My granddaughter is now thirteen, in every sense of the word. Gone are the days when she gushed over my arrival, squealing “Grandpa’s here!” and running toward the open front door for a long hug.

She’s thirteen. (Did I mention that?) I still get hugs, but I have to ask for one.

When we talk these days, it’s more often about all those things she finds entirely ANNOYING and BORING and SOOO PREDICTABLE. She’s the one who asked one day why it is that old guys all wear white tennis shoes and a Fitbit. I looked down and sure enough, there they were: white Kirkland tennies. And on my wrist? A Fitbit. We wandered around the Mall and her observation was confirmed. In a not-so formal poll, it seemed as though a solid four out of five of my peers, greying old guys, were everywhere walking up and down the mall in white tennis shoes and sporting a digital, step-measuring watch on their wrist.

(I since trashed my white Kirkland’s [sadly, no longer sold at Costco] for a dark brown pair and scrapped the Fitbit for an Apple Watch, Series 3 – Carolyn’s surprise Christmas gift.)

I confess, it’s a Grandfather’s prerogative to annoy a thirteen-year-old granddaughter with intentionality and aplomb. It’s great entertainment, all in fun of course. I’ll try some dance moves, for example, and she’ll roll her eyes and toss back her head, clicking her tongue, “GRANDPA! You are so old-school! That’s so EMBARRASSING.”

Does that stop me? Not for a minute.

So just the other night, out of nowhere, she had a retort for one of my teasers. I said something like, “I am so hip it scares me.”

Her reply?

“OK Boomer.” Just like that.

Wow. I’d heard that one before from somewhere out there in cyberspace. OK Boomer. It made me curious. For some years now, I’ve talked about myself as “The Beached White Male – an aging, curious Boomer.” I knew enough to think of “OK Boomer” as an intergenerational thing, one appropriated by all those who followed us Boomers, you know – Gen Xers, Millennials, Gen Y, Gen Z.  They seem, in general, to have developed a particular disdain for my generation. For good reason. OK Boomer sounded like one of those popular twitter memes deserving a hashtag. It’s a dismissal, a wave of the hand, a disparaging shrug, a WHATEVER… as in “Sure Boomer, whatever you say.”

Even before I heard Rebecca say it, I determined to do a little etymological research on the phrase. But now, here it was coming out of my granddaughter’s mouth, aimed at me, her grandfather. A Boomer, no less.

“Wow, Rebecca – ‘OK Boomer.’ Where did you hear that one?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Somewhere,” she said with a wave of her hand.

“Do you know what a Boomer is?”

“Not really.”

“I love it!” I said with a laugh.

It was time to Google the phrase.

Imagine my surprise when in my morning newsfeed Time Magazine (one of my many lamestream media sources) with the title: “Terms Like ‘OK Boomer’ Are Hard to Define. This Dictionary Is Trying To Do It Anyway.” I read it with interest.

Here’s how they define the term: “OK boomer” is “a viral internet slang phrase used, often in a humorous or ironic manner, to call out or dismiss out-of-touch or close-minded opinions associated with the Baby Boomer generation and older people more generally.”

Wow, I thought. There it is. The Beached White Male in a phrase. And how is it that my generation has lost all credibility with the generations that have come after us?

We think we have it figured out. We aren’t interested in their naïve notions of reality, of politics, of business, of religion, of what it means to be an American.

Too many of us are consumed by a Trumpian view of the world – terrified of progressives, denying the mess we’ve made of the environment; our inability to see injustice, unwillingness to own our prejudices; our lack of capacity to appreciate the plight of a new generation in an economy that favors the wealthy, saddling the young with debt and housing that’s out of reach; our smug hold on privilege, behind those gates of protection – more interested in building walls than bridges.

OK Boomer.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

We can do better.

We can dance.