The New York Times

  February 21, 1988

TELEVISION: 

IN SAN FRANCISCO, TV BATTLES ON THE FRONT LINES AGAINST AIDS

By MARY ANN HOGAN

 (Mary Ann Hogan is an Oakland, Calif., writer who frequently reports in AIDS issues)

 SAN FRANCISCO—Early in 1983, Jim Bunn, a new reporter for KPIX-TV here, finished writing his first AIDS report and knew the story was like none before. It had sex, death, medical intrigue, a host of complex social issues - not the least of which were civil rights and gay life styles - and, by definition, it was going to challenge every taboo known to television.

But most of all, Mr. Bunn recalls, television wasn't just reporting the story. It was soon to become part of the story and potentially part of the solution to an epidemic that has hit 52,000 Americans, 29,000 of whom have already died, and has possibly infected as many as one million more.

''The story was something that transcended our role as journalists,'' Mr.  Bunn said recently. ''As broadcasters, we were in the business of providing information. We were in a position to help stop the spread of the disease.''

Initially, not everyone in the Bay Area broadcasting community shared Mr.  Bunn's sense of mission. AIDS was a story, certainly, but not necessarily one to be championed. It only affected gays, really, a newsworthy subject sometimes, but not day in and day out, on the 6 o'clock news, even in San Francisco.

But Mr. Bunn's view has prevailed. He soon became the nation's first full-time television AIDS reporter, traveling around the globe for KPIX, a CBS affiliate. And now the programming he helped set in motion is going national.  ''AIDS Lifeline,'' an education and public-service campaign developed at KPIX, is being syndicated by the station's parent company, Group W Television [ see box ] . WPIX-TV in New York plans to carry the first of the hourlong shows on Monday, March 7 with the presentation of ''AIDS 101,'' a prime-time primer, the first of five specials to be broadcast this year.

Television has become part of a pioneering public-education effort in San Francisco, a city of 740,000, where time has been compressed because of urgency, where the 4,100 AIDS cases - and the 20,000 more that are expected to develop within five years - represent the highest number of cases per capita in the Western hemisphere. One station was the first in the nation to broadcast condom commercials. Another was the first to demonstrate the proper use of a condom and to make safe-sex specifics part of its regular broadcast lexicon.

But most important, stations here have struck a comfortable partnership with health and education organizations throughout the community, on a scale local broadcasters say is unprecedented in television. Although the print media covered the story earlier, more accurately and more aggressively, television, because of its sheer pervasiveness, is generally credited with waging the most powerful educational campaign.

The journey that San Franciso television made in its AIDS coverage went through four stages. First, there was resistance. Next, there was coverage of the story, but overall it was spotty, sensational or off the mark in the choice of what was important and what was not. A third stage found the story being covered accurately, with the scientific information correct, and the science and the sociology in balance. But that, in turn, led to a final stage: the realization that simply covering the story was only a beginning.

''AIDS didn't change the role of news coverage,'' said Bruno Cohen, formerly KPIX's news director and now a film producer with the Disney studio. ''What it did was create a lot of discussion about the role of a television station in a medical epidemic.''

KPIX broadcast its first AIDS special, a four-part series, in 1983. In May 1985, Larry Lee, a field producer for KRON-TV, produced a special that was subsequently syndicated worldwide, ''In the Midst of Life,'' focusing on the AIDS ward at San Francisco General Hospital. ''We made a conscious decision to distance the audience by having a straight woman [ the head nurse on the ward ] as the main subject,'' said Mr. Lee, who is gay. ''We thought, if people aren't going to pay attention to this disease because of fags and junkies, we'd put it in terms they could understand.''

Another KPIX special was broadcast soon after, in August 1985, and took an educational slant. The hourlong production, called ''Our Worst Fears,'' focused on how education can help stem the spread of the disease as well as lessen the fear surrounding it. The station's ''AIDS Lifeline'' public-service and education campaign, more than a year in the making, began at the same time, just as the world first learned that the actor Rock Hudson had the fatal illness and the story, for a time, became a national obsession.

From the start, the AIDS education and care groups - ''the people in the trenches,'' as one of them says - have met with station officials to stress the importance of education. The groups, broadcasters will tell you, have acted as guides. ''We didn't have to go out there all alone,'' says Nancy Saslow, a former KPIX producer.

Holly Smith, of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the area's primary clearinghouse for AIDS information, is known locally as the media watchdog. Ms.  Smith herself says, ''The biggest turning point for me was when the media and the community organizations said, 'O.K., we're in this together, and we're in it for the long haul.' ''

Mr. Lee of KRON-TV, the area's NBC affiliate, which last year drew national attention for its decision to broadcast condom commercials, says: ''We wanted to elicit a sense of compassion. It's more than a particular news report or special - it's a willingness to cover it day in, day out.''

At a recent exhibit of an AIDS memorial quilt here, sponsored by KPIX-TV, some felt that sense of compassion had fully flowered. Visitors to the exhibit left with pamphlets, paid for and produced by the TV station, listing AIDS care and service groups around the Bay Area. An hourlong KPIX telecast about the quilt, ''Threads of Love,'' drew another 30,000 requests for the pamphlets. The result was the largest single volunteer recruitment effort in the history of the epidemic here.

''It's the traditional American response to a disaster, people pulling together,'' says Greg Day, the community-education director for San Francisco's Shanti Project, the country's largest AIDS volunteer care organization.  ''Television played a key role in making that happen.''

Today in San Francisco, it is not uncommon to see AIDS prevention placards on buses, brought to you by the same people who bring you the nightly news.  Education pamphlets and service organization guides, printed in various languages, bear the names of TV stations as well as the numbers of AIDS hotlines.

For the most part, reporters on the story have become AIDS specialists, like Mr. Bunn and his colleague at KPIX, Hank Plante, who spends at least 80 percent of his office time on AIDS stories and one workday a week reading up on the science of it. Mr. Plante recently broke six AIDS-related stories in the course of one week, all of them picked up by the networks, local print media or national wire services.

The city of San Francisco is small, its social fabric closely knit. The gay community, representing one-quarter of the electorate, is organized, political, visible and well connected. For television, that has meant a tough critic, as well as - eventually - a strong ally.

The environment here has been emotionally charged, so much so that the public-health chief, on the brink of closing the city's gay bathhouses in 1984, jogged each morning wearing a bullet-proof vest. But that environment was one the majority of television viewers didn't know about and didn't understand.

Mr. Bunn, speaking by telephone from his office in Geneva, where he on loan to the World Health Organization, helping develop an AIDS education plan for the international media, says: ''The staff fights I remember most were when someone would say, 'How are we going to make this story meaningful to Joe Beerbelly out in Martinez?' A real signpost for us as a station came when we said, 'O.K., I guess we're not going to find any heterosexual suburbanites with AIDS. Let's do the story anyway.' ''

In effect, television grew up here as the audience it reached grew more tolerant, the one maybe helping to make the way for the other.

''We had discussions about every phrase - about how we could do this so the majority of people wouldn't turn off their TV,'' recalls the producer Ms.  Saslow. Indeed, early on, all the stations in town rejected a series of public-service announcements produced by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. The spots were considered either too sexually suggestive, or - in the case of one, showing a man with the disfiguring lesions of Kaposi's sarcoma - too shocking. 

Community groups, in particular the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, actively lobbied stations to include in their reports repeated, detailed descriptions of how the virus is spread, to whom and why, rather than relying on euphemisms, such as ''exchange of bodily fluids.'' Reporters and producers, in turn, lobbied station executives to do away with TV's traditional prudery and to say outright, when appropriate, that the virus is spread during unprotected sex between men and women and unprotected anal intercourse between men.

Doing the story did not preclude early lapses into the sensational. In 1984, television's coverage of the city's divisive bathhouse controversy ''glossed over the intricacies of a complex social dynamic,'' Mr. Bunn says. ''It was a case where TV really didn't serve very well.''

''What we learned from San Francisco was the urgency,'' says Jeanne Blake, medical reporter and AIDS specialist at WBZ-TV in Boston, which started an AIDS education campaign soon after KPIX syndicated ''Our Worst Fears'' in 1985.

In the summer of 1987, scores of mini-documentaries, newscasts and public-service announcements later, KPIX was awarded a national Emmy for its AIDS programming. The AIDS staff won a Peabody Award as well. Though other stations have not shied away from AIDS coverage, there is a feeling around town that KPIX has put its stamp on the issue. Sometimes sources call with tips, saying, 'I know you guys are the AIDS station.' ''

A staff member at a competing station puts it this way: ''They richly deserve their Peabody. It breaks my heart that we weren't able to somehow work together to carve out different parts of the story. But they're doing it. It's being done. So, what's the difference?'' BRANCHING OUT

''AIDS Lifeline,'' an education and public-service campaign developed by KPIX-TV in San Francisco and nationally syndicated by Group W Television, is being called the largest AIDS public-education effort to date on commercial television.

Since late last month, viewers in a number of other cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Pittsburgh, have had a sampling of the weekly news updates on AIDS issues and the frank 10- and 30-second public-service announcements - some of them advocating condom use - featuring celebrities such as Jimmy Smith, Marlee Matlin, Ted Danson and Quincy Jones.

The package includes a series of five one-hour specials for broadcast this year - the first one, ''AIDS 101,'' to be shown early next month - on topics such as heterosexuals and AIDS, particular problems within minority communities, how to explain the disease to children and testing and treatment.

But most important, ''AIDS Lifeline'' urges local stations to take an activist role in their communities by helping to set up local resource networks and panels of consultants, and by generating outreach ideas; they are also encouraged to produce and circulate information pamphlets, and to distribute educational videotapes designed for parents and their children to schools, libraries or parent-teacher associations.

The campaign has already been bought by stations in markets as diverse as Los Angeles; Nashville; Honolulu; Providence, R.I.; Waco, Tex.; Charlotte, N.C.; Atlanta; Miami, and Bakersfield, Calif. Group W hopes to eventually reach at least 100 cities by the end of the year.

Metropolitan Life Insurance has underwritten the project for $1 million.  Revenue from syndication sales - expected to be at least $1 million this year - will go directly to AIDS organizations.

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 By Mary Ann Hogan

(Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times 1994 all Rights reserved)

 WASHINGTON—It's time again for the ultimate test of what's in and what's out. Early next month, behind closed doors, the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee will meet here to discuss who and what should appear on that singular place of national honor-a U.S. postage stamp.

   The issues are sticky. What about popular but tainted? Think Elvis stamp, with its $36 million in revenue last year-although other drug-using singers (Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin) were rejected.

        What about historic but tainted? Think mushroom cloud, an image on a stamp scheduled for 1995 that the Postal Service agreed to withdraw on Wednesday.

        These are difficult days in the increasingly difficult business of minting American icons.

         "It is a burden, no doubt about it," says John Foxworth Jr., the auto industry executive who chaired the World War II subcommittee that in the late 1980s chose a picture of an atomic blast for a stamp commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

      "We recognized the atomic bomb would be controversial, that some people would object. But we just didn't feel we could represent the end of World War II without depicting the event that ended the war," says Foxworth, who retired from the group in 1990.

          Plenty of people, from Japanese officials to the U.S. State Department, disagreed.

      President Clinton, who last month pressured the Postal Service into reinstating a Madonna and Child Christmas stamp after a national squawk about its discontinuance, also prevailed in the matter of the bomb stamp. The White House did not object to commemorating the bombings, but the artwork depicting the nuclear mushroom cloud was a poor choice, said Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers.

The Postal Service will substitute a stamp with a picture of Harry S. Truman announcing the end of the war.

       These controversies have raised provocative questions for the Stamp Advisory Committee and the country: Just who or what is an American icon?

        There are some rules. A subject can't be commercial. It must have broad national appeal. It can't be a living person. The subject must be American, or at least American-related. It shouldn't be religious (with the exception, it appears, of Madonnas). Major anniversaries and events, such as wars and statehood, can be commemorated only every 50 years.

       Here's a quick look at recent decisions.

       Richard Nixon? In. All Presidents get a stamp the year after their deaths, even the ones who quit. (Other people have to be dead for at least 10 years.)

        Marilyn Monroe? In. The stamp, due out next year, is expected to be a big seller.

        John Lennon? Out. (He was British.)

         Annie Oakley? In, finally, after 10 years of tireless lobbying by one of her descendants.

        Hanukkah? Out-again-to the dismay of a Marietta, Ga., plastics engineer who has been writing to the committee for years championing a stamp for the Jewish Festival of Lights.

           Free Enterprise? Out. A swell idea, but how do you draw it?

           No decision is final. The 15 members of the Stamp Advisory Committee-artists, scholars, business executives, marketers, all with an interest in philately-can always decide to approve Lennon, Hanukkah or Free Enterprise at a later date.

     The committee, chosen by the postmaster general, does its national duty for expenses and a small stipend. The current group includes actor Karl Malden, sports figure Richard (Digger) Phelps and Los Angeles designer Michael Brock. Among former members are author James Michener and actor Ernest Borgnine.

       Four times a year, the group meets for two days in a conference room at U.S. Postal Service headquarters. Working several years ahead of when a stamp is actually issued, members pore over an agenda that postal officials cull from thousands of submissions from groups and individuals.

         As the Postal Service moves toward hip, contemporary and socially inclusive, the chance of an average American's hero, passion or ancestor appearing on a U.S. postage stamp has skyrocketed.

           "You're right up there with George Washington," says committee chair Virginia Noelke, a professor of history at Angelo State University in Texas.

Some of the new George Washingtons include Bessie Coleman, the first African American woman aviator and Phoebe Yates Levy Pember, a Confederate nurse who fed soldiers her famous chicken soup.

Panel members say there isn't a subject that doesn't surface in the requests—Shaker chairs, fishbowls, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, somebody's grandmother. Can your grandmother make it? Possibly.

        "What did your grandmother do?" asks 10-year stamp panel member Phelps, the former Notre Dame basketball coach. "If your grandmother did something great in her own neighborhood, she probably won't make it. But that submission could spark an idea. There might be a groundswell of people whose grandmothers did great things in their neighborhoods, and then we might look at the idea of grandmothers in general. We try to reflect what's going on."

           The committee is not without its critics. "With their need to be politically correct, they're ending up with all these obscure people that John Q. Public has never heard of," says Michael Laurence, editor of Linn's Stamp News, the country's largest stamp publication.

          "George Washington hasn't been on a stamp in 10 years. Some of the old subjects my constituency longs for have been jettisoned."

Laurence and some other stamp experts say the committee is really a political buffer between stamp hopefuls and the Postal Service. "You can bet that of those thousands of submissions the committee gets each year, a lot of them are already in the works by the Postal Service marketing department," Laurence says.

       The committee says it isn't so. "We look at everything," says panel member Mary Ann Owens, an international stamp show judge from Brooklyn.

       While the stamp group sorts through thousands of submissions for about 50 to 100 annual spots, final approval belongs to the postmaster general.

         The President pushes a stamp agenda by pressuring the postmaster general. "Once, President (Ronald) Reagan wanted a Hispanic veterans stamp. He wanted the Hispanic vote," Phelps says. "Our view was, if you do one group of vets, you have to do every other group-Irish, Italian, you name it.

"So we said no."

   But the decision came down on the President's side.

         Of the White House victory on the atomic bomb stamp, "I'm not surprised. There certainly are two sides to the issue," says committee chairwoman Noelke. "Ultimately it's the postmaster general's call. He cares what the President thinks as have all postmasters general."

             In the end, what is retained in the national memory may have very little to do with what is commemorated by the Postal Service. As with Mozart and Salieri, time—-not a committee—will tell.

A former colleague recalls what it was like when stories—and a newsroom—got Aaronized.

By Mary Ann Hogan

Much of the journalism world will remember Leroy Aarons as a warrior for newsroom diversity: 

--News exec comes out of closet, founds group for gay and lesbian journalists--

Leroy Aarons

I will remember him as my first and finest mentor, a storied member of the Eastern media elite who gave it all up to come to our rickety newsroom in Oakland, to make us, a lot of us, believe. 

It was 1983, and everything about The Oakland Tribune was rickety—the elevators, the Christmas parties, the paper’s piggy bank. But Bob Maynard, the new owner-publisher, didn’t care.  He was on a mission to prove you could do quality journalism on a shoestring, in a building with sloping floors, with a staff full of doubters. All you needed was passion. 

In came Roy Aarons. 

Much like Maynard himself, Roy didn’t so much enter rooms as he did fill them up. He didn’t so much work with reporters as he did tame skeptics, anoint learners and recruit fellow seekers. His truest gift, among the many, was his endless belief in the Possible. And if you could ask him now, I’m sure he would say that is why he joined Maynard’s crusade, leaving behind his stints at Time, People, The Washington Post, his parties with Katharine Graham, his stories on the war in Israel and on John Lennon and Jesus.

From the moment Roy stepped into our midst, stories were no longer assigned; they were Aaronized, a phenomenon that could terrify and vex as much as inspire. To wit, the day President Reagan announced he was getting a hearing aid. Roy, hell-bent on our being the first and last word on it all, pronounced:

“I don’t just want a story on hearing aids - I want the whole schema on hearing aids!” Up went the hands to sculpt out the airy dimensions of schema (Dimensions: infinite by infinite).  “I want the history of hearing aids, the sociology of hearing aids ... I want pictures! I want diagrams!”

And when did he want it, I asked, figuring Aarons would say something like next week, or even Sunday. I was a feature writer, accustomed to getting some time to think. 

Roy’s Michelangelo jaw tensed. Up went the hands. “Tomorrow! Tomorrow! Tomorrow! This is a neewwspaper, Baby!”

And then he danced—literally danced—away. 

My husband, who was Roy’s managing editor in Oakland, told an obit writer that Aarons “was American journalism's best chance of proving that perpetual motion was possible. His energy was invigorating and liberating."

To me, that captures the essence of Roy’s presence in our newsroom, but with a twist. While he invigorated and liberated us (and sometimes drove us nuts) with big ideas and boundless hope, we in turn, invigorated and liberated him by not blinking once at who he was outside of the newsroom: A gay man who had fallen in love with a young Israeli financier named Joshua Boneh, with whom he was building a life.

In an extraordinary interview last year with Aissatou Sidime-David on the Chips Quinn Web site, Roy explained:

“When we moved to California in 1983, some people knew I was gay, but not a lot. I joined the Tribune, and said to myself, ‘I am not going to one more newspaper job in this country and hide my life under a barrel.’ So, very shortly after I arrived, I held a reception at our home for the staff. They all showed up, and there was Josh and I greeting them at the top of the steps. And I was out.”

We would learn later—because he told us—that for all his journalistic success in the Eastern establishment, Roy painstakingly hid his homosexuality and lived in fear that he would be found out, his career ruined. He would tell us that part of his decision to join Bob in Oakland was to do great journalism, but to do it, for the first time in his life, on his terms - living fully and openly with his partner, and inviting his colleagues to share his happiness.

Roy often said that the richness of the life he lived in Oakland—the intertwining of his personal and professional selves—gave him the courage to stand up at the now famous 1990 ASNE convention, and tell the assembled that he was proud of the group’s survey on gays and lesbians in newsrooms, proud,  not just as an editor, “but as a gay man.” With that, he started a revolution.

Bob Maynard died in 1993 of prostate cancer, after selling the Tribune to Dean Singleton’s Alameda Newspaper Group—and, not incidentally, after winning the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for news photography. Roy—who died Sunday night after a long fight with bladder cancer—left the Trib soon after his national coming out. He founded the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, and as his six-person group became 1,200, he went on to write books, plays and operas, to sing, to garden, to play, to mentor the young, to grow older with Josh.

But during that particular time, in that particular place, Roy and Bob were what journalism could be, should be—without bitterness or cheapness, without corporate hammerlock, without the systemic fear of being radical, wonderful, full of surprises. People who believed in themselves, and in you.

We can honor them by dwelling where they walked, in the Possible.
______________
Mary Ann Hogan, an independent journalist living in South Florida, was a reporter at the Maynard-era Oakland Tribune during the 1980s. She credits Aarons for inspiring her second career, as a writing coach. Since 1997, she has been  involved as a training editor with the Chips Quinn Scholars Program for Newsroom Diversity. Reach her at mahogan@aol.com. 

Published on Poynter.org  

By Mary Ann Hogan

(Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times 1991 all Rights reserved)

With the hype-driven success of "Scarlett," can "Huck Finn's Excellent Adventure" be far behind? Just think: If Rhett can come back, maybe Shane can too.

To prepare for the day that Huck and Jim open a dude ranch in Wyoming, we present this unexpurgated look at likely sequels to some of the great works of literature.

"The Raisins of Wrath"

When we last see the Joad family from Steinbeck's Depression-era masterpiece, "The Grapes of Wrath," Tom has left the clan, vowing to improve conditions for the helpless everywhere. He promises Ma Joad he'll come back someday. The rest of them, still looking for work, hole up in a barn with a starving fellow migrant, whose life Rose of Sharon tries to save with mother's milk.

Fresno, 1988

This time when the dust came, it curled up in ribbons past the hats of the men who were sitting on the benches, waiting. They were waiting for the dust to settle so they could see their reflection in the shiny hubcaps of a Lincoln Continental. Out of the car stepped the California Dancing Raisins. They had heard through the grapevine that Tom and his family were starved by drought and needed help.

"Tom," said the head Raisin, "we want you to be our manager. . . ."

 -----

"Hamlet: The Next Generation"

The final scene of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," one of the most troubling works in the English language, is a big mess. Basically everybody is dead, except Hamlet's trusty sidekick Horatio, and, of course, the ghost of Hamlet's dad, who was dead when the play began.

 (Enter various pages and attendants, Horatio, and finally, the Ghost of Hamlet's Father.)

Ghost: Zounds! Where is everyone?

Horatio: Dead, my lord.

Ghost (sniffing the air): Something really is rotten in the state of Denmark.

(Enter Ghost of Hamlet; Ghost of Hamlet's Mother; Ghost of Hamlet's Stepfather and ghosts of everyone else who died in Act V, Scene 2.)

Horatio: Soft! Who goes there? Art thou flesh or fiend?

Ghosts: OooOOOoooOOOooo!!

Horatio: Page! Come hither! Get thee to a Ghostbuster!

(Exeunt: Attendants, to look up Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd in the Yellow Pages.)

_____

"The Raven, Too"

"The Raven," Edgar Allen Poe's most famous poem, ends with the narrator realizing that the Raven perched above his chamber door will be there forever, croaking, "Nevermore!" The refrain is a hapless reminder that the narrator is doomed to be haunted throughout his life by the memory of his lost love, Lenore.

Years have passed since first the bird

Relayed to me that awful word,

That stinging, unforgiving word of "Nevermore."

But now, my bird and I are friends.

Through therapy we made amends,

And soon forgot old what's-her-name ---

Oh yes! Her name's Lenore.

"Let's move out West," the raven croaked.

And then untutored, unprovoked,

I said: "Let's open up a health-food store!"

Quoth the bird: “In Livermore.”

____________

 Call Me Fishmeal

Melville's "Moby-Dick," the labyrinthine allegory of Good and Evil often described as the most important work of American fiction, ends with everyone drowning, except the good guy-narrator Ishmael, who floats to safety on a coffin rising from the sinking vessel's hellish vortex. The Great White Whale, of course, escapes, with the body of his maniacal nemesis, Captain Ahab, lashed to his side.

 Call me Fishmeal.

 That's the nickname they gave me after the leviathan of my soul found itself pierced on the harpoon of my conscience and I sold the rights to my story and moved to Hollywood. Life is peaceful now that I am rich, and I continue to embrace the bosom of the sea through my position as national director of an organization that saves the whales.

To pledge contributions, call 1-800-GO-FISH.

BY MARY ANN HOGAN

Los Angeles Times

Dec 26, 1994

Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times 1994

It starts with the poppies. All of a sudden, here they are, part of the landscape I take for granted. Like the Bay Bridge view of San Francisco. Like earthquakes, fresh tortillas, crab season, like the Pacific Ocean itself.

Earthquakes I can do without. But the other stuff?

"Where are you folks going?" the mailman says, nodding at the "For Sale" sign.

"Virginia," I say.

"You're—leaving California?"

That's just what I think to myself a hundred times a day.

We're not so much going to one place as we are leaving the other. We're uprooting, taking the things we own but leaving the things that made us.

We're going to a better job, safer streets, a place without 911 buttons on the automated teller machines. We're leaving aging parents, comfortable back roads and baseball teams, a lifetime of people we love, or know, or at least can call on if something goes wrong.

But America's migratory history tends to deny the idea of loss. To complain, to drag your feet, to be depressed, to achingly miss your friends and family, is somehow seen as the height of self-indulgence. It's anti-opportunity. And by extension, un-American.

"Aren't you excited?" someone inevitably asks when I describe our future home.

"It's great," I say. "Just great."

*

I'm not sure my 4-year-old son understands what it all means. He knows about the boxes in the basement and the real estate people. He knows we'll be together again with his father, who has been back east for several months at his new job. But as far as he can see, Virginia is only 10 inches away from California in his "Child's Atlas of North America."

"Mom," he says one day, "when we move to a new state, will our friends move with us?"

I should find solace in the massive group experience of it all, in the fact that each year, about one in six Americans moves somewhere-across town, upstate, to a different region, another country, even to Virginia. But the numbers don't help. No matter how many other people move, I've always assumed I would live out my life on the West Coast, where my great grandparents came a century ago to find their own version of better jobs and 911-free banks, where I've been connected to the tiniest ripples of life since day one.

"I've been thinking," I say one night to my husband. "If I die in Virginia, who will come to my funeral?"

*

In the beginning, people moved on, in what some call  “a deeply rooted tendency in American culture."

 "Our society is one built out of the migratory experience," says Peter Morrison, Rand Corp. demographer

Like Canada and Australia. Scratch the surface of any of these three countries and you find millions of what California writer Bill Barich calls "Elsewherians." They strip the cupboards, stash the toys, grab the truck and ride off to the Promised Land, taking part in what Morrison describes as "a fundamentally healthy process, akin to the human circulatory system-our way of maintaining the economic life of the nation."

He's right. If we all stayed in one place forever, the country would have a monumental economic heart attack. So we go to Texas, Denver or Silicon Valley when they're booming. We go elsewhere when they slip. We leave California, in droves these days, with the same single-mindedness that Steinbeck's Joad family came here. We uproot for the good of the family, and in the end, for the good of the country.

Outwardly, it makes perfect sense. But still, I know there must be hundreds of thousands of uprooters, my immigrant great-grandmother among them, who tape the boxes shut, say their last goodbys, and then begin to die inside.

"The diaries of women coming across the Great Plains, following their husbands, are filled with lament and regret," says John Bodner, professor of history at Indiana University. "They ask themselves, `What am I doing . . .?' "

Three weeks after we arrive in Virginia, my son and I are watching his "Dumbo" video. Dumbo's mother gets locked away in the cage. My son crawls onto my lap.

"I think being in jail is better than being in a new state," he says. "When you're in jail, you just pay money and you can get out. But when you're in a new state, you have to wait till your mom or dad says you can go home."

*

"It's similar to the grieving process," says Stephen V. Eliot, a Ridgefield, Conn., psychologist who for 12 years ran a relocation counseling service.

"Once the decision to move is made, people can have a profound sense of loss. It starts with the very basic things, the familiarity of the everyday. The sense of security you have from knowing a place. It moves to deeper relationships and support systems, to friends and family."

The people who recover, who can turn uprooting into transplanting, are the ones who feel the sadness to the bone, Eliot says. They accept it. They admit it. They acknowledge that losses have their own time frame, that you can't stop feeling them by willing them away.

Suddenly, random moments of feeling connected turn into days. Then into months. And that's when the real new life takes hold.

Those who don't make it through just go through the motions. Moving? A cinch. Pack up the house, send out new-address mailers, sign up for some pottery classes, get new curtains, a few new friends, and, presto, you have a new life.

Sort of.

"Sometimes the separation is so painful, people block it out altogether," Eliot says. "They say things like, `These friends weren't so great.' They also struggle with the unreasonableness of their sadness: How could I possibly feel this way if what we're doing is best for the family? They can withdraw. And then they're not able to make new connections."

At midnight I call a friend in California. "How did we get to know each other?" I say. "I don't even remember."

"I think it was just chemistry," she says. "When you have a lot of people in your life, you can afford the luxury of chemistry. It just happens. When you're desperate, it's like you're looking at everyone you meet, wondering, `Is this the one?' It's a double bind. You can't just go up to people and say, `Hi. I just moved here and feel terrible about it. Wanna be friends?' "

*

Four months after we arrive in Virginia, my son announces that he loves his new state and wants to stay forever. He loves his school, his karate class, and most of all, Virginia's trees.

"They don't have any trees in California," he says. One day I pick him up at the home of a preschool friend. The friend's mother greets me at the door.

"This whole move must have been hard on you," she says.

I force a smile. "It's been OK. . . . To tell you the truth, it's been kind of awful."

"I know what you mean," she says. "We came here from Boston two years ago. Coffee?"

By Mary Ann Hogan, Special to the Newseum

"The moon is made of green cheese."
-- John Heywood (c. 1497-1580)

"Magnificent desolation."
-- Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11, 1969

SPACE, 1969 -- It's a perfect day, as days on the moon go, and Neil Armstrong, first human ever to step there, is doing what anyone would do. He's taking pictures.

Houston: Neil, this is Houston. Did you copy about the contingency sample? Over.

Armstrong: Roger.  I'm going to get that just as soon as I finish these pictures.

Typical tourist. Never mind the soil sample, just let me get one more shot here ...

Just before history's first lunar landing, Armstrong's wife offers this advice: "Be descriptive, Neil."

It has a stark beauty all its own, Armstrong finally reports. It's like much of the high desert of the United States. It's different, but it's very pretty out here.

The pictures will prove it. 

Houston: Roger.  Out.

At first, NASA doesn't place high priority on photography. "They had a memo out that said: ‘If an astronaut desires, he may carry a camera with him,' " Gemini 5's Gordon Cooper says. That changes.

If there is a turning point, it may be the series of 1965 images taken by Gemini 4's James McDivitt, showing fellow astronaut Ed White floating freeform in space, light as thistledown—is that the Earth below him?—connected to the micro-universe of his spacecraft by a mere tether. These are the first spacewalk photos ever shot, and the first NASA photos to be devoured by the worldwide press. And so, by the world.

Imagine: Kodak moments in space. Pictures from a place where no camera has gone before.

By 1968, when the first of the 11 Apollo missions takes off, NASA has a bustling photo department, even importing photojournalists from National Geographic and Life to coach their astronaut-photographers.

Each moon mission is more photographically sophisticated than the last. The camera lets the pilot-explorers show rather than tell. "We were engineers and pilots," Apollo 17's Eugene Cernan has explained, "and the world was getting a bit tired of hearing us say ‘beautiful' and ‘gee whiz,' although I believe it would have been equally difficult for poet or plumber to explain such sights."

So, fellas, what does it really look like out there? What do you really see? Be descriptive. 

Cernan, the last human to leave the moon behind, puts it like this: "You can call it 'the universe,' but it's the infinity of space and the infinity of time. I'm looking at something called space that has no end and at time that has no meaning ... Now that's very difficult to conceive, I know. But that infinity of space and that infinity of time does exist because I've seen it with my own eyes."

And he's recorded it with his own camera.

And he, Armstrong and a select group of fellow astronauts have brought back the pictures to show us, yes, I've seen it with my own eyes. Science analyzes the photos. NASA assigns each one a cryptic label, AS11-40-5914 ... AS11-40-5915 ... And now, some 30 years later, the rest of us can see just how those photos have altered what we know and how we imagine.

Imagine: Real-life images of us, and surrounding atmosphere.

A postcard-perfect earthrise.

Vistas from a place we once called heaven.

Unimaginable. 

If Proust is right —if art brings us to "landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon"—then astronaut photography is nothing if not art. The pictures offer layers upon layers of answers to questions we have entertained since long before the time of Greek mythology's Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, scorched his wings, and tumbled into the sea.

Apollo 12 air-to-ground transmission: Al, can you find the Earth? Where's the Earth? Oh, there it is. I can see it. Hello there, Earth.

The astronauts, fighter-pilots-turned explorers, have seen the sun and the moon and our place in the universe, seen it with their own eyes. And by recording it with their cameras, they become unwitting photojournalists, as pioneering in their way as the Civil War artists more than a century ago, who first brought the unthinkable home in photos.

Image. Man in spacesuit out for a spacewalk, with Earth backdrop. Astronaut commentary:  "Rather impressive."

Image. The whole Earth hanging in sky. Astronaut commentary: "Waters are all sort of a royal blue. Clouds, of course, are bright white."

Image. The moon itself, subject of centuries of philosophy and fancy. Air-to-ground transmission: "That crater is ... that crater is, by golly, a rather steep crater ..."

Image. Man in spacesuit with American flag on surface of the moon, with Earth rising.  " ... a beautiful picture here."

Unimaginable.

Houston: You guys resting?

Pete Conrad: Yeah we're resting.

But they're not really resting. Apollo 12's Charles "Pete" Conrad and Alan Bean are stalling—walking slowly back to the lunar module, hoping for a chance to shoot the "impossible photo" they've been secretly planning.

They want to mount the camera on a stick, set the remote timer they smuggled on board the spacecraft, and snap a picture of the two of them, the only humans in existence on the moon at the time, standing side by side.

"That would obviously be the picture (NASA) would grab and send out to the world," Conrad says in an interview years later, "until some smart guy asked, ‘Who took that picture?' "

But they can't find the timer. And Houston wants them back at the Lunar Module, pronto.  The Impossible Photo never gets taken.

It's the second photographic mishap for Apollo 12. The other: As Bean pulls his TV camera into position, he accidentally points it into the sun and burns out the lens, depriving the world of the first TV moon shots with colorfilm.

Bean, an artist as well, is haunted by the loss and makes up for it by painting color moon scenes. Among his most famous: The impossible image, two explorers, side by side on the moon, with nobody else to witness the scene but the stars.

Imagine.

Astronaut photojournalism gets its start with a February 20, 1962, sunrise and sunset. Four of them, in fact, in one day.

On that day, John Glenn becomes the first American (the second human) to orbit Earth. He also becomes the first still photographer in space, armed with a 35 mm "rangefinder" he bought for the trip from a Florida beachfront drugstore.

He is first in a decade-long line of pilot-explorers who set out to document science, and who come home with documents that inspire existential inquiry and global humility.

Except when they drop the camera. Which happens twice. The camera in question both times is a specially outfitted 70 mm Hasselblad, the space camera of choice. Apollo veteran Cernan, on his June 1966 Gemini 9 mission, is climbing in after his spacewalk, and kicks the camera Thomas Stafford used to shoot his adventure. Cernan dives for it. But the camera bounces away.

A month later, on Gemini 10, Michael Collins (of Apollo 11 fame) discovers that the camera stuck in a slot on his chest pack has broken free of its tether and floated off into space, carrying his wide angles of Gemini, Earth and Agena.

As far as anyone knows, the cameras are still in orbit.

Air-to-ground transmission: "The Earth is now passing through my window. It's about as big as the end of my thumb ... "

The real significance of astronaut photography becomes clear when the world sees the first images of the whole Earth. Date: December 1968. Mission: Apollo 8, first manned space mission to enter lunar orbit.

"We were fighter pilots and test pilots out to do a job," as mission LM pilot William Anders puts it. "But all of us either transcended that or were jerked out of it by the view of the Earth as a sphere about the size of your fist at the end of your arm."

Apollo 15's Alfred Worden canonizes the whole Earth in poetry: "Earth: a small, bubbly balloon hanging delicately in the nothingness of space ... " Earth scientists, ecologists, theologians even, seize upon the image as a tool to teach a new way of thinking.

Biologist Lewis Thomas, in his 1974 classic, The Lives of a Cell: "Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth ... is that it is alive ... It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun."

And Apollo 8's Anders begins his Christmas Eve message from that very vantage point in space like this: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth ... "

This millennium's final moon mission. Apollo 17, December 1972. They've got space photography down. Technically, the very last moon photos are ... galaxy class.

Incomparable lunar panoramas.

A crescent earthrise behind scalloped lunar surface that would make Michaelangelo weep.

Mission commander Eugene Cernan, among the most poetically minded of astronauts, captures the mood of the entire operation: "As I stood in sunshine on this barren world somewhere in the universe, looking up at the cobalt

Earth immersed in infinite blackness, I knew science had met its match."

But then, like the rest of us, they're still tourist snap-shooters at heart. 

Harrison "Jack" Schmitt: Let me get the focus right ... All right. I got you reaching for the flag.

Cernan: How's that?

Schmitt: That's good, Gene ... That's beautiful.

Cernan: This has got to be one of the most proud moments of my life ...

Houston: Roger, 17 ... we thank you very much.

Mary Ann Hogan is a Virginia-based writing coach and story consultant.

South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Aug. 8 2004/ OUTLOOK

By MARY ANN HOGAN,  Special Correspondent

I knew him for 25 years.

His wife is my closest friend.

So when he died last month, prime of his life, a vibrant 52, I told her I'd write his goodbye.

What to say in an obituary for someone you've known for so long—a contemporary, and—by full-life standards—still quite young?

Here were some early thoughts, words that would come back to haunt me:

Brilliant physician. Workout fiend. Dog lover. A man of great talent and passion and brawn. Big laugh. Family first.

One summer he taught my sons how to shoot a gun, and my sons will remember that, and him, forever. At the memorial service, a fellow doctor told the crowd of 400 that just before his untimely death, "Ken saved the life of one of my patients and I can never thank him enough."

He loved his children more than anything.

His wife was the love of his life.

His heart was as big as the mountains.

Big. More. Love.

The obituary I wrote said all those things because those were the highlights of Ken's life.

Then, I couldn't sleep at night. I kept thinking about what the obit didn't say:

His daughter was the first to see his truck by the road.

His wife waited at home for a call, for any word at all since his groggy and rambling goodbye.

Police found his body 100 yards from the truck, sprawled on a grassy hill. In the cab of the truck were bottles of pills and a gun.

Thank God he spared the world the mess of the gun. He took the pills instead, a lethal dose of a drug he knew would stop his heart. Prescribed them himself. Just went up there and lay down amid the wildflowers, no blood, no blown away face, no missing brain matter, what a great guy, a gentleman, really, to be so kind and thoughtful in this, his final larger-than-life deed.

All of this the obituary should have said, but—not speaking ill of the dead—didn't.

The obit said instead that he died "unexpectedly," some vague and comfortable word for a death that no one would name.

But the truth is, death by one's own hand is more prevalent even than murder, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The unspeakable act is particularly destructive, leaving everyone close to the dead one endlessly blaming themselves.

In her book, Night Falls Fast, Kay Redfield Jamison, the distinguished Johns Hopkins University psychologist, says that try as we may with science, statistics and trends, there is no adequate explanation for the why of such an act. Sure, there is often a trigger—a divorce, a lost job, a lost way, some life event that lets people tidily say, "Ah ha."

Yet, Jamison goes on, quoting another expert in the field, "The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight. "

What exactly was it in my friend's case?

His wife and I and others revisit those things that, in serious retrospect, could have been warnings, patterns, signs. Lonely childhood. Distant, exacting parents. Early sense of wanting, maybe needing, to be better, brighter, bigger, more accomplished, master equestrian, top of his class, Stanford Medical. More sports than you could believe, wind surfing, scuba diving, wake boarding. Owner of big prize dogs. Lover of big things and big ideas.

All things that appear to feed and fill. But to feed and fill what?

No one knows for sure.

And there lies the heart of it.

Ken was a natural at medicine, his sister would say at the memorial. At a fairly advanced age, at least for doctors, he studied into the night, on top of everything else, to get board certified in several sub-specialties, disciplines that most of us could never pronounce, let alone master. Montana, where he moved his family 10 years ago, was his idea of heaven—big, expansive, full of muscle and promise, a study in extremes and mysteries, like the man himself.

Was there a trigger? Maybe the threat of his longtime marriage ending, maybe a thousand reasons leading up to that point, maybe he just got tired of achieving, maybe, maybe, maybe.

I sent Ken's obituary off to another friend alerting her to the news. This is so sad," she said. "What happened?"

I told her.

Silence.

"Then—the obituary is a total lie," she said.

Silence again.

Was it a lie? Or was it a half-told truth? Was it an act of kindness for a friend in a moment of need? Or a conspiratorial blow for silence, for the way it's been for centuries, since the very first time the bodies of those who took their own lives were barred from resting in peace in burial grounds with the rest of us?

Maybe I am an accomplice, a sinner of omissions. How to know?

I read back on my handiwork and all I can see now is what the obit didn't say:

Daughter, 17, screaming over long distance phone call, 'Oh God, he's dead, he's dead, oh God, help me, I want him to see me grow up, I want him to see me graduate, to get married—Oh God, why did he have to do it? '

Daughter, 14, pallid with shock, can't cry, can't feel, won't talk, defying the notion of "sharing" her thoughts with anyone, numb, nearly gone.

The obit should have said, but didn't, that death by one's own hand is the 11th leading killer in the U.S., according to the 2001 death count, the latest on tap at the CDC. That number 11 comes after heart disease, stroke and diabetes, but before liver disease and pneumonia.

Self-murder is more popular than the murder of another, the homicides we see in newspapers every day and in TV dramas every night.

The obit could have said that worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, someone ends his own life, or her own, every 40 seconds of every single day. And that those numbers baffle social scientists, who log the growing rates even as Americans keep getting richer, more acquisitive, more long-lived, maybe happier, or maybe not.

I could have quoted the many Web sites or organizations that reach out to the roughly six "survivors" of each such death, people who will search the rest of their own lives for answers. For patterns. For clues they should have seen but didn't. For the thousand details that would never show up in the obit.

In Night Falls Fast, Jamison asks a provocative question: When in the course of human evolution did the first human creature make the conscious decision to end his (or her) own life? "Was it a sudden impulse," she writes, "or prolonged disease? An inner voice, commanding death? Perhaps shame or the threat of capture by an enemy tribe? Despair? Exhaustion? Pressure from others to spare common resources of food and land? No one knows."

She then follows the sweep of history and mines the most famous of such deaths, Cleopatra to Hemingway, the list goes on, the distinguished company of artists and writers and thinkers lending a near mythic undertone to it all.

But the actual details? Pedestrian, bleak.

The police returned Ken's cell phone, the one from which he made the final call to tell his wife, "I want it to look like a heart attack."

The line on Part 32 of his Death Certificate, Cause of Death, reads "Prescription drug overdose."

At the memorial, 400 people listened as friends, family and colleagues spoke, as girls with beautiful voices sang.

Not once did anyone there mouth the unsayable word.

Suicide.

Mary Ann Hogan is an independent journalist and writing coach living in Boca Raton. E-mail her at mahogan@aol.com.

SOMEWHERE COOL OUT WEST—Pass the bran muffins, light the incense, and crank up the Rolling Stones. It's breakfast time here at the Sunny Hills Rock 'n' Roll Rest Home, that rollicking feel-good place where our nation's 77 million Baby Boomers will go to stage the final act of their lives.

Before anyone trips over the phone cord trying to get on a waiting list, know that the Rock 'n' Roll Rest Home is still, at this point, just an idea, a metaphor, a dream, a best-case scenario, maybe even, depending on your proclivities, a hallucination. One that a loose network of forward-thinking experts has been pondering as we march toward that demographic watershed of a date, Jan. 1, 2011.

That's the day the Boomers start turning 65.

And then they'll be 70, then 75, 80, and faster than you can say In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, the landscape will be teeming with old folks, more than have ever been old together in the history of the continent.

These aren't your parents' old folks. They'll be old folks whose generational ethos has always been, well, Dylan put it best, Forever Young.

So many Boomers getting so old so soon promises to shape the whole society. Futurists and demographers are consulting their statistics and plotting scenarios.

Some say we will become a nation of narcissists, and spend all our money on our last hoorah and beyond, scarfing down buckets of anti-aging props, pills and shakes while salivating marketers cater to our ever-selfish whims. They predict we'll spend our days consuming pricey treats and our nights pounding our fists at the unfairness of it all; we really are over 30, dammit, and on top of that, mortal, with one foot already firmly planted in that final Davy Crockett fort in the sky.

Breathe deep.

Others say we will go happily into that good night, grabbing and owning old-hood for all it's worth, the same way we grabbed and owned passages and causes of decades gone by, delayed adolescence, college, parenthood, self-esteem, the business world, even the presidency. Softly, gently, we will evolve into wisdom-imparting elders, in a massively populated bow to the tribal ways of yore, when the average life expectancy was 40, so anyone who made it to 80 was not only honored, but thought to be touched by God (so God forbid you'd ever stick 'em away in a nursing home).

"There's sort of a Shakespearean-story aspect to it," says Ken Dychtwald, psychologist, author and president of Age Wave, a San Francisco-based consulting firm that specializes in Boomer-related markets and trends. "One outcome is that we care only about our own gratification. The other is the ultimate replanting of life. What will be our legacy? That's the unwritten chapter."

But what if both things happen at the same time? Left brain, right brain. Yin and yang. Mars and Venus. Red and blue. What if we are heading for the ultimate replay of the culture wars, a chance for a huge group of people with a huge amount of time on their hands to argue sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll of the 1960s all over again?

At stake, says Dr. William H. Thomas, is quality of the final Boomer years. A maverick geriatrician, Thomas is at the hub of a movement to replace nursing homes with communal habitats of like-minded people, plants, pets, music and genuinely good old-folk vibes.

"We'll have a subset of Boomers leading the emergence of a new kind of old age," Thomas says. "The Boomers will find a way to make old age cool."

Will we?

ONLY ROCK 'N' ROLL

It's exercise hour at the Rock 'n' Roll Rest Home, that still imaginary place where Boomers—Americans born in the years 1946 to 1964—will bend and stretch their way into a period of longevity the length and breadth of which this land has not yet seen.

One thing's certain: We'll be bending and stretching to rock 'n' roll, says the University of Chicago's Tom W. Smith, director of the National Opinion Research Center's massive social science survey of trends in American life and thought.

"The favored music will be rock and roll, in the same way that our parents' generation wanted to hear the big band sound," Smith says. "It's the strongest example of what we call 'the cohort effect.'"

In other words, the music you hear as you come of age tends to be the sound you prefer as you grow old. Ours is the soundtrack of growing up Boomer. School dances. Kids who tried pot. Kids who wore Madras. Induction centers. Protests. The town memorial service for RFK. The moon landing. Dr. King. Mr. Nixon. The Mets' first pennant. The Saigon Baby Airlift. The Yellow Submarine, Red China, Black Panthers, Green Berets, Walter Cronkite signing off, "And that's the way it is."

This doesn't surprise Peter Hart, whose Boston rhythm and blues band is made up of 50-plus rockers. They call themselves Geezer.

"You can bet the parties at the rest home will be a lot more raucous than they are now," says bass player Hart. "We'll be gigging there. We'll be playing till our bodies give out. It's better than all living together in a stadium when Social Security runs dry."

But there are different ways to party, just as there's different rock 'n' roll, The Doors, The Animals, The Four Tops, The Dave Clark Five, Chuck Berry, Elvis, Janis, Jimi. And remember the number one chart-topping hit of 1966, the one that squeezed out The Beatles, the Stones and Wilson Pickett? It was Sgt. Barry Sadler's service-to-country anthem, The Ballad of the Green Berets.

Silver wings
Upon his chest
Make him one
Of America's best.

DOCTOR, DOCTOR

A long time ago, way before Boomers started going in for triple bypass surgery, eons before Washington wonks worried about the gerontological train wreck of too many oldsters and not enough doctors, everything seemed possible.

It was 1966. Time magazine named as its Man of the Year a generation—young adults under age 25.

Time called them the Now Generation, a cultural juggernaut whose "convictions and actions, once defined, will shape the course and character of nations." A pretty tall order but typical of the prestige the world attached to the Generation that Would Never Grow Old.

They were "intellectual," Time said, "skeptical," and engaged in an "omphaloentric process of self-construction and discovery." They were also "highly independent," which made them "highly unpredictable."

These were the leading-edge Boomers, those who clearly recall Kennedy's assassination, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and the Tet Offensive. How these first wavers encounter and shape their old age will open or close doors and possibilities for the rest, the Boomers who came of age after the '60s.

If we all keep working (70 percent of us told the AARP we would work well into our eighth decade), we'll steal some of the best jobs from the generations below us.

If we all retire (one-third have $50,000 or less set aside, and only seven percent have $150,000, we told the U.S. Government's Retirement Confidence Survey), we might break the collective back of those charged with feeding and caring for us.

Either way, money will trade hands—lots of money.

"No one in human history has so commanded the attention of the economic organism of American marketing. This will happen big, big, big time as they age," says current Time essayist Lance Morrow.

"As they have done everything de novo, they'll find ingenious and wonderful solutions to all sorts of problems.," Morrow says. " Here come those great new walkers! It's hilarious to contemplate."

The up side: Acres of novel inventions, wonder drugs, medical marvels and gadgets for lifestyles still unimagined, all in the name of staving off the great—if unpleasant—inevitable.

The down side: Will only the seven percent with $150,000 in the mattress have access to it all?

"Who will be first in line? Will survival—survival of the fittest—become a blood sport?" asks Dr. Florence Comite, associate clinical professor at Yale University School of Medicine. "That's an awful thought—the worst case scenario."

So government gets into the act. Comite predicts a new ethical creed evolving to help us sort out the answers. "An emergence of the ethics deeply bred within our generation," she says.

Something's got to give, Morrow agrees. "These will be critical decisions. You can't just put 70 million people out on an ice floe."

That would be some party, the Rock 'n' Roll Rest Home on an ice floe with Manfred Mann singing its only Number One U.S. hit, written by Dylan:

When Quinn the Eskimo gets here
everybody's gonna jump for joy.

JUST WHO ARE WE?

If those who study the Boom psyche are right, the first things to shift (besides the hair, the height and the waistline) will be the language. There will be no more golden years, no "retiree," "elderly," no autumnal, senior-citizen beating around the bush.

"There will be no euphemizing it. We'll be old," says William Strauss, expert in generational cycles and co-author of The Fourth Turning.

Figuring out what to call ourselves—geezer, old aquarians, shaky dudes and old fogies for starters—will show that we know who we are and are OK with it.

In San Francisco, filmmaker Susan Stern and her 50-something friends have already done it. They are Crone Babes.

"Being a Crone Babe is not about facelifts or trying to reclaim our youth," says Stern, whose film Barbie Nation explored gender roles and body image. "Being a Crone Babe is about how women can be beautiful and sexual, and to do that throughout their lives."

Stern, for one, sees a rest home that offers "workshops in sexuality, not just flower arranging and genealogy." Says Comite, creator of Yale's pioneering health program for aging women: "Sex and sexuality will be an important part of true connectivity, intimacy, even spirituality and how it all ties in to finding meaning" in old age.

What women say about it all is especially important, because, well, they live longer. Instead of drugs that deny old age, some visionaries see us taking the drugs that help us accept it (enter medical marijuana), as well as round-the-clock Internet access to medical specialists, scanners that read your finger and check your vitals and tell you and your doc whether your meds need to go up or down.

Don't even call it a rest home, they say. Call it "a life-extension community," part spa, part communal residence, a place where the rule is exercise, massage and well-being for both body and spirit. Or more leafy, comfortable habitats like Eden Alternatives, or communal Green Houses.

The shift in vocabulary presupposes a shift in the way we think about getting old.

"We equate old age with decline," says geriatrician Thomas, father of the "Eden Alternative" movement. "All our policy, all our research, is declinist. Government policy people take the view: 'Old people are a plague of locusts and we have to do something about them before they do something horrible to us.'

"You don't hear them saying, 'Holy Cow! Society is gonna be blessed with a vast number of people with a huge amount of life experience.' You couldn't drag that sentence out of them with a tow truck."

Thomas, author of What are Old People Good for? How Elders Will Save the World, sees the Boomer future as "a contest of ideas; a contest of people who can imagine, and those who rely on Power Point slides and bar charts. The future always belongs to those who can imagine."

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one.
-- John Lennon

RED CANE, BLUE CANE

But wait! Don't forget, the Boomers are not all political, long-haired, college-bred and hell-bent on changing the world.

"The truth is, we weren't all joggers, we didn't all go to Berkeley. Most Boomers never protested anything," says Jeffrey Love, chief of research for the AARP.

In fact, there are wide and varied chasms among us: economic, cultural, philosophical, and the testy matters of politics, religion and the meaning of things. How will that play out when we're all locked together in the yellow submarine of old age? Will we spend our cocktail hours and tea time poking each other with red canes and blue, in endless argument about who was right about Vietnam?

Maybe. But the communications revolution of the early 21st century has handed us a chance to group up in ways we never imagined. Instead of the "local" rest home, there may well be communal groups of Swift Boat vets over here, environmentalists over there, history buffs down the street, church fellows, artists, musicians, stock speculators. The World Wide Web will allow these "naturally occurring retirement communities" to operate across national, and cultural, boundaries. On the other hand, each communal grouping could create its own blog and spend its last days on Earth slugging it out in cyberspace with the other old bloggers.

"There will be stresses within the generation," says Fourth Turning author Strauss. "There will be some sort of endgame to the Culture Wars. The question is, will the divisions get deeper? Will there be a solution? If the divisions worsen, it could be damaging to the nation as a whole. If they end, it would be healing."

Our house
Is a very, very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard
Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy
-- Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

LETTING IT BE

It's lights-out at the Sunny Hills Rock 'n' Roll Rest Home, that peaceful (we hope) space and time where Boomers will literally stage the very last act of their lives.

In the end, that's exactly what Boomers will have in common: The End.

Current life expectancy for men is 79, for women, 81.

Though we will all be dying, if the researchers are right, we'll do it in creative and different ways.

"There's a whole as yet unimagined approach to death and dying," Thomas says. "We don't know what form it will take."

Boomerists talk of a new surge in spirituality,of movements to reject extraordinary medical treatment. Of going out instead on the pleasant ice floe of pharmaceutical oblivion. Of celebratory "send off" parties, last hoorahs where loved ones honor you before (and during) the great departure, rather than after. Of themed events (maybe virtually produced) that surround the honoree in the final hours with a favorite place, moment or song.

"Being an other-worldly generation," says generational historian Neil Howe, "we will give a lot of thought to death and dying; to Thanatos, just as we paid a lot of attention to Eros."

But, the endings will not be written by experts. They will grow out of the personal choices of more than 70 million highly independent, highly unpredictable people.

Each of them, somewhere out there, destined to drop off to sleep tonight, just as they will one day soon at the Rock 'n' Roll Rest Home, smiling as the music floats in from Rare Earth:

I just want to celebrate
Another day of living
I just want to celebrate
Another day of life.

Independent journalist Mary Ann Hogan writes from her home in Boca Raton and coaches writers nationally. Reach her at mahogan@aol.com.

By MARY ANN HOGAN

(Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times 1993 all Rights reserved)

The Mother Bird arrives one morning to build a rickety nest in the plum tree.

I see her from the window as I spray the glass, wipe the walls, scrub the doors, polish the brass (ammonia works great), and scrape the linoleum tiles on the kitchen floor (try a toothbrush).

I am not a neatnik by nature.

I am pregnant. And possessed by the late-stage ritual known as nesting, the obsessive need to clean, organize and rearrange everything in sight, to ready the environment for a new life-whether it's a new baby, new career, new home, new phase.

To the nesting dove outside my window, the world is a giant twig to be pecked into place in a plum tree. To the nesting human, the world is a giant mess. So the nester makes it right.

(Note: Buy eight rolls of paper towels . . . three paint scrapers . . . four pounds mozzarella cheese for stuffed zucchini . . .)

The condition is not only obsessive, it's progressive, particularly with mothers-to-be. The closer the baby gets, the more feverish the nesting fervor. As one mother who raised three children puts it: "You know you're ready when you're down on hands and knees at midnight cleaning the floor vents with Q-Tips."

(Note: Pick up four boxes Q-Tips.)

In quieter moments, I wonder: Where did it come from? Is it something only women do or do men nest too? Is pregnancy nesting related to the clean-fuss-organize frenzy of some people, no matter their gender, who can't start building or writing or moving on to the next stage unless their underwear is folded, their ferns watered, their files in order, their slates literally wiped clean? (Frank Lloyd Wright was apparently a pre-sketch fusser; was he nesting over the birth of a drawing?)

*

The progressive nature of nesting is what concerns me this morning as I measure the driveway to see if it's wide enough for a truck.

"What truck?" my husband asks.

"The truck with the guy coming to jackhammer the concrete in the back yard . . . to make way for the lawn."

The male of the species tries not to register alarm. But one thing is clear: This is not someone who has given much thought to jackhammers and shade-resistant dwarf fescue lawn grass and just how it all might one day help his unborn child get into Harvard.

"Are you OK?" he asks, finally.

I tell him about my friend Jackie, also pregnant, who woke up one morning and remodeled her kitchen. As she describes it: "It's like being on a runaway train. I spent the weekend up on a ladder stenciling dancing chili peppers across the kitchen walls. My husband just rolled his eyes."

The dove in the plum tree. Dancing chili peppers. Jackhammers. Incredulous husbands. It's all starting to make sense.

While our Mother Bird reminds us of our inextricable link to the natural world, there is Father Bird-the one who will never truly understand the wisdom of waddling downstairs at 2 a.m. to check a strange smell that may be coming from the freezer, then spending the next 45 minutes scouring ice trays and repositioning bags of frozen peas.

Jackie reassures me that I'm not losing my grip.

Oh?

Here come the contractors. One to fix the sewer line; one to do the stairwell carpeting; one to rewire the porch lights and hang the dusty chandelier . . .

(Note: Hit the 3-for-1 geranium sale and hang flower baskets on back porch.)

*

The wind is unseasonably high when I hang the geraniums. I worry about the Mother Bird in her rickety nest, the bird-world equivalent of clapboard and cheap aluminum siding.

"Do you think she needs help?" I ask, eyeing the ladder.

"Quit nesting all over the Mother Bird," my husband says. "She knows what she's doing."

He's right. The creatures that don't nest-like horses, cows and rhinos-just don't. Those with relatively helpless young-like mice, dogs, giant pandas, most birds and primates-do.

And they know exactly what they're doing and why. Even the Australian brush turkey, who builds a compost heap around her eggs to incubate them. (Mother Turkey pokes her head into the mound to check the temperature, sort of like Betty Crocker checking the marble fudge cake.)

"A bird isn't going to do too much that doesn't benefit herself or her young," says David Rimlinger, curator of birds at the San Diego Zoo.

No dancing chili peppers on the walls of her nest. Still, in its way, a bird goes into a frenzy. "Once she starts," Rimlinger says, "it's go, go, go, until the nest is complete."

When humans inherited nesting, behaviorists say, we got the go, go, go part, but didn't quite get the specific function part. It's possible, of course, that early humans nested in the corner of the cave, weaving saber-toothed tiger skins into cradle padding, and their ancestors actually built nests in trees.

When did it all become hazardous to people's health, to say nothing of their credit cards? How in the evolutionary scheme of things did we get from twigs to jackhammers?

"The residual stimulation still exists," says psychologist Jay Rosenblatt of the Institute for Animal Behavior at Rutgers University. "It's just siphoned off into other activities. It's deflected nest-building. The fact that we no longer need to do it doesn't alter the fact that we have to do it."

No matter what the creature, the go, go, go is the operating force-testimony to the raw power of nature, designed to ensure the propagation of the species.

Or, in this case, the propagation of the chili peppers.

*

Jackie calls to say her kitchen is finished. She's now on the prowl for a knockout claw-footed bathtub. "It's for the storage room we're turning into a bathroom," she says.

This is nature with a twist. Call it Nesting With a Vengeance. It's most commonly found in women who have delayed childbearing until their 30s. It's a way of thinking about self, career, the world, your place in it. Experts call it a hormonally driven metaphor for the fact that women are no longer confined to the four walls of the home or the cave.

"A woman has gone out and made a career, an income, a place for herself. She's delayed childbearing for a decade or more. All this plays itself out in the furiousness of the nesting," says Bay Area psychologist Lucy Scott, nationally known expert on delayed pregnancy.

The lawn-ladder-jackhammer frenzy, Scott says-almost a compulsion to tear things up and reconstruct them-is a symbolic way of tearing up and reconstructing an entire life to accommodate the new child.

"There's a profound shift in all levels of the way you think of yourself-from an independent person in life, in the world, to being home, relatively isolated, and taking care of this dependent creature."

Enter the contractors . . .

Last year, roughly one-third of the nation's 3.7 million new babies were born to women between the ages of 30 and 40. That's 1.2 million furiously nesting women, enough to populate (indeed, to build) a major American city-and to send 2.4 million contractors wintering on Maui.

Can this raw power of nature be harnessed somehow? Should nesting mothers take over the DWP? Or Wall Street? Should they blow into Washington with each new Administration to set the nation's house in order?

*

The Mother Bird leaves one morning without a peep. Her nest disintegrates soon after she vacates. I learn later that doves are notoriously sloppy nest builders, and that part of their nesting wisdom is getting the heck out of there, babies in tow, as soon as everyone hatches.

Meanwhile, I am spending the last weeks of my pregnancy on nest rest. From my pillows I can look out onto the world below. Let's see: The camellia bush needs pruning. The neighbor's porch needs painting. The neighborhood utility lines need to be underground. Quick, where's the ladder?

Editor’s note: Five days after filing this story, Mary Ann Hogan gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

Copyright (c) 1994, Mary Ann Hogan. Dist. by Los Angeles Times  Syndicate

"WHY are there rainbows?" My 4-year-old is at it again.

"Because when sun shines through rain, it makes different colors," I say, hoping a trace of high-school physics can serve the moment.

"Why is there a sun?" he asks.

"The sun is a star. There are many suns in the universe."

He puzzles. "Mom," he says finally, "why is there a universe?"

We call it the Why of the Why. In a few seconds, a tiny kid can toddle his own path of inquiry back to the most basic questions of time, space and existence. Where does the ground end? Why can't you go to the middle of the middle? Why is forever the last number? In a flash of parental hope (or maybe delusion), you think, "Hey, Einstein wondered the same thing." Of course, you know your children aren't really entertaining the Big Bang theory. Or are they? Treat your kids' questions seriously, and the impulse to know why corn chips curl could lead to a cure for AIDS. But brush them off because you're too busy faxing or stirring macaroni and their spirit of inquiry could wither. Or run amok. Why can't you catch lightning? The kid may figure the only way to find out is to connect an Erector set to the electrical plug. Enter the age-old dichotomy: on the one hand, curiosity has sparked the greatest advancements of human knowledge. On the other, it killed the cat.

Why? The question pricks the heart of the curious nature of curiosity. Behaviorists say curiosity is hard-wired from infancy to make learning and, thus, survival, possible. It's the "constant tension between the satisfaction of a search ended and the seductive lure of the unknown . . . (that) keeps the explorer exploring," says Dr. Linda C. Mayes of Yale Child Study Center.

Why does growing take time? Why do some plants grow into trees? Why do people live longer than flowers? When it clicks, it's like tasting chocolate for the first time. You want more.

''You see it in a 12-month-old who pulls to stand up, which is the motoric version of curiosity," Mayes says. "You see it in the look on their faces: 'Oh wow! That did it!' The same is true for a 4-year-old who has discovered one tiny bit of an answer about the universe—or an 80-year-old scientist discovering a new star."

But just on the far side of curiosity, the explorer can get lost in space. There are cautionary tales. Galileo, after all, was branded a heretic for asking too many questions.

''Asking questions is often seen as rebellious—a violation of the established order of things," says Ruth Formanek, professor of education at Hofstra University in New York. ''There are rules. When can you ask? Of whom can you ask? It's a power issue. Kids pick this up along the way—they become hesitant about asking questions. It lasts them their whole lives. I see it in the graduate students I teach. They don't feel comfortable asking why."

Why should that be, if, as Robert Penn Warren put it, "The end of man is to know"? Parents of mini-Einsteins often blame the child's schooling. (And it may be a rare teacher, indeed, who seriously entertains the apparent mystery of why ice cream doesn't have bones.) But does that explain everything?

''There's a lot of talk about the 'insatiable curiosity of the human species.' But in truth, humans tend to be curious about an amazingly small set of domains," says Don Symons, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

''Look at all the information about the physical world that's available to us now—an overwhelming amount. It's as if the modern world is providing an experiment to find out what people are curious about. And what are they curious about? They're curious about O.J. and Anita Hill. These are the things that grip them—not geology and plant physiology."

Why?

It probably started when nature endowed the higher creatures with curiosity in the first place. The animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz says curiosity is "how an organism asks questions of (its) environment."

Linked to survival

What's that strange thing by the tree? Something I can eat? Mate with? Something that can hurt me?

Those that found out and acted accordingly survived. Says Formanek: "On a simplistic level, it's like listening to the weather report. Why do we do it? So we know whether to wear a raincoat or carry an umbrella. So we can understand the environment and adapt to it."

You see it in chimps, among the most curious creatures, who investigate a new object. They poke it, roll it, maybe try to smash it with a stone, as others watch to see what their braver friends can find out.

''It's their way of categorizing the information in their universe," says Nancy Harvey, an animal behaviorist at the San Diego Zoo.

Add the human ability of language, and you might come up with:

Why don't rocks grow?

Where does the sky go when it rains?

Why does time go by?

''Young children have constructed a very elaborate universe of their own," says David Elkind, Tufts University child psychologist and author. ''Everything in the world is new and mysterious. They believe that everything has a purpose. They're trying to fit the incongruities of the world around them into that picture. When they ask, 'Why is the grass green?' they don't want to know about photosynthesis or chlorophyll. They may want to know that green grass is helpful to green caterpillars who need a place to hide.

''Of course, they also ask questions to have the pleasure of the interaction. They may want answers, but they also want you to know what they think. We're far too ready to give them long-winded explanations. Too often, our answers just bore them."

Why?

That's how curiosity works, experts say. Too little or no stimulation and you can literally bore an animal to death. Add something new and different to the environment and it evokes interest and curiosity.

But something extremely different evokes fear.

''An old shoe is boring. An interesting box will cause a child to go and investigate. But a big scary box—a box with strange sounds coming out of it—that would be frightening," says Raymond Bixler, psychology professor emeritus at the University of Louisville. "Organisms evolve to avoid things that are too strange."

The genetically encoded message: Keep searching to keep going, but avoid things that are too far out. You could get eaten by a predator.

Or lost in space. Stephen E. Glickman, a University of California, Berkeley psychologist who has studied curiosity in zoo animals, found that creatures richest in curiosity have three things in common: varied diets or complex hunting behaviors, good manipulative capabilities and big brains. Humans to a T.

Add language and abstract reasoning to the mix, and you get questions about how to build an airplane, split an atom or beat Bobby Fischer. Of course, as some evolutionary thinkers point out, it's possible that nature never intended our excess brain capacity to be used for sorting out plate tectonics.

''Curiosity about the physical laws of the world is an acquired taste," says anthropologist Symons. "The massive amounts of information available to us now just didn't exist in human evolutionary history."

Which could explain why more people tend to be riveted to O.J., Roseanne and the tabloids than they are to, say, photovoltaic cells. But then come those rare people with the most curious quirk of all—the insatiable mind. For them, as Yale behaviorist Mayes points out, curiosity is "the inevitable fate that at least a few individuals must accept in order to advance knowledge." 

Why? Who knows? British physicist Stephen Hawking believes the answers to the biggest whys could lie in a unified field theory of the universe, as yet unearthed by the most inquisitive minds alive. When such a theory is found, Hawking writes, "then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God." It's bedtime at our house and my son looks perplexed.

''Mom, why can't you own a star?" The 4-year-old germ of scientific genius no doubt, or maybe a creative way to start a bedtime conversation.

''Why do you think?" I ask.

''Well, if you owned a star, you wouldn't be able to keep it in your room." ''I think you're right."

''Mom, why can't you keep stars in your room?"