The Dawn of the Bob Greene Moment
by Bob Cook

When you get to a certain age, whether you like it or not you are going to start having Bob Greene Moments. Bob Greene is a 50-ish Chicago Tribune columnist for whom life appears to have peaked at a 1964 Jan and Dean concert in his native Columbus, Ohio.

Greene's frequent ink-stained trips to the past tell us that though we've gained much as time has marched forward, we have lost much as well. We have lost, as Greene emphasizes, our inability to escape the technology that aids us.

Our inability to be shocked by the kinds of scandals that gripped our nation years ago.

The inability of the remaining living Beach Boys to appear on the same stage.

And, contemplative, wistful looks at summertime, leavened with graphic descriptions of child-abuse cases.

For his role as the Last Unironic Man, Greene is lauded as a Middle America icon. "With the death of Charles Kuralt, Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene inherits the mantle of America's leading Cracker Barrel journalist," Entertainment Weekly said in a review of his book, "Chevrolet Summers, Dairy Queen Nights," a collection of short pieces about Average America.

Or ripped as a Middle America icon. From Booklist, in a review of the same book: "As in almost all Greene's other mysteriously popular books — the smarmily personal nonfiction and the truly icky fiction — the tone here is ersatz insightful. It's Bob's world, and the rest of us are too stupid to understand that if only we were appreciative of the little things about life in the 1950s (Greene's piece of nirvana), we would all be so much happier."

In the mid-1990s The Chicago Reader, as a public service to Bob Haters, ran a popular column, written by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg under the nom de rip-a-new-sphincter "Ed Gold," called "BobWatch: We read Bob Greene so you don't have to."

"Ed" would point out Greene's cliches and flaws for the boomer-hipster crowd that picks up the Reader and wouldn't wrap their mahi mahi in a Bob Greene column.

But Greene is not a flat-out crank, pining for the good old days. His late-model car has a front window, for sure, but he spends most of his time looking through the rear-view mirror at what he passed up, as if he can't get his mind off the gas station he didn't pull into at the last exit.

What may be scariest to would-be hipsters is the extreme likelihood that they will grow up to become him. After all, as you get older, there's a certain realization that the best days are behind you. Or, at least, that you're growing immune to the Next Big Thing because you've seen it before. Or that the future is not yours anymore.

Hence, the idea of the Bob Greene Moment. It's when, without realizing it, you see something new and realize a sense of some element of the past lost by its introduction. You're not rejecting the future, just feeling a slight hurt at part of your past dying. The new thing could be a new car, a breast implant, anything, as long as it motivates you to think wistfully about the past.

Last Christmas, I bought my wife a handheld computer. One of the first tasks she took on was transferring the information from her address book into the little device. A few days after she began, I had to look up a number for her that she hadn't yet transferred.

So I went to her old, paper address book, which she's had since we got married seven years and three cities ago. As I paged through the book, I saw no longer needed numbers like the landlord in Brooklyn, the kennel in Cleveland and even the movers in Indianapolis. And I thought, "wow, here's our whole history, laid out in these phone numbers." They're written in ink, so you can't erase them. But with a handheld computer, you could hit delete and instantly those numbers would be gone. Sure, they're not useful, but it would be like erasing your history.

That's when I slapped myself with the toaster. Barely into my 30s, and I'm thinking like Bob Greene! I never said a Bob Greene Moment was a pleasant moment.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.