My Generation
Saturday, October 4th, 2008
By early October, the morning light has changed and the air in those earliest hours is so mountain-cabin thin that breakfast smells weigh it down. Fresh coffee and eggs are boiling in the kitchen, seaping out the windows and door frames to fill the house as subtly as the morning chill left on the furniture by cracked windows.
In the backyard, the dogs give off their first barks, chasing squirrels that balance along the fencetops and powerlines, or in suspicion of random hedge apples that fall invisibly behind the fence and land in the underbrush with rustling sound. They are animals in a long line of creatures that came before them, as we are, and yet they are in some cases 4-5 generations removed from the farm dogs that ran these fields when I was much younger and the pastures were yet to be made over into suburban housing.
My generation is all grown up now, and making the table for children of their own. The first real generation defined by media (or maybe defied), raised with Henry and Ribsy – with Pony Boy and Dally – with wet recesses sitting “Indian style” watching Reading Rainbow and Electric Company, then all that giving way to Nirvana, phony apathy and downtrodden plaid.
We’re successes now, and we’re alcoholics. We’ve dyed our hair, we’ve died of cancer. We’ve married the right person, and there is love still to be claimed for some. Those are the extremes, but I can testify to personal knowledge of those situations or those who are living them … and I’ve come out on the fair side.
Despite our individual stations, our generation has apparently found hope the way each one does before it. We’ve found the hope to make lives for the younger versions of us in a world more chaotic and dangerous than the one we already knew to be chaotic and dangerous. We’ve done this not knowing if our offspring will benefit by timing, by chance or dumb luck the same way we have, to avoid any significant injury or trouble.
I can remember so many close calls, so many temptations when I had the good fortune to slip past thanks to someone else’s wisdom, circumstance or my own temporary strong will. I can remember a few nights out behind a local motel where these old men would sell bootleg liquor to carloads of kids brave enough (or stupid enough) to park and wait outside of rooms rented by the quarter-hour. My generation, as I immediately experienced it, in dim garages with lawn chairs and oily tools hanging on the walls while sniffing butane from cannisters with towels draped over their heads. Good friends popped pills at the lunch table and washed down uppers with milk from the same chocolate cartons we drank from in grade school.
Another good friend with a lesser affliction, but a genetic hindrance instead, namely the lack of intelligence replaced with what he saw as street wisdom. He was killed in a motorcycle drag race. He was raised on the same streets with kids the same age who lived in the same ranch-style houses with paint flecking, but many of them are still here 15 years later and haven’t done a thing wrong. Now the experiences that he lost and the sadness of his passing is more evident.
But these are the risks I contemplate this morning while making a simple start to the day – while I sip coffee and peel eggs. I have all Saturday to be with my children – to guide them and see them through the day, and still I will make mistakes. Come Monday, they are sent back into public schools and I have to trust in people my age to care for them and teach them, when I doubt my own ability to do that sometimes. It’s then that I depend on all the connectors – all the similarities we share in our upbringings. I suppose you could call it the American way, but isn’t it this way in other nations? Maybe, but with different seasons and a lighter menu.
