Stop Puking Up The Sixties

                 Stop Puking Up The Sixties

That’s what the graffiti demanded. It was spray-painted on the wall of the Student University Center. I take this sort of thing personally. When I saw the message spray painted in Day-Glo orange (a vestige of the ‘60’s), I did a personal inventory. Did someone see me wearing my tie-dye T-shirt as I mowed my lawn last week? Has someone objected to my Jimi Hendrix Are You Experienced? poster in my office? I got rid of my bell-bottom jeans a long time ago, though sometimes I wish that I had kept them. I’ve seen them go for a pretty penny on ebay.

I finally got an iPhone awhile back. It's my first cell phone, in fact. I didn’t get it to appear tech-savvy or current with social trends, or even to be accessible to the department chair whenever she goes on a tear.  I got it for when the university land lines go out and the walls of this old rat hole of a university come tumbling down. At least then I'll have a chance of being rescued. The department chair doesn’t know that I have it. Otherwise, she’d text me with all of those memos that I hear other teachers talk about. I pull it out of my pocket in class to pretend to check my messages and quickly put it back in my pocket because there’s a school policy about not using a cell phone in class. I’m not too sure how that affects my students’ impression of me. Most of them don’t even know what a land line phone is. The iPhone isn’t old nineteen-sixties technology like the Corona typewriter (aka boat anchor) is.

At dinner, I had a discussion with Anonymous Family about the graffiti and just how personally I should take it. I wondered if my manner of dress might negatively affect how others perceive me. I proposed that I update my footwear to Skeechers or maybe a pair of Nikies.

Anonymous daughter jumped on that immediately. “It’s pronounced Skechers with a short e. Forget it. And forget new Nikes too. That’s what the geezers wear when they go swalking around the mall.”

Swalking? What the hell is that?

I thought about a new poster for my office. “Hey, how about lending me your poster of that singer who wears red dresses and crimson lipstick? She’s really cute.”

Anonymous Daughter rolled her eyes.

Anonymous Son chimed in immediately. “Dad, if you put that Taylor Swift poster in your office, everybody will think that you’re a dirty old man. I’ve got Ratt and Motorhead posters you can have. They’ll look so rad on your walls.”

I have no idea who Ratt or Motorhead  are, so I declined. I don’t know what rad means either. Isn’t a rad a unit of measurement for radioactivity? Radioactivity is anti-Green, so rad would place me right in the middle of the Cold War. That’s really “‘sixties”.

I turned to Anonymous Wife for some sort of direction but she gave me a look that said I’m not going to say anything. You’ll have to work your way through this on your own.

“Dad,” Anonymous Daughter said, “don’t take that message so personally. You dress just right. You’ve worn the same sweater every day for as long as I can remember and you wear your reading glasses around your neck on a chain and those khaki pants and white socks go great with whatever those shoes are. They're shoes, right? Don’t change anything. You are what you are. You are a professor and you look like one.”

I love that child, even though she just described what I think a geezer who swalks around the mall looks like.

As we cleared the table, my wife made a suggestion. “You know, you could enlarge my photo to 24”x30” at the university print shop and hang it on your wall.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she didn’t look like a modern cultural icon. After many years of marriage to me and having born two children, though, she is still trim and beautiful. I often wonder what people think when they see us together. 

“You mean that photo of you wearing the bathing suit during our honeymoon at Hilton Head?” I asked.

“No! The one that your brother took of me last Easter,” she said.

So I brought the photo down to the university print shop to have enlarged to poster size.

 “New chick, prof, or an old flame?” the wiseass kid behind the counter said.

“It’s my wife.” 

“Whatever,” he said.

I moved Jimi to another wall and tacked up my wife’s 24”x30” enlargement on the wall to my right, directly across the room from my office door.

I noticed that whenever I left my door open, people slowed down as they passed. (They usually walk faster. I don’t know why).

After my last morning class today, I left my office door open.

“Who is that?” one of the passing first year lecturers asked.

“That’s my wife.”

“How sweet!” she said and headed back up the hall.

Not long after that, another admirer stopped and asked about the poster. Then another. Then another.

I was about to stand up to close my door when the department chair appeared at the threshold.

“Awww. That’s so sweet. You should tell your wife to drop by sometime. I haven’t seen her since the Christmas Party a couple of years ago. She is SO much prettier than Jimi Henderson.”

Jimi Henderson?  Henderson? I wasn’t going to correct her. She’s an old millennial who sailed through school and earned her PhD when she was twenty-six and has climbed to the top of every university ladder since. She’s a Women’s and Gender Studies professor who doesn’t take correction from males well.

She sounded so sincere, almost as if she liked me. As I basked in the rays of her momentary (but dubious) admiration, I almost revealed that I have a cell phone, but my better judgment made me keep my mouth shut.