There Are No Boring Lives

By Alan D. Bergman

“My life just hasn’t been that interesting.”

I get a little crazy each time I hear a Baby Boomer (those born between 1946-1964) utter those words. My forehead furrows, my stomach instantly aches, and my head bangs away like a bass drum in a marching band. It’s hugely aggravating for me to listen to anyone deny that their life has been interesting.

The truth is all of our lives have been filled with a treasure trove of poignant memories,unforgettable experiences, and important lessons learned.

As a professional biographer and personal historian, I know from years of interviewing experience that strategic digging beneath the surface is all that’s required for revelations to tumble forth. Asking the right open-ended questions can elicit stories that the next generations will find captivating and even astounding.

INTERVIEW SURPRISES

In my work, I have often been surprised by what my interview subjects have revealed— people who, before I met them, had warned me that their lives had been dull and uninteresting. Among the surprising items that I’ve learned from them (collectively): spending five years in prison for tax evasion; patenting a device to keep birds away from wind turbines; the horror of learning that a beloved nanny was an ardent Nazi supporter; and one individual unable to return to his home country because of a military coup takeover of the government during his absence.

These aren’t the stories of celebrities or historical figures. These are the stories of people who, like so many others, insisted their lives were unremarkable.

LIVING THROUGH HISTORY

From a contextual point of view, all of our personal stories have intertwined with the history of our times, rendering our stories and lives that much more interesting.

Being a Baby Boomer, I vividly recall the day another teacher rushed into my second-grade classroom and whispered something into my teacher’s ear. My classmates and I watched in stunned silence as our teacher burst into uncontrollable sobs, a strange and unforgettable sight. Hours later, I learned that President Kennedy had been assassinated. So, for me, the horrors of that event commenced when I witnessed something most mysterious in my elementary school classroom in Westchester County, New York.

Thirty-eight years earlier, I was in a meeting on the 22nd floor of a Manhattan skyscraper when my wife called to say that a plane had just hit one of the towers of the

World Trade Center. All the meeting attendees strode over to the conference room windows literally moments before the second plane crashed into the second tower. We stood there, not comprehending the surreal sight we had witnessed. My instinct told me to immediately leave Manhattan and head home, a task made challenging by the complete shutdown of public transportation. I walked to the Midtown Tunnel, where police officers were stopping cars, instructing drivers to take the many people gathered there through the tunnel into Queens (where my car was parked).

Though both these incidents have their permanent place in history, we each had a personal relationship with those tragedies and how they unfolded for us. I am confident that the next generations of my family will be interested in learning how these events personally affected us, their forefathers and foremothers—what we did, how we felt, and how they transformed our personas going forward.

Among the many significant events that became pieces of all Baby Boomers’ stories were the first human footsteps on the moon, a U.S. president resigning in disgrace, a relentless war in Vietnam; the birth of smartphones, and the advent of driverless cars.

These have become parts of our unique, irreplaceable life stories.

Do not ever tell me you’ve had a dull, uninteresting life.

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Alan Bergman is a personal historian and the author of 16 privately-published biographies. His website is https://LifeStoriesPreserved.net and he can also be reached via his email address, ab@LifeStoriesPreserved.net.