Baby Boomer blogger

The Square Dance Unit. Or Why I Never Forgave Our Gym Teachers

| Linda DeMers Hummel

I liked school as long as I was sitting down, and lucky for me there was a lot of sitting in those days. I excelled at raising my hand and keeping my notebook tidy. In music class, I could hum, eventually locate the melody, and blend in. In art, I learned early that coloring inside the lines often trumped talent. I was relieved to have been born a girl because I had to do far less to prove myself than a boy did. It let me lower my expectations and avoid disappointment. I was excellent at being a girl.

There were setbacks, of course. Because we lined up and walked the halls in Size Order, I was never able to forget for a second that I was freakishly tall. Three girls in my class were also named Linda, rendering me “Linda D.” until I got to high school. I spent a fair amount of time wondering why my parents hadn’t thought ahead before giving me the most popular name in the universe, or — for that matter — combining their towering genes to create a child who was taller than her pediatrician by the time she was 12.

It was harder to adapt in gym class than other quadrants of Raymond J. Lockhart School, but unless it was October, I did okay there, too. Hugging the wall, and shouting, “Yeah!” when my team scored, and “Ugh!” when my team missed a goal, I could pretend to be in the mix of a spirited crab soccer game without my foot ever touching the ball. I was an expert at losing my place in line when we were climbing ropes. By 6th grade I’d mastered all the non-participation tricks ever invented.

But October always arrived no matter what grade I was in. And October meant that our gym teachers would push a button to retract the sliding wall that separated the girls’ gym from the boys’ gym and make their big announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, next week we will begin our Square Dance unit. This is an important social component of physical education. You will stay in your street clothes.” They always made it seem like we’d be curing Leukemia starting the next Tuesday and that always bothered me. Also, who called them street clothes?

Our gym teachers were a married couple. We guessed their combined ages to be about 230. Mr. and Mrs. Tierney went with the Darwinian model when it came to Square Dance as they did for every game we ever played. To me, Square Dancing seemed very much like Dodge Ball except there was some curtsying here and there. I was always slightly disappointed on the first day of Square Dance when I didn’t wake up temporarily paralyzed.

“Girls on this side of the gymnasium, boys on that one. Line up, single file.” And with that, the choosing-your-partner humiliation began.

So here it was, another year when no miraculous change in the curriculum was going to save me. I began by checking to see if any of the boys had grown a foot or two over the summer. As always only Russell Oliver, whose parents were rumored to be over seven feet tall, was taller than I was. I silently yearned for other Massapequa families to be overtaken with whatever chromosome arrangement was lurking in the Olivers’ bodies. I saw no growth spurts.

“Kevin O’Hara!” Mr. Tierney announced. To the accompaniment of some hooting and hollering from the other boys, Kevin walked to the other side of the gym, sizing up the girls waiting to be chosen. He took his pick, and promenaded her to the center line. Then every boy, one by one, got his turn.

As the number of unchosen girls started to dwindle, I did what I did every year. I hunkered down for the long haul, attempting a casual pose, absently looking up at the rafters as if thinking, What is that exciting, important thing I’m doing later?

Sandy Palma and I usually looked at each other at about this point. I was too tall and she was too heavy, and it would come down to which one of us would be the last chosen. I was okay with Sandy getting chosen before me. Sitting down, I could blend in better than Sandy. When she sat down, there just seemed to be more of her. But, oh God, did I hate being the last one even if I was trying to be gracious to Sandy, who deserved it. Being last meant you had to endure the sound of the boys engaged in mock applause when the last boy had no choice but to pair up with you. And for reasons that probably died with them, the Tierneys always acted like they didn’t hear the din going up.

Russell was called third on this day, an enviable position if he wanted to pick a pretty girl, and why wouldn’t he?

Then, in a move that made no sense to anyone, Russell walked over and chose me. What? I may have heard a collective gasp, or maybe that was just the voice in my head. Life was mighty rosy from the center line when you’re not the last girl chosen.

I always thought Russell’s choosing me was a pure act of kindness. As the only boy tall enough to promenade me through the perils of 6th grade, I thought it was a conscious choice, meant to help me out.

About five years ago, I found Russell Oliver on Facebook and wrote to him, telling him how fondly I remembered this moment and thanking him for it. His response was gracious without overcommitting. Because I don’t think for a second he remembered any of this, which makes me think that I took things way too hard in my childhood.

When Baby Boomers Go Old School

| Linda DeMers Hummel

I learned a lot about modern parenthood when I watched my brother’s kids for a week while he and his wife went on vacation. I stayed at their house in Massapequa, cooked the meals, and got their kids to and from school — Raymond J. Lockhart School — the same one my brothers and I went to. To claim the kids in the afternoon, I had to show a signed permission slip to a woman holding a clipboard at the door, who had a hard time letting go of her suspicions about me until the third day.

I got there early every afternoon and sat in the lobby with other people, waiting for the bell to ring. I noticed that when parents pick their kids up from school these days, they take apart backpacks immediately, before they even get to their cars, and this surprised me. Parents seem a little frazzled, as if there’s a lot riding on what’s in that backpack. There are questions and there is meaningful pointing to papers.

I pictured me in the last half of the 1950s, right here in this lobby, holding my book bag, walking down these steps with my friends. After a half-hour meander home — I’d say “hi” to my mother and eat a snack before going back outside to play. When she asked how school was I could say “Fine” without having to come up with any evidence.

There’s something transcendent about being in your old school after this many years have passed, and mostly it’s that the universal school smell hasn’t changed one bit. Of course everything looks smaller than you remember it, but not as disappointingly puny as the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History turn out to be, especially after you’ve already told your kids, “You won’t believe how huge they are!” As soon as I walked through those school doors, I could remember my teachers’ faces and the way they walked, even when I couldn’t remember all their names right away.

I was in the middle of 1st grade when Raymond J. Lockhart School was opened in 1957. Before that, the kids in my neighborhood had to be shuttled to class in rented space in Amityville. There were just too many of us, but there was a joyfulness about that, too. Our fathers had survived WWII, our mothers had welcomed them home, and now our parents were planning their futures in great detail, all the while procreating like champs. Now my friends and I could move into a real school with water fountains in the halls and linoleum floors that sparkled and smelled like fresh wax every morning.

For the first few days of picking up my niece and nephew, none of the other mothers said anything to me as I sat down. Mostly they stared at me as if I had Danger tattooed on my forehead and just spoke among themselves.

Then on the fourth day, when it seemed they were running out of things to talk about, one of them looked up at the stately portrait that hung in the lobby and asked the others, “Who was Raymond J. Lockhart anyway?” Before I could remember that no one was looking in my direction, or that Dr. Lockhart had been dead for about 30 years, I piped up, “He was superintendent of schools when I went here.” Maybe it’s just me, but I thought questions would follow, questions like, “So, what were kids like in the 1950s?”

Everything got quiet. Lucky for me the school day was over and the bell rang, and soon backpacks were being unzipped and papers were careening slightly through the air.

Here’s one answer.  We were children who did what we were told, and now we’re all a little embarrassed about that. Sticking a fork in a toaster would zip you across the room and result in instant death as you hit the wall. A pencil could (and would) poke your eye out no matter the speed or trajectory. I took it upon myself to be extra careful with chopsticks we got free from the Chinese take-out restaurant, and also with rulers, just to be on the safe side.

Oddly, along with all the household objects that could kill us, we were also swept up in the American Can Do spirit, and understood that somehow we could accomplish anything we set our minds to. This would turn out to be a handy way to think in our early 20s when we found out we were much smarter than our parents or than any humans previously born.

Massapequa. Ever heard of it?

| Linda DeMers Hummel

For the last 30 years I’ve lived in a city I love, where people take a certain pride in swallowing the last vowel sound of every syllable ever invented. I’ve never gotten the hang of it, though I’ve tried, and even after all this time, I’ll be talking with a stranger here in Baltimore, and the person will say, “You’re not from here, are you?”

Sometimes I say, “I grew up in New York,” but when you say it like that, you get, “Oh, Manhattan?” People think it’s exotic to have grown up in New York City, where you never learn to swim or drive, and you’re all blasé when you see Robert Di Niro strolling around your neighborhood.

Answering “Long Island,” doesn’t always work out down here either. To people south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Long Island may or may not be an extension of New Jersey, and that’s the end of that.

We never really get over where we grew up, or at least I didn’t. I mention it a lot, even if I haven’t lived there since 1973. My hometown has become more and more wrapped in gauzy, rosy memories, and in my head it’s exactly the perfect place it always was.

I love where I’m from. Massapequa.

So imagine my excitement when a whole bunch of people from my hometown all got famous at once. Of course this happened in the late 80s and early 90s, and here I am still talking about it, so you might want to consider the source. I guess I thought all that fame connected to Massapequa meant something about me, which it decidedly did not, but I got a whole decade out of riding coattails and boring the socks off people who innocently asked me where I was from.

Jerry Seinfeld, Alec Baldwin (and his brothers) and Ron Kovic, who wrote Born on the Fourth of July, got famous. Steve Guttenberg and Peggy Noonan, the White House speechwriter who wrote President Reagan’s eloquent words after the Challenger explosion, also got famous. And here I usually take a breath and mention a couple more, but I try to make it clear that Jessica Hahn and Joey Buttafuoco’s fame was not exactly what Massapequa’s founding fathers had in mind.

So for a long time if people in Baltimore found my accent not to their liking, and there was even a hint that I should expound on my roots, I’d say, “Well, actually, I come from Massapequa,” just to see who was up on current events. Back then, most people wanted to talk about Alec, and I would go into my own little rehearsed snippets about any or all of the Baldwins.

And if it went too long, the person would interrupt with, “You knew him?” or worse, “You knew them?”

I had a number of ways of evading this question and going with the broader stroke, shall we say.

On a train to New York last year I sat next to a man who grew up in Huntington, a neighboring suburb, and as we got to talking about our hometowns, he said, “So . . . Massapequa. . . so many famous people from Massapequa, right?”

I perked up. I was delighted by his attention to detail, and wanted to applaud him for keeping up with fading news stories.

I started by telling him that Alec Baldwin’s father was my history teacher. (This has never been true. But saying, “He was my friend Jill’s history teacher” wouldn’t be the same, so I’ve always gone this route.)

And we all called Alec by his childhood name, Xander, I tell the man from Huntington. (I do recall seeing Alec as a little boy with his Dad in the high school parking lot. About 100 yards away. He was blond. Unless it was Danny, Stephen, or Billy, which it certainly could have been. Maybe I yelled, “Hey, Xander!” I can’t really remember.)

I can see I’m not as good at this as I once was. I’m a little out of practice after all these years, and I blame the Massapequa celebs who couldn’t keep it up and no longer needed a publicist by the millennium. And after a while, it got harder and harder even for me to keep the Baldwin brothers straight, except Alec — or as I call him, Xander.

“Carlo Gambino lived in Massapequa, right?” he asks. This man is really working out as a traveling companion.

It’s been a while since I trotted out all my Godfather facts, but I do my best. I tell him that Gambino’s summer house was right on the water in Massapequa, on Club Drive. The fact that I know the name of his street brings me closer to The Don, and apparently, this is the effect I’m going for.

“His house had no shrubs in front — nothing.” I’m not at all surprised that when I say the word nothing, I linger.

“So no one could hide in the bushes?”

“Exactly!” I say. This is going better than it usually does.

“And he kept a boat docked in Oyster Bay behind his house, 24 hours a day, with an armed guard on board.”

“Is that true? Really?”

“I think so.”

I’m not sure why I equivocate here, and right away I can see he was hoping I’d know more details. He seems disappointed that I never saw Gambino in person. Or that I don’t have details about the horse head scene in the movie. Or an answer to his next ten questions, when the best I can do is mumble, “Um, I’m not sure.”

By the time we pull into Penn Station, I feel like reminding him that no one famous ever grew up in Huntington.

The Incontinence Aisle? You’re Welcome!

| Linda DeMers Hummel

On the back of the women’s room stall at the airport, at just the right height for reading, is an advertisement for a new adult diaper. I commend the marketing genius who put this here because I’m betting that ¾ of the women sitting down at this moment in this bathroom fit the demographic. And I know from a lifetime of being every corporation’s target audience that — for a few more years at least — Baby Boomers will still be where the numbers are. We’re the women who never want to pee once we’re on the plane (the logistics being just too cumbersome), so we put off that last trip to the bathroom until minutes before boarding. We’re the ones who have peeing on our minds, so it makes sense that we actually read the ad in a women’s room stall.

I study the woman in the photograph, who has clearly never taken a bite of red meat in her life and has to be a former runway model turned yoga practitioner, without a wrinkle or a gray hair. And no surprise that she is half of a great looking couple, on a beach. They are holding hands and skipping along, their bare feet remarkably four inches off the ground.

It’s the perfect message, and this marketing wunderkind saw me coming: You can still look like a million bucks, and there’s no way you’ll pee down your leg when you cough! And as if that’s not enough, later you and a ridiculously handsome man will check into an ocean-front room where he won’t be able to take his eyes off you. You, my dear, still got it. You, my dear, will have it forever.

Diaper or not, I want to be her. I’m sucked right into the message, and then I smile at the last phrase, at the bottom: Located in the Incontinence Aisle. I wasn’t aware that incontinence now had its own aisle, but I know my generation had everything to do with that. Incontinence was nothing special until we started to gush when we sneezed. You’re welcome, America.

As I board my plane, I begin to wonder how much time I have left before I have to shop in the Incontinence Aisle. I’ve been using the phrase at my age for a while now, and that’s probably not a good sign. I think I use it to punctuate a statement that might not have enough gravitas on its own, which makes me sound like quite a bore, also not a good sign.

I do notice that I’m repeating stories with alarming regularity lately. Even when I take a second to ask myself, Have I already told this person my adorable story that took place 30 years ago? Either I don’t wait for my own answer, or I can’t remember if I did or not, so I launch into it, because, really, it’s my best story of all time: I walked to my aerobics class, all the way across the entire gym floor at the health club I joined the year after giving birth to my third baby. I noticed men looking at me and nudging their friends. I was getting a lot of attention, just by walking through the club. I was thrilled that they were noticing how well I’d whipped my saggy postpartum body into shape and naughtily delighted at how much they all seemed to want me.

When I got to class at the far end of the building, the instructor came rushing over to me, saying, “Oops, you’ve got toilet paper coming out of your leotard and it’s dragging behind you!”

Lately when I’ve told this story, I see a little impatient nodding going on, because my listener has heard it all before and is trying to save me the trouble of finishing. I believe I’ve now told this story to every living person I’ve ever met, though I can’t be sure, so I’m going to keep telling it, just in case.

This happens, too: I’m driving in a perfectly orderly and cautious way and come to a four-way stop sign, where there is a 30-ish dad in his SUV, waiting. He spots me and begins waving that I should go. The first few times this happened, I just thought I was on the receiving end of some respect-your-elders politeness, and I went on my way.

But today it happened again, and this time I got to see the dad’s face. He looked rather frantic, the way he might if maybe I were about to drive a team of wild horses through the intersection and he was thinking of how he was going to save his children.

I wanted to open my window and shout, “Hey, I’m still an excellent driver!” But this is what my father said to the Police after he mowed down an entire hedgerow in front of their condominium in Florida. So I did go first at the intersection, but I also gave the SUV dad a little thank-you wave, showing off that I could still do two things at once without hitting the fire hydrant on the corner.

There are more signs. They’re subtle but piling up.

I can’t remember the last time I got caught in the rain without an umbrella.

Or ran out of aluminum foil, or dryer sheets, or flour. I stock up on everything.

When I bend down now, I always look around carefully to see if there isn’t something else I should be doing as long as I’m down there. I hope that the cheerleaders from high school also have to do this now.

I’m not sure I’ll ever to remember to cough or sneeze into my elbow because every time I feel one coming, I still hear my mother saying “Cover your mouth!”

I’ve never taken a successful selfie.

I don’t know what Uber is and don’t care enough to find out.

And somehow I totally missed the demise of phone booths. One day they all just seemed to have disappeared from the landscape.

In his later years, every morning and every evening, my grandfather wrote down the weather in the little boxes of the free calendar he got from his newspaper boy. I’m happy to report that I’m not even close to doing that, but the world does seem to be spinning so much faster than it used to.

And for anyone keeping score (not me!) the weather sucks today.

The Book Thing

| Linda DeMers Hummel

So, for the last seven months I’ve been writing a book. A memoir. One day back in the fall, for no good reason I can recall, I was struck with the idea that there was a book in me. A really good book that would make readers laugh and cry and — yes — maybe wince here and there. And since time’s  a-wastin’ when you’re 64, I got started that afternoon.

I’ve been a freelancer (on and off) since the early 80s, but I’ve never done anything this serious or extensive … or potentially heartbreaking. Sometimes I read through parts of my manuscript and think “What drivel,” while other times I think it’s got legs. Only time and literary agents who might not “get me” will tell.

Only three friends know about “the book thing” because I have been known to abandon projects with alarming regularity, and I didn’t want to meet an acquaintance in the grocery store sometime in the future, who — just trying to be pleasant — would ask, “So how is your book coming?” and then have to lie or pretend I didn’t hear the question.

So I’m going public. My plan is to post pieces of the memoir (as yet untitled) here, as well as some of my recently published essays that I especially like, and see if I’m hitting any high notes. In the publishing world, this is called creating a platform, a phrase that makes me want to gag, to be honest. Writers are notoriously bad pragmatists. But I’m trying. And Baby Boomers are notoriously bad at putting the microphone down at weddings and karaoke. But I’ve gotten better at that, too. Bear with me.