My Sister

My sister drew this decades ago. It may be the only thing she's ever drawn, although she has a grandson now and maybe she will draw little pictures for him. The caption is still one of my favorite sayings to use when I need something more dramatic than my grandmother's "oh my aching back." My sister is a human being I described today as a prettier Yoda. She is the sibling who got all the common sense from the gene pool that stewed the Robinsons. She was born wise and has grown into good use of the wisdom. She tells me I'm weird. I correct her in the direction of bizarre. She gets a kick out of my naivete. The world and its people are always a surprise to me, repeated experience notwithstanding. Learning impaired. My mother would ask me "how many buildings have to fall on you before you get it?" My sister is honest, in the Heinlein Fair Witness sense. She is the same with everyone. Facts are facts, humans are flawed, the world isn't built to give us what we want. Pragmatic. And admirable. She's the last person to claim she has her shit together, which means she does. And she is funny. Oh, my, we need more humans like my sister. 

A Three Story Life: The Pounce

The Pounce is what happens when I wander upstairs. If I'm on my way to the kitchen, Dad will make a remark into the air. "I don't think those wing nuts are the right size." For years that would cause me to stop, turn and ask "what wing nuts?" and I'd be caught. If I'm on the way out the door, handbag on shoulder, keys clutched, The Pounce occurs concurrent with my hand touching the doorknob. "I don't understand this," he'll say. [Note the similarity to The Sideways Ask.] Slowly I turn, hand drops from knob, I ask "what?" and then I'm going to be late. Pounced again. Dad is so confident I'll respond, he doesn't even look up. If he's at his computer, he taps on the screen. "This." If he's in his globalpops-lounger, he holds up a piece of paper. No eye contact, confident in his power to stop forward motion. I drop handbag, keys, books, all things toted, and grab the paper or peer at the computer monitor, ready to explain "this." Used to work 100% of the time. I'm caught at about 45% now. As I adjust behavior, Dad gets wilier. Today I got flattened by The Pounce because he did make eye contact. He held up his hands, shrugged, rolled his eyes, in perfect imitation of a Jewish mom with an unmarried kid who's too skinny. He looked imploringly up. "What?" I asked. "Well, I went up to the hardware to get the back door window glass cut, you know, the broken window." "What size?" hardware man asked. "Standard." "Well, there's lots of standard, bring in the frame." "So I got some bolts to put the holder back on the wall." "What holder?" I ask. "The bathroom toilet paper holder." "So we've switched rooms?" I observed. "Well, yes, but the bolts don't work." "Take me back to the back door," I suggest as Pounce Tour Director. "Well, I've got all the screws out but one." "Let's go get it out then," I offer, thoroughly Pounced. "No, I'm tired from working the bolts." "What bolts?" I ask, apparently suffering short term memory loss from being Pounced yet again.

What Else I Like About Being Older

I'm a slow learner, so it's an advantage to be headed for elderdom. Each decade had its own idiocy, like any other life, also 10 year spans of richness I can reflect on at leisure now. Reverend Lorna Brown told us that each experience, tragic or less than, is a lesson we'll need. We don't always feel the lesson. We wail, fret, holler why me, quote Dorothy Parker what fresh hell is this?, but reflecting on how you just pulled another rabbit out of your hat at a given moment now, you can see the script on the movie screen of your mind. 10 years was behind me when I grasped that change is to be desired, not hated. 20 years went by before I realized that not freaking out was now a lifestyle. 30 years on I knew that living based on what everyone and everything else wanted of me was not a good way to live. 40 years of struggling on my own sent me to find professional help in turning my life around. 50 years experience figured out my dad is sad and cannot know how to be happy, so being happy myself is a nice example. 60 years went whizzing by before I understood that not everything in the universe happens just to me. And even if I don't look at all like this silhouette, I can still draw that lovely figure, with her pearls and cigarette holder and I didn't have to buy the pearls, the dress or the cigarette. Life is gooder being older.

What If Age and Sex Didn't Matter?

Never imagined this question would have an answer in my lifetime, but we may find out soon enough. Marty Kaplan writes that the emperor of TV advertising pricing has no clothes. How erroneous are the Nielsens? "Essentially invalid. No link," said CBS Chief Research guru, David Poltrack. Continuing reliance on the coveted 18-34 age group will be anathema to marketeers. About damn time! Now we'll be in for a bunch of cluster, um, taste and behavior psychographics, but I'll take that shift. It is not possible to ignore the boomer bubble, and now there's money involved. As I wrote before, those who marketed to the purchasing preemies are in for a rude awakening right fast. Not just TV, but movie money will redirect. Boomer bucks. Stay tuned.

Ziggity Boomer

My new persona. I use ziggity boom a lot - mostly to describe when I go ballistic about something or other - like when I forget one of two things on my mental list, or when yet another product I prefer is discontinued. Live long enough and everything we prefer is discontinued, and though I know that cognitively, I am not zenned enough to accept it. I go - and use - ziggity boom so much that my good friend Joel named a character in his book Ziggy Bloom. I typo'ed ziggity boomer the other day, and I liked it. Funny that the older I get, the more typos seem significant. Maybe as I age, I need significance and will pounce on it wherever I find it, even in my sent folder. Or maybe I'm making everything up, including anything I think I notice. That's Ziggity Boomer. I'm going to trademark it. If I remember.

For Women Who Weren't Born Yesterday

Ken turned 50 this month. Barbie is older than Ken. In 2009, when Barbie reached 5-0 I started rescuing chewed, green-eared, haircut, forgotten Barbies on eBay and changing each into a 50-year old. We got older, why didn't Barbie? Wrinkles were created with marble dust, rather than life experience. I took off the face paint and repainted more age appropriately. The Barbie pictured here was the Unicef Barbie circa 1989. She had bitten fingers and toes which became arthritic with a little sanding. I gave her a cool haircut and gray hair. I had trouble with one poor doll whose legs were bent. The repair sites told me to plunge her in boiling water, and bend the legs back. I preferred to just give her a cane and tell the story that she needs a knee transplant, but can't afford it. Each doll got reading glasses around her neck, and in her handbag a membership card, proudly proclaiming membership in WWWBY. I didn't get my first Barbie until I was 35, because when I mentioned I'd never had a Barbie to my then husband, he thought I missed having one. I didn't. I appreciated that my mother and grandmother thought the doll was strange gear for a little girl's toybox. But I sure loved every one of the Barbies who weren't born yesterday!

Marketing to Me: Advertising Discovers Boomers

Cloris Leachman in a leather jacket. Ziggity BOOM! Network Solutions' new Go Granny campaign got me to call. My ziggity boomer side winced at the granny, but I am also senior, sensible & savvy and dislike the tata godaddy ads. NS was smart to offer an alternative image and I'll move my business from godaddy. The man I talked with said the phones are ringing off the hook. That's cool. I worked in industrial advertising for decades and liked the work because it's simple: appeal to the greatest number of potential customers and make your current customers happy with the decision to buy. We savvy women and men aged 55-64 have a whole lot of money to spend nurturing our businesses. Women entrepreneurs are the fastest growing small business segment. Job creation is rising in the women-owned business realm. We buy and we influence major purchase decisions. Women not only buy purses and make-up, we buy high tech, industrial and automobiles. I remember years ago at dinner with a newly-arrived automotive marketing vp from the UK. This is Detroit, so he was with one of the formerly Big 3. I asked him what his plans were for marketing to women. He said, "you can't market to women." At that time - circa 1985 - women influenced a new car buying decision at about 75%. It was the 80s so influencing was a far as we got. Little wonder we had to bail these birds out 25 years later. I saw the taglines on an msnbc blip about marketing to Boomers yesterday. The 30-something man and woman discussing it talked about brighter colors and Depends. I saw the spot. Honestly. Who the hell cares what color your Depends are? It's a start, long overdue. It will get better, once the ad agencies aren't chockablock with 30-something boys who dream of Mad Men women, instead of 401k-cashing, business-starting, fast-car-driving, motorcycle-owning, techsavvy women like us.