Grandma's Been There

Around ten o’clock every morning, my mother turned on the television to watch game shows like “Concentration,” “Truth or Consequences,” and “The Price Is Right.” And every afternoon, she watched “Queen For A Day.”

Could it be possible that a fountain of youth exists? Not a spring filled with water that reverses the aging process when we drink it or bathe in it, but a state of mind, an attitude, a way of looking at ourselves. Are old age and childhood more connected than we know? This episode is dedicated to the memory of George Clayton Johnson.

Nowadays, when most businesses are open on Sundays and we can shop on line twenty-four hours a day, it must be impossible for younger people to understand what it was like for nearly every single business in the neighborhood to be closed for an entire day. But kids of my generation couldn’t imagine Sunday any other way.

How’d you like to visit your childhood home only to find out your old address no longer exists?

Lots of things have changed since I was a kid, but there’s one question American kids have been asking every day since the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. “What are we having for supper?”

I became a podcaster because I love podcasts. They’re entertaining, educational and sometimes even inspirational. This week, I’d like to tell you about a handful of my favorites in case you’re looking for something new to listen to. 

By the time we were sixth graders, we were used to our teachers’ theatrics. The antiquated flowery language, trite worn out proverbs and dumb expressions meant to showcase their superior intelligence while illustrating our stupidity. They had a million of them. Is this what our parents were paying tuition for?  

In the mid-1960s, our teachers warned us we would someday suffer from something called “future shock.” Our world would change so drastically and so rapidly that we wouldn’t be able to keep up with it all.  It would cause distress, anxiety, even disorientation and confusion. Maybe for the older generation, but not for us. We kids couldn’t wait to be bombarded by the future. We were ready. Bring it...

The first few weeks of a new school year were always a rather frenetic period of readjustment and settling in. Get used to a new teacher. Get the right notebooks. Cover all those textbooks. For me personally, the hardest thing to adjust to every September was being back in school while the weather was still summer-like. It felt wrong, unnatural—like we’d been kidnapped.

In the late 1960s, you didn’t have to be fully aligned with the counterculture to enjoy a visit to a psychedelic shop. You just had to be open to new ideas and have a willingness to recapture some of that childhood sense of wonder, whether you were an adult or a kid.

Mary Quant, the fashion designer whose creations defined the 1960s “mod” era said she spent her thirteenth birthday crying because in her words, “old age had struck.” All she had to look forward to now were below the knee-length dresses, high heeled shoes, corsets, nylons and garter belts, stiff beehive hairdos, artificial nails…  I totally understood. Before I became a teenager, I had been dreadi...

When we were little kids, just about everything was chosen for us, but the candy store was a place where we got to pick what we wanted.

Everything I need to know about life, I learned from Rod Serling. Well, maybe not every thing, but lots of important stuff. By the time I was thirteen, I’d seen every single “Twilight Zone” episode more than once.

A richer, fuller more joyful life? Relaxation, discipline and more will power? Increased physical, mental and spiritual control? Who wouldn’t want all that?

Nowadays, they call it “me time.”  A time to shut out work, world and worries and just concentrate on wellbeing and recharging the physical and spiritual batteries. When I was a kid, we called it summer. Just like the old rhyme said, “No more pencils, no more books. No more teachers’ dirty looks.” I heard that! Except that chant should have been modified to say, “no more text books.”  

The summer of 1967, so frivolously referred to as the summer of love was a turning point, an ending and a beginning. Somewhere around the middle of July, the counterculture gained a number. I jumped in head first, and never looked back. It was the moment I’d been waiting for for thirteen years.

Summer days were long, lazy and dreamy. We were content to spend most of our school vacation outside eating ice cream, drinking sodas and playing with friends on the avenue, going no further than the corner store or the playground on the next block. But on a Saturday or Sunday, or during those two short weeks our fathers were on vacation from their jobs in July or August, we stepped out. All we wa...

In January 1968, my favorite band, The Byrds released an album called The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Life-long fans like me referred to it as “the Notorious album.” One of the tracks on the album was “Draft Morning,” a song about a young man, a draftee who was in no hurry to be shipped off to Viet Nam and commanded to kill people, a command that came from faces unknown to him. 

When we were kids, it was common for us to ask each other, “What are you?” What we were actually asking was, “What nationality are you? Where’s your family from?”

Even as a child, I was in love with the seasons, their unique personalities and the different things they did to get our attention. But if you asked me what my favorite season was, I didn’t even have to think about it. “Summer!” I said, just like every other kid I knew. Why would you even have to ask?

The reason I have so many stories about my father from my own childhood and from the stories he told me about his years as a kid is because of my exceptional memory—the one I’m always bragging about in these episodes, the one I inherited from him.

I’m a June baby, one of Cancer’s moon children born right after the longest day of the year. In other words, I’m lucky enough to be able to celebrate my birthday right as the summer begins.   

Before I even became a teenager, there were plenty of banned rock and roll records out there. Many of them were in my own record cabinet. 

When we were kids, the adults in our lives wanted to be sure we understood that honesty was always the best policy. But how was that concept supposed to sink in when they were constantly lying to us?  

When I was a year old, I still hadn’t grown any hair. My mother Scotch taped a bow to the top of my bald head so I would look less like a little boy in girls’ clothing. As a teenager in high school, I loved my waist-length hair and couldn’t understand why my teachers hated it and wanted me to cut it off.