‘unhappy’? Is our house to blame? We cannot perfect our lives by perfecting our homes.
And just as there is organization in nature, we should strive to find that lovely balance of organization within our home to sooth the mind and create that happy place to buffet us from the noisy, complicated world we have created outside our doors.

(featured photograph by Catherine Massaro)