Reflections on friends and family and people that fall in between

I grew up in Warren, Ohio and I come from a large, noisy and often dysfunctional family.

Now there is a statement that probably most of us who grew up in the Mad Men 50s and 60s share. Gas was cheap, TV was opening our world to people and places and ideas that we never would have imagined. We hung out with Gail and Ellen and Daryl and Kay and Bonnie and Betsy and they all lived nearby. Boys had cooties and eventually raging hormones that sometimes matched ours and sometimes didn't. We went to school together from Kindergarten til we walked together at graduation. Back then there were no seat belts in our cars, no bike helmets on our heads, and we didn't always lock our doors at night. We ate processed food without really caring if it was good for us or not. Vegetables and pasta came in cans.

And for many of us the constant was family. We were really the first generation that collectively moved away to go to college, that took those first jobs in far distant lands like California. We left in color coordinated Villager outfits with matching socks and came back to visit in impossibly large bell-bottoms, without our bras and without our inhibitions.

We didn't have Skype or smartphones or fax machines. We called home (collect) and were often comforted in difficult times by very distant family voices. We never learned until much later that family doesn't always mean friend, that friend can often be better than family and that there are lots of combinations that exist in between. Some of us knew this from the beginning but I have observed that many of us learned these things much later in life. If at all.

No matter how old we are when we learn some of life's lessons it isn't simple.