The week between Christmas and New Year’s is unlike any other.
No school. No work (or less work) for many. Hopefully all the shopping, wrapping and cooking paid off on Christmas and everyone had fun, but now is the time of no chores, no commitments, no challenges.
I told my husband it’s “anything goes” week. If he wants three Godiva chocolates for breakfast, that’s fine. If I want to wear my Comfy and slippers into a store, I will. (My slippers have hard bottoms, like real shoes 😉.)
My high school did the musical “Anything Goes” when I was in junior high in the late 70s, so I never got to be in it. But my friend’s older brother had one of the lead roles. We idolized those older kids and couldn’t wait to get to high school so we could be in the musical too. I still remember all the songs, especially the title song.
Here’s Sutton Foster in the Act 1 Finale of Anything Goes on Broadway. She got a Tony Award for her part in this production.
Welp, yesterday we learned that Ozzy Osbourne passed away at the exact same age as Jimmy Buffett—76. So, I decided to ask my “Generation Jones” husband (age 63) the same questions about Ozzy that I had asked him about Jimmy Buffett two years ago.
Question: You heard the news that Ozzy Osbourne has died at age 76. How did it make you feel?
Answer: Surprised. I didn’t know he had Parkinson’s and I had heard about the farewell concert two weeks ago (which was billed as the last time Black Sabbath would ever play together).
Question: What were your overall feelings about Ozzy?
Answer: I really liked Black Sabbath, but only with Ozzy. Together they were great. (Didn’t really like Ozzy on his own or Black Sabbath without Ozzy.) Iconic sounds. Ozzy’s voice and Tony Iommi’s guitar…there was nothing else like it at the time (early 70s). First started listening to Black Sabbath in junior high school.
(Tells me the whole story about how Tony Iommi’s fingers were severed in an industrial accident, which forced him to play the guitar an octave lower and make that incredible sound.)
We then listened to a couple of his favorite early 70s Black Sabbath songs: “Sweet Leaf” “Into the Void” “NIB”
He says that their 1978 album “Never Say Die” was the last album of theirs that he liked.
Question: What made him a cultural icon?
Answer: The Black Sabbath/Ozzy sound. They were the first ones. The low guitar, the slow riffs, Ozzie’s Voice. Influenced everything that came after.
As an illustration of how truly different and awesome their sound was at the time, we looked at the Billboard Top 100 Hits of 1971. And I really got the point. I mean…I love Carole King, The Osmonds, The BeeGees, John Denver, etc…but you can see how Black Sabbath felt like the start of something entirely new and exciting to a lot of people—boys especially.
And then came the true revelation: my husband still listens to Black Sabbath all the time—even more than Led Zeppelin—especially in the gym.
It’s his jam.
Deadlifting 485 pounds
I guess Black Sabbath makes a better soundtrack for powerlifting than say… Taylor Swift. I get it!
Question: Would you say that they were a uniquely British band?
Answer: No. They were just completely different than anything else out there.
Question: You’ve now read his obits, was anything a big surprise?
Answer: No. (Already knew the whole story of Sharon dragging Ozzy out of the gutter and resurrecting his career—way before “The Osbournes” TV show.)
Question: Did you ever know any other big fans?
Answer: We all listened to them in high school. (He has an older Boomer sister who introduced him to cooler music in the 70s. Meanwhile, I was listening to The Osmonds and the Bay City Rollers.)
Question: What do you think his legacy will be?
Answer: First answer: young people don’t listen to Ozzy anymore.
Upon research, we learned that certain subgenres of metal continue to cover Black Sabbath songs and even sound a lot like them.
As of today, May 31, 2025, Greater Boston is experiencing its 12th consecutive rainy weekend. Since early March, every weekend has included some measurable rainfall, with more than half of those weekends seeing rain on both Saturday and Sunday.
GenX, there are a couple of rain songs from our childhood that will never leave my brain.
The first is “Rainy Days and Mondays” by The Carpenters. It came out in 1971.
The other one is “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” by BJ Thomas. (I didn’t know the artist. I looked it up just now.) It came out in 1969, so perhaps only older GenXers like me remember this one. Apparently it was featured in the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” but I don’t remember that. I just remember singing the song along with the radio, with the most memorable line being “Just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed.” I always pictured that guy. His feet must have been enormous.
What are your rain songs? You know—those songs that just emerge in your brain on rainy days.
I think one of the hardest things about accepting Trump’s reelection is that it feels like a mortal wound to the idea of the “beloved community” that many of us 70s kids grew up with.
Popularized by Martin Luther King Jr, the “Beloved Community” is a global vision in which racism, poverty, and militarism are eradicated—a society based on justice, equal opportunity, and love of one’s fellow human beings. In King’s words, the Beloved Community was not utopian, but attainable through hard work and commitment to ethical principles and systemic change achieved through nonviolence.
Mr. Rogers brought that vision to life for those of us who were a bit too young to remember MLK when he was alive. Mr. Rogers (and also Sesame Street) taught us there’s a place for everyone in the neighborhood. It’s better to be kind than to win. Bullies were unequivocally bad. Even the cold old Catholic Church got nicer in the seventies when the reforms of Vatican 2 led to a focus on the New Testament—lots of felt banners and folk music.
And raise your hand if you remember Free to Be, You and Me. For those who don’t remember, it was a pioneering children’s album and television special created by Marlo Thomas in the early 1970s that promoted gender equality, individuality, and emotional expression. Featuring stars like Alan Alda and Diana Ross, it encouraged kids to reject traditional stereotypes and embrace who they are, becoming a cultural touchstone for a more inclusive generation. My sister and I listened to that album over and over again.
Someday Trump will be gone.
And on that day, I’m going to listen to Free to Be, You and Me from start to finish.
I’ve been digitizing old photos over the past few weeks. I have a ton of them. There’s no way I could save all of them in the event of a fire. I wouldn’t even want to. There are too many.
Walt Whitman’s lines “I am large, I contain multitudes” keep popping into my head. I’ve gone through so many phases in my nearly 60 years. I contain multitudes. We all do.
One theme I’m finding is that we (like everyone) mostly took photos on vacations and holidays. And there’s one vacation destination in Massachusetts that everyone knows: Cape Cod. It’s known simply as “the Cape.” (There’s another popular cape in Massachusetts, but that one gets referred to by its full name: Cape Ann.)
Cape Cod is where the Kennedys summered and it’s just one of those places that everyone in Massachusetts has memories of. If you didn’t have a friend with a house “down the Cape,” then you probably rented one or stayed in a Cape hotel at least a few times in your life.
My earliest memories of the Cape include barfing after eating scallops at Thompson’s Clam Bar, having my grandmother tell me that they thought I’d drowned when I went missing at the beach one day, and waiting for the sun to come out.
I’ve been lucky to visits “The Islands” many times too. (If you’re from Massachusetts, you know that The Islands are Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.) But the Cape is where my earliest vacation memories happened.
I’m realizing that the places where our memories were made—where our lives have played out—are quite meaningful. They’re the settings for our stories.
The Cape, August 1970At the beach on Cape Cod, 1970, with my Italian grandmother in a bathing suit (a rare occurrence). I don’t remember how I hurt my knee, but I do remember wearing that huge bandage.
Today’s realization from The Great Photo Digitization Project of 2025 (inspired by the tragic California wildfires) is that I was an extremely well-dressed child. (My own kids were nowhere near as well-dressed as my sister and I were.)
And this was before the era of “fast fashion,” so my mother made many of our dresses and outfits.
We always had matching accessories too. Note the headband in this shot:
With my baby cousin Steven and Aunt Betsy, 1971
In my old photo albums, one accessory is featured more than all the others and that is color-coordinated kneesocks. I remember having a drawer full of them. Thinking back, they were pretty cool because they came in so many different colors and were way more comfortable than tights.
Knee socks and a matching purse for the first day of first gradeNovember 1972Note the “milk box” near the front door (I am old)Heading off to Town Day 1973
Facilitated by my mother and a Marshall’s opening up in my town in the late 70s (“Brand Names for Less”), I ended up being a major clothes horse right through high school. I embraced the Reagan era “preppy look” and had dozens of sweaters in every color of the rainbow. My closet looked like a Benetton store.
My high school preppy look
It wasn’t until I tried to fit all my clothes into a tiny freshman dorm closet that I realized how ridiculously many I had.
I’m continuing to selectively digitize my old photos and I bring you a comparison of the two methods: iPhone photo vs PhotoScan by Google.
iPhone photo of an old print PhotoScan by Google of the same pictureiPhone photo PhotoScan by Google
Let me know if you have thoughts about which method is better quality, because it’s too much work to do both.
Because most of these photos are stuck in the old adhesive style photo albums, I’m having to pry them out if I want to see what (if anything) is written on the back. Then I’m stuck with a loose photo that I’ve been taping back into place with painter’s tape.
The photos above were taken on my “First Communion” day in April 1973. Despite my previously described love of veils, I remember I did not like that one. It was attached to a very uncomfortable headband that squeezed my head painfully. Perhaps this was a sign of the rocky road ahead for me and the Catholic Church.
Other than the painful headband, I remember getting some religious-themed presents (a Bible locket, an angel) and being made to feel quite special with a family party after the main event at the church.
I think we look like a real mid-century Italian-American family in these photos, but my dad is no Tony Soprano. He loved his mother (my long-widowed “Grammy”) dearly and she worshipped him. He was far and away her favorite child. As the only boy in an Italian family, he was extra special and he took great care of her until her death in 1992, just a month short of her 90th birthday.
Born in the summer of 1965, I am part of the oldest GenX cohort (1965-80) and I’m discovering through my photo digitizing project, that I’m quite well documented.
My parents took a lot of pictures. Many of them were bad (“delete” was not an option back then) but there’s at least a few photos from every single year of my life through college graduation. (Whereas, we probably have five pictures in all of my father as a kid.)
It looks like the summer of 1974 was the peak of my gymnastics prowess. I remember that I worked very hard and mastered a “front walkover” as a kid and here’s the proof:
This appears to be a class performance
I don’t think I ever progressed to handsprings (too hard). And I certainly never did a walkover on a balance beam (too scary).
Two years prior, in 1972, a tiny Soviet gymnast named Olga Korbut did a backflip off the uneven bars in the Munich Summer Olympics, won three gold medals, and inspired a lot of little American girls to try some new tricks. I was one of them.
And so, for my 60th birthday this summer, I pledge to work hard to reenact this photo and perform a front walkover in front of an audience.
KIDDING!! Can you even imagine? I’ll stick to Downward Dogs.
My 9th birthday party on my parents’ porch in the summer of ‘74. My sister and I and my neighborhood friends Candy, Kim, Carolyn and Bethanne had a good time.
Thanks to blogger Dwight Roth (a wonderful poet), I’ve learned that sometimes an iPhone photo of an old print is just as good or better than a “scan.”
Today’s discovery is Rainbow—the original guinea pig.
Rainbow was the first in a series of guinea pigs that my sister and I had as pets in the 70s. My main memories of the little fellows involve the absolute anguish we felt when they inevitably got sick and died. I can’t believe my mother spent good money taking them to see veterinarians when they stopped eating. (Maybe she lied about that and just drove around the block a few times.) I remember praying to God to save my guinea pigs. He never did.
In any case, I’ve learned that Rainbow was my class pet in kindergarten and I took him home for the summer.
I was happy to discover some good guinea pig memories in one of the old photo albums.
Good times in Kindergarten with two boys whose first and last names I still remember. (Yet, I can’t recall the name of a new person I met in church last week.)
I love how Rainbow got his own square in the class photo.
I was a wary little kindergartener. Thank goodness Rainbow didn’t die on my watch.
We hosted a neighborhood party for our guinea pig “Cookie” and another guinea pig in the summer of 1973. It looks like they had a nice little feast.
A happy memory of “Candy” roaming free in our backyard in the summer of 1974. I remember the guinea pigs loved nibbling clover and were very cute doing so. 🐹
![A logo for "50 Happens," [a site dedicated to Gen X women with children and grandchildren] [who embrace life's challenges with humor and resilience], [featuring a modern and uplifting design] [that embodies strength and positivity] [with an elegant and playful style] [and a harmonious blend of colors like pink, fuchsia, purple, and blue].](https://50happens.blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/img-5uorrxvwartomopcpuhjfjd0.png?w=300)
50 Happens 