The Time of Our Lives

by Tom Brokaw

  Like every generation, their time is being defined by new realities, many of them unforeseen but with certain advantages. When each of our grandchildren was born I had the same thought: Welcome. You’re off to a good start. You’ve been born in America into loving, stable families with strong traditions of parenting.

  I was never more proud of our middle daughter, Andrea, an executive at Warner Music, than when she was frazzled one Sunday morning while dealing with thirty-month-old Vivian and twelve-month-old Charlotte, trying to give each newly awakened toddler breakfast and attention.

  I said, “Motherhood is a lot more demanding than you expected, right?” Andrea paused in the middle of putting a fresh diaper on Charlotte, laughed, and said, “Yeah, Dad, but it is so much fun.” She wasn’t kidding, this free-spirited Berkeley graduate who spent her twenties and most of her thirties hanging out at rock clubs and concerts, trying to find the next Bruce Springsteen.

  Jennifer, our eldest daughter and a physician, shares the joy of parenting with her sister as she shepherds her two daughters through preteen and teenage commitments to school, chorus, soccer, field trips to local attractions, and summer trips to Italy and London.

  Jennifer has started a new business as a consulting physician after twelve hard years working in San Francisco and Albuquerque emergency rooms, but she’s determined not to dial back her attention to Claire and Meredith or her husband, Allen, a prominent and very busy radiologist.

  She recognizes the pressures for women of her generation who want to do it all, including, in her case, a demanding training regimen for long-distance swimming in San Francisco Bay.

  “Dad,” she’ll say, “it wears me out but I know it’s worthwhile.”

  Sarah, our youngest, is not married at age forty-one and with every passing year the idea of becoming a single mother plays a larger role in her life. Frozen embryos, a surrogate, and adoption are subjects a new generation of grandparents have come to know in a way our parents could not have imagined. A clinical therapist, Sarah transformed her personal and professional experience with these issues and others affecting modern young women into a popular book called Fortytude: Making the Next Decades the Best Years of Your Life—Through the 40s, 50s, and Beyond.

  Exploring the myriad questions facing women in their forties is another manifestation of the social and cultural evolution of Sarah’s generation. Confronting these changes as a grandparent is a handy way of calibrating the course of our life histories. When I participated in a grandparents’ day at Claire and Meredith’s school in the fall of 2009, a teacher asked the grandparents and her students to record side-by-side accounts of life in the seventh grade for the two generations. All the grandparents except one who had attended a public school in the Bronx remarked on the de facto and legal separations of the races in their seventh-grade experiences. We also commented on the inequality of opportunities between boys and girls, especially in athletics.

  The grandchildren seemed amused and slightly bewildered by what I am sure they considered to be ancient history. Their lists made no reference to race or gender. They began with computers and video games. They also call their teachers by their first names—remember, this was in San Francisco—a practice that in my time would have meant a note to the principal’s office about the troublemaker in the back row.

  It was a smart and provocative exercise for the kids and their grandparents alike, one I filed away as a future conversation starter when entertaining my grandchildren.

  Here are some differences we didn’t get into: When Meredith and I married young—she was twenty-one and I was twenty-two—we had just graduated from college, and everything we owned, mostly wedding presents, fit in the backseat of a Chevy II, one of the first compact cars. We struck out for Omaha and never looked back or called home for money or help.

  Now fully half of young Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four still live at home, most of them without a job. That’s an increase of 37 percent since 1970. In a book entitled Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone, authors Richard Settersten and Barbara E. Ray remind us that baby boomers, who were so quick to leave their own parents, often enjoy having their children around a while longer, providing financial assistance and advice. Moreover, Settersten and Ray discovered that many young adults are leery of rushing to sign on with an employer who feels no loyalty to them.

  They quote a young Nevada woman working her way through college who said, “I think our generation knows that we cannot rely on the government or a company in the future so we have to take care of business ourselves; do these qualities breed loyalty? NO. It simply causes people to base their lives on something of more permanence, such as friends and family.”

  To that I would add, “including grandparents.” It is a new relationship we’re all working our way through. If there are rules for connectivity between grandparents and their grandchildren, I seem to have been otherwise engaged the day they were handed out. The best summary is now a well-worn comment: “If I had known how much fun grandchildren would be I would have had them first.”

  I do have a few learned-on-the-job observations. The truest seems to be this one:

  When raising your own children, bribery was a form of white-collar crime. For a grandparent, bribery is a business plan.

  It is part of the unspoken Grandparent Code of Behavior that it is okay to buy grandchildren all the ice cream they want, their first bicycles, or even pay for their education. The most ordinary gestures can pay off. During a vacation I made a point of bringing my youngest grandchildren hot oatmeal every morning. Within a day I was greeted with squeals of laughter as they shouted out, “Oatmeal man, here’s the oatmeal man.” It brought back memories of my own grandfather, a man of extremely meager financial means. When he’d babysit the three Brokaw boys there was no thought of going to the local diner or bowling alley café.

  He had a limited capacity in the kitchen, so for breakfast, lunch, and dinner he’d fix us the one dish he had mastered: pancakes. During one three-day stay we must have consumed close to five dozen pancakes.

  Grandma Ethel was appalled when she returned, but we assured her we had loved every morsel.

  It is also important for our generation of grandparents to go beyond the material and share with our grandchildren our cultural, political, and personal values, to help prepare them for the vastly different circumstances of their future.

  When I shared these thoughts with our eldest daughter, Jennifer, she immediately said, “I don’t want some sappy letter to my kids talking about the good old days in a Hallmark card kind of way.” I promised her I would try to avoid tales of walking to school through Great Plains blizzards or working in a rock quarry for a dollar an hour, even though those were instructive and formative experiences.

  As my generation and the baby boomers have learned, we seem to have a much closer relationship with our grandchildren, just as we do with our children, than our grandparents and parents did with us. We’re learning the seemingly infinite uses of the new information technology together. We share common tastes in wardrobes and lifestyles. The chances that my parents would wear blue jeans and running shoes, and go biking or cross-country skiing on weekends, were about as great as Billy Graham opening an ashram.

  My generation and the boomers have grown up believing the world needs to hear from us. We’ve had an ongoing dialogue with our children, so why not just extend that to the grandchildren?

  I live in a world that my grandchildren will occupy, as my grandparents did not. They were confined geographically and culturally to the rural Midwest even though they had met in Minneapolis. Their lives were spent first on a farm and then in a succession of small towns as my grandfather found work where he could.

  They lived out their senior years in a tiny tidy mobile home, not nearly as spacious as even the most modest SUV I see these days plying the interstate highways of the American West. In the summer mont
hs I’d stop by and we’d squeeze together in what passed for the living room and watch the Major League Baseball game of the week on their twelve-inch black-and-white television.

  Grandpa wore his Irish sentimental side like a comfortable cardigan, tearing up and sniffling whenever the national anthem was played on television before the game began. Grandma Ethel was a Baker, a no-nonsense WASP who would hiss, “Jim, for God’s sake, stop. It’s a baseball game, not a memorial service.”

  Thanks to the television they had an electronic window on a world they never expected to see and certainly didn’t expect to experience. Their lives were defined by that small trailer and wherever my parents would take them once they could no longer afford a car, but I remember no complaints. They were cheerful and interested in the news of the day. Ethel even sat by my side when as a family we watched Elvis’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  Mother and Dad failed to see his appeal, but when it was over Grandma said, “He seems like a nice young man; I hope he makes a lot of money.”

  Fast-forward to my life and relationship with my grandchildren and it is a universe of shared experiences, from urban life to travel, culture, and current events. We have much more of a shared prism through which we see life.

  Five-year-old Vivian is a dim sum aficionado. Once Claire and Meredith were with me on a beach when a waitress approached. I was wondering what to order the girls when Claire said in a clear, confident voice, “We’d like two virgin piña coladas. Tom, will you join us?”

  For all their worldliness, I hope they also have an appreciation of what went before, beginning with their families on four sides. After all, they are an extension not just of gene pools but also of experiences, dreams, and lessons.

  CHAPTER 18

  September of My Years

  A few years ago I was invited to be a guest on the Sirius XM satellite radio show Siriusly Sinatra, devoted to the life and artistry of the man known as the Voice, Ol’ Blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board—Frank Sinatra, probably the greatest American entertainer of my lifetime.

  I’d long been a fan of his music and a student of his larger-than-life place in American culture that stretched from show business to politics to the shadowy world of the mob and beyond. That night it was mostly about his music, and I selected as one of my favorite Sinatra recordings “It Was a Very Good Year,” the love song to life.

  The show in which I participated is repeated from time to time, and when I turned seventy a friend of the same age called to say he’d been listening to it while driving on a dark road on a stormy night in Wyoming. He found the selection of “It Was a Very Good Year” at once evocative and unsettling—unsettling because of that haunting last verse.

  It is preceded by paeans to small-town girls and soft summer nights, when I was seventeen; girls who lived up the stair with perfumed hair that came undone when I was twenty-one; blue-blooded girls of independent means with chauffeured limousines when I was thirty-five.

  Then, this:

  But now the days grow short;

  I’m in the autumn of the year

  And now I think of my life as vintage wine,

  From fine old kegs,

  From the brim to the dregs,

  And it poured sweet and clear.

  It was a very good year.

  That’s it. From small-town girls and soft summer nights to a life as wine from the brim to the dregs.

  For so long the autumn of my years seemed to be a distant season. But now, inexorably, that season is upon me. While like everyone I’d like to put time back on the clock of my life, I have no rational reason to wish for a reset.

  Rather, my short and long objectives are to make the most of the time remaining and to get through the autumn with grace, compassion, and always a commitment to leaving the world a little better place for family and everyone.

  As my professional obligations contract, I have no illusion about the need for one more gray head saying, “Now in my day …” My familial role has taken on a new form, one that Meredith and I relish.

  THE PRESENT

  In the sunset years of life and marriage, we find we need to blend each other’s strengths and judgment as we deal with a more complicated world, the role of grandparenting, and the financial, emotional, and physical management of the years we have left. Gratefully and in unspoken ways we came to that conclusion simultaneously, and we’re working through it in tandem.

  How we manage these years, I suspect, will not go unnoticed by our children and grandchildren, just as Meredith and I watched our parents and grandparents as they began what has come to be known as their senior years.

  Earlier I noted that today the experiential gap between generations is narrower than it was then. Grandparents and grandchildren share the same tastes in wardrobe, music, movies, technology, and culture to a far greater degree than they once did. (I do wonder how children forty years from now will react to the profusion of tattoos among their grandparents, who are now in their twenties. Or body piercing. “Grandma, where else on his body does Grandpa have a tat of a snake?”)

  This common turf means grandparents have a unique and welcome role in helping parents set a course for youngsters through the meteor shower of choices the information age brings. What is wise use and what is distraction for the sake of distraction? What is unacceptable, by any standard?

  My generation has a unique opportunity to learn something new and perform an important public service simultaneously. Grandparents my age were witness to the cruelties of racial segregation and the violence that erupted when it was challenged. How many people my age and slightly younger had their first lessons in shocking injustice as they watched the fire hoses and dogs turned on the peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham and Selma, or the epithets and twisted expressions of hate that greeted the well-dressed black students walking up the steps of Little Rock Central High School?

  Now there’s a new form of injustice in schools across the nation: the anonymous taunts and vitriolic mocking designed to hurt and belittle a target for his or her adolescent awkwardness, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.

  There have been bullies as long as there has been adolescence, but the Internet tools of videos, anonymous postings, and profane attacks have taken this ancient cruelty to a new level. It is an appropriate subject for parents, schools, communities, and grandparents to take up with the youngsters on the giving and receiving end.

  Race is a subject that can open the door to that discussion.

  Socially, contemporary grandparents often comment on the color blindness of their grandchildren. However racially tolerant members of my generation may have been, most of them attended segregated schools and lived in racially segregated societies north and south, east and west. Two generations later, their grandchildren live in a time when race is steadily moving away from segregation and toward assimilation.

  But bullying is, alas, an exception to the growing place of racial tolerance, and it is in that arena that grandparents can and should be proactive mentors within their families and in schools as volunteers. My generation can bear witness to the shameful treatment of people of color and the hope that almost all of us had that we could move beyond it.

  That we have made great progress is testimony first to the courage and vision of the people of the movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but also to the determination of the rest of the population to march beyond the stain of institutionalized and de facto racism. It should be a matter of generational pride, just as the acknowledgment and diminution of bullying can be a matter of pride for our grandchildren.

  To do that we have to find the cyber fusion between our grandchildren and our use of this technology. Websites could be established for interactive conversations and re-publication of the most disturbing images from the civil rights struggle. Online word games could be lessons in hurtful, even hateful, language. It could be an exercise that would help heal the wounds within our generation while providing a forum for intergener
ational understanding.

  The discussions need not be confined to bigotry or social cruelty. What about a dialogue on the public use of language? When did the F-word become acceptable outside the locker room or barroom? Tell me about your purple hair. Is it only me or do others wonder what the grandparents of the randy, exhibitionist cast of Jersey Shore think when they watch Snooki and Paulie and their antics? For that matter, how would you like Paris Hilton as a granddaughter or Charlie Sheen as a grandson? Curious minds want to know.

  Attention to personal health and extended longevity are also benchmarks for our generation worth celebrating for the benefit of our grandchildren. At a reunion of high school friends recently—all of us seventy years old or older—I asked, “Who in our town was seventy when we were in high school?” I stumped the gathering. Finally one of the old gang remembered a banker who may have lived his three score and ten. Men, especially, were dying in our town in their late fifties and early sixties with distressing regularity.

  In their case, lifestyle was a major factor. They grew up in a world of cigarettes and cigars, marbled beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, fried chicken and butter on everything (even on a slice of cake for my dad), all-you-can-eat buffets, and whipped cream lathered on whatever was for dessert. God forbid they would be caught jogging or biking. Walking from the golf cart to the bar at the end of a motorized round of eighteen holes was about the extent of their regular exercise.

  My father and both of Meredith’s parents died before they were seventy. My mother lives on into her nineties, thanks, in part, I believe, to a move to California where her lifestyle took on a healthier mien.