Tag: The Sixties

Pinky Blinders

Today’s writing prompt: “You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?“

Mine is:

“For me, the Fifties will forever be symbolized by Jayne Mansfield and her pink, heart-shaped pool.”

That is an image I have long carried of the Fifties. Beautiful, buxom, platinum haired Jayne Mansfield hoisted in the arms of her weightlifter husband Mickey Hargitay at the edge of her Beverly Hills swimming pool.

What is it about that image that sticks with me? For me, it was everything that was wrong with the Fifties. The garish and overt sexualization of women’s bodies. The plasticity and pretentiousness of the bottle bleached blonde. The artifice. The illusion of endless summer.

As a child you don’t know what is real and what isn’t. You learn what the accepted reality is from the adults around you and what – according to them – is supposed to matter.

Children have no choice but to accept and mirror this version of reality and it becomes their own. Until it doesn’t. The choice of opting in or out that comes with adulthood.

Even as a child, I remember being appalled by the behavior of a lot of the adults around me. Especially at our frequent house parties. The adults drank too much. Many smoked – a stupid, filthy habit I eventually adopted for many years and then finally discarded.

They laughed too loud. There was a constant low level of tension and forced frisson at these parties. Adults trying really, really hard to have a good time.

The disconnect between what many of these people said and what they did was evident to me. Way too much flirting and laughter in corners between men and women who were married to other people in the room.

I have come to understand how traumatized that entire post World war Two generation must have been. Sure, the Allies had been victorious over the evil forces of Nazism. Sufficiently to declare victory, disband the active war effort and move everyone back into a semblance of normal living.

Turns out that was easier said than done. Women used to making their own money and living independently were forced back into the domestic arena to make room in the workforce for the returning menfolk.

Possibly worse as an expectation, these displaced women were supposed to be happy about it. Doing their bit for the boys and country and all that.

Little wonder that the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield became popular. They were part of the post-war myth that life was not only better after the war, but bigger and better than it had ever been. These women and all the pretenders were symbols of all the freedom and glory the war effort won them.

It was bound to buckle. No society can live disconnected from the dictates of reality indefinitely. Enter the Sixties and what soon seemed to be constant social upheaval on every front: civil rights, the anti-Vietnam War protests, the rise of feminism, Baby Boomers starting to come of age. New rulebooks being written.

I see myself and my life goals as having been marinated in the stew of the Fifties. As an adult, I still tote around my little bag of values from the influences of that early upbringing.

The Protestant work ethic. The focus on external symbols of success. An expectation of affluence. A certain generational narcissism about our “uniqueness” that came with being part of the largest cohort of babies born in one period in the history of the world.

Today Boomers are vilified by many. Our focus on accumulating wealth and security worked well for us as a generation. To the point it seems that we have unintentionally scanted the generations coming behind us.

How in the name of heaven did a simple single family dwelling get to be so ridiculously expensive? Everywhere. I’ve yet to find a logical economic explanation.

While my autobiography would open with a description of that superplastic vision of hyper-happy and beautiful young and rich people like Jayne and Mickey, it was evident that fantastical image and lifestyle was bound to be time-limited.

It was a pablum period. No grit in the corn meal. No starch in the shorts. Just fun and glitz and partying and happy. Always happy. Perpetual adolescence.

The generation that lived it up in the Fifties eventually came back to a place of reckoning in the decades that followed. More settled and mature. Yet some of the Fifties core values are worth hanging on to.

A fierce sense of justice and atonement emerged from the detritus of war. An inherent world-wide sense of the fragility of peace and human life. The focus on stability to ensure the healthy growth of the upcoming generation. Medical and technological advances galore.

For those of us shaped within the confines of that decade, many of the images endure and maybe some of the values, too. Our crowd is leaving the planet and will have left its mark on the world as every generation inevitably does.

I recently read there are now more millennials in Canada than there are “baby boomers.” The great cull has begun. Soon, the pluses and minuses scored by our generation will be consigned to the history books.

And when it is, I have a strong suggestion for the image that best represents us for the cover.

About That Book I’m Writing

[If I published this post before, it is high time to post it again. I have two weeks from today until I reach the one year anniversary of publishing a daily blog post. I needed to remind myself why i started.]

I was born in the Fifties to a professional business family in a small East Coast Canadian town. I have been trying to sort out the logic behind my arrival and existence on this planet ever since.

If you want to know the narrative arc of my memoir, it is that. Making sense of where I came from and to what end.

I experienced zero to minimal stability in my childhood. There were pluses, of course, but also abuses and dereliction of parental duty – by times insignificant and at others, life-altering. Okay, I’ll say it: life threatening.

My mother fervently hoped that the pluses she tried to inject into our young lives would outweigh the abuses. She later managed the pain of our fragmented backstory by adroitly deflecting criticism and accountability by acting as if no abuses had happened.

And if abuses did happen to me as a child, she asserted, it was not her fault. I had somehow brought them upon myself. I was an aberration and accident of birth maybe. It takes a particular parental personality to react in that way upon hearing about bad things that happened on their watch.

As a “teenanger,” I was full of rage at my mother for her attempt to abandon us with a serious suicide attempt. (I note the typo in teenanger, but I’ll leave it as it fits.) I was also furious with her for what I truly believed then were unjust grievances she had against my Dad. I was fully onside with his point of view.

As a young teen, he used to bend my ear by the hour with detailed evidence of how horrid and evil my mother was. I once screamed at Mom that she was deliberately blocking Dad’s path to happiness.

You see, she put up roadblocks in his affair with a local floozy by refusing to sign divorce papers. The floozy was determined to not only bed him but wed him.

Apparently, she had made a couple of failed attempts with other lawyers in town. No doubt she thought the third time was a charm, but that didn’t work out for her either. So sad.

Much later it occurred to me that it probably wasn’t appropriate that my father shared my mother’s psychiatric diagnosis with 12-year-old me. I remember him handing me a single sheet of paper with a brief paragraph summing up my mother’s deficiencies.

What I remember from that shrink’s written summary is that “the patient” did not seem “to be able to clearly distinguish between right and wrong.” 

Mom’s suicide attempt when I was 11 years old rent the family neatly in half. Me and Dad were on one side of the divide. My two younger sisters and Mom were on the other.

It should be no surprise that our sense of “family” today (both parents are deceased) is shaky to non-existent. My mother and I never fully healed the rift between us until she died.

We were restrained and civil to each other in public. In private, we were two lions circling and sizing each other up for the next attack.

I eventually learned there wasn’t anything all that special about our family or our circumstances in my childhood. We were certainly not as “special” and “gifted” as my mother wanted us to believe.

Our way of life was different from my peers, for certain, and vaguely bohemian to be kind. Code for chaotic. Mom reveled in her outrageousness and little social rebellions in our tiny little town. She actively curried our sense of being intellectuals and adventurers.

I often reflect on how similar but different my story is to many of my contemporaries.

Dad may have been screwing around but so were many others. “Boys will be boys, after all!” Mom got through her days by consuming a cornucopia of pills chased down with a generous helping of vodka.

But that wasn’t unusual. Lots of ladies from the Fifties sought emotional deliverance from “Mother’s little helpers.”

We were all raised in a society awash in the post-coital ecstasy of the post-war Fifties having climaxed by summarily screwing Hitler and his evil Nazis.

Thank God we were able to. The world deserved to celebrate that victory. But as often happens at unchecked adolescent celebrations, the world went rather to hell with it all. The Sixties fixed that.

So off I sail into my daily writing labors today on yet another unknown adventure. Destination set but how exactly to get there is uncertain. The goal is the eventual delivery of a manuscript that is worthy of becoming a printed book. I’m primed for adventure, stormy seas, and lots of hard work and soul searching. That’s essentially been my life.

As former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it: “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” I believe I am more than qualified for my mariner’s ticket.

I truly believe I can master the roughest of seas these days. I have proven it.