Yesterday, All His Troubles Seemed So Far Away

Help!

When I married, I knew the day would come when I’d want to give my children a sense of my past--and, as with most boomers, my past was not so much my personal history as the popular culture I grew up on.

My parents’ generation may have viewed their lives in terms of their tribulations during the Great Depression. But for me and my friends, the past meant a golden age of pop entertainment. In my fond parental dreams, I would draw my children onto my lap and regale them with tales of my youth: “Why when I was a boy, comic books cost only a dime and there were almost 30 Westerns on TV! Have I ever told you kids about Palladin, a knight without armor in a savage land?”

Unfortunately, as so often occurs in this unaccommodating life, reality failed to play along, particularly once my girls got old enough to pop a Madonna cassette into a Walkman. Every time I’d invoke the Fab Four or the Stones, they would favor me with the sort of half-pitying looks that made me feel as if I’d been reminiscing about Rudy Vallee.

The pity flowed in both directions, since, like other boomers, I possess the conviction that everyone born after 1957 missed out on all the fun. On the whole, I’ve done a pretty good job of concealing my sense of generational superiority, since it seems highly unnatural (not to say unseemly) for a person suffering from advanced male pattern baldness to engage in a coolness competition with his teenage daughters. I know how vitally important it is for their emotional development to define their old man as a fogy.

All of which makes my current situation the more difficult.

It began with “The Beatles Anthology,” which my daughters finally consented to watch after subjecting me to the usual eye-rolling. Clearly, they were anticipating yet another of Dad’s dorky trips down memory lane. So imagine my surprise when they actually yelped every time Paul shook his head during an early performance of “She Loves You.” I’d never seen my girls act so, well, girlie before. Whatever magic the mop tops possessed, it still worked.

But the real shocker came when the series was over and I found myself with two Beatlemaniacs on my hands. My 13-year-old was particularly hard hit. Within days, she had transferred all my old Beatles’ LPs onto tape so she could play them obsessively on her bedroom audio system. As for the older one--a longtime Nirvana junkie--an astonishing transformation had taken place. One day, she was going around the house singing, “I wish I could eat your cancer”; the next, “I want to hold your hand.”

At first, I felt a keen sense of vindication. But it wasn’t long before triumph turned into discomfort--even dismay. It took me a few days to figure out why.

Never before in my life had I felt quite so old.

First, I discovered that I possessed a middle-aged intolerance for hearing any pop song played repeatedly at top volume. And then there was the sheet of Sergeant Pepper cutouts that my 16-year-old found inside the album sleeve and tacked to her bedroom wall--a dogeared bit of memorabilia that seems as quaint and antique as the Edwardian kitsch it was meant to parody.

But the worst were the portraits of John, Paul, George and Ringo that my younger daughter took from the White Album and hung above her desk. The difference between those radiant young faces and the people I had seen recently on TV--a jowly McCartney, a grizzled Starr and Harrison looking weirdly like one of the wizened, anthropomorphic felines in “Cats”--was painful. Particularly since it epitomized the disparity between the self-images my peers and I are still clinging to and the reality we face every day in the mirror.

Now, I experience a chill whenever I walk past my 13-year-old’s room and hear Harrison plunking away on his sitar. “Love me while you can,” he drones. “Before I’m a dead old man.”

I know I have only myself to blame. I should have let my kids stick to “Gangsta’s Paradise.” I still have the warmest feelings for my cool boomer past. But the future--which I’m reminded of every time I hear John Lennon’s spectral voice on “Free as a Bird”--doesn’t seem so hot.