Dinner last night with good friends Sam and Carrie, and over dessert (split four ways) the boys of our generation performed their “first date” ritual, pulling out old driver’s licenses showing us, to great amusement, photos of themselves from decades long past, sporting long hair and full beards. I’d say that a good percentage of the time, if we meet another couple our age with whom we feel instant rapport, they were in some university back in the sixties or seventies, either championing the “revolution”, or dodging tear gas on the way to buy the latest Beatle’s album.
This got me thinking. If we were hippies in the sixties and seventies and yuppies in the eighties and nineties, what are we now? Back when I was in my twenties, I suppose that I imagined that when I would someday be approaching sixty, I’d be thinking pretty seriously about retirement, and there would not be any need for any new generational labels. I’d be cutting back, same as did my parents, fading graciously into the background, like Paul McCartney’s own image of turning 64. Nameless. Invisible.
Instead, I am full of energy and ideas and even if I wanted to, retirement for us is nowhere on the horizon. Then I thought of a handy moniker. At an age where expectations that our generation pull back, instead of “re-tiring” we are “re-upping” for another tour of duty in life. We are changing careers, finally getting around to taking risks with our dreams, advancing into new psychological and spiritual terrain, not only new to us as individuals, but for society as a whole. We are, in fact, Re-uppies.
Carol Orsborn