Daredevil was a word to which we might have given some thought, inasmuch as the best place to play chicken was the empty parking lot of Johnny MacKay’s fire-and-brimstone church where the sand wasps made their nests.
How we really got hurt was by accident, trying to bring our bikes to abrupt halts on loose gravel. We never understood the physics of this maneuver.
I blame Tarzan for our ignorance of physics. The old Johnny Weissmuller movies were on TV almost every Saturday morning. Tarzan swung effortlessly on his jungle vine pendulum, from wherever he was to wherever he wanted to go, with no thought of pivot point, length of pendulum arc, or pendulum acceleration back to equilibrium position. We would do the same on a rope from a tree branch in the Penske backyard to the roof of the Penske garage, making the Tarzan yodel and trying to thump ourselves on the chest with one hand while holding onto the rope with both. Pendulum acceleration back to equilibrium position was smack into the Penske tree trunk.
But whatever ignorance of physics we indulged in, extra glory went to anyone who required a bandage larger than those that came in the standard Band-Aid box.
Meanwhile, what were the girls doing? I don’t know. Boys didn’t notice. Boys didn’t notice anything that wasn’t loud, fast, or about to explode. The girls were too old to make those high-pitched shrieks of glee or grief that could be heard all over the neighborhood. (The raised voices of mothers and daughters didn’t carry much beyond bedroom walls and certainly not all the way back to the alley where we were skewering newts on lit sparklers.) The girls were too young to be “fast,” as it was still called. And the girls weren’t married to us yet, so we didn’t make them explode.
It used to be that, toward the end of childhood, boys and girls led separate lives. There was a kind of half-joking purdah. On one side of the veil frilly dress patterns were sewn and stuffed animals were collected. On the other side Johnny and Bobby and I were given hammers and crowbars and five dollars apiece to spend a glorious afternoon tearing down the MacKays’ rickety one-car garage. We didn’t drop the roof right on our heads, but not for lack of trying. Boyhood and girlhood were parodies of manhood and womanhood.
As our generation got older we ceased to be amused by the joke. By the time we’d grown up the list of things women aren’t supposed to do was reduced to using the men’s room unless the line for the women’s is really long at sporting events or concerts. And there are only two things men aren’t supposed to do: pace up and down in hospital waiting rooms smoking Lucky Strikes while our wives deliver babies and hold forth on what it’s like to be a woman.
I am not about to violate that second injunction. But the men and women of the Baby Boom are more alike than men and women used to be. I’m trying to imagine my dad acting like my mom. I’m not having much success. And I’m only slightly better at imagining my mom, pipe stem clenched between her teeth, driving too fast with one eye on the road, trying to dial the car radio to a Cleveland Indians game.
The Baby Boom genders are similar, therefore I conclude that the experience of our formative years was similar. The girls were prying up icky things from the busy street of the psyche. They were loading Wham-Os of melodrama with steel ball bearings of emotion. They were lighting firecrackers of hurt feelings, breaking parents’ hearts the way we broke parents’ windows, and leaving flaming bags of dog poop on the front porch of vulnerable people’s sensibilities. And girls were as avid as boys in their attempts to torment a dumb animal, otherwise known as Mom. But, mind you, I was a boy, so I’m only guessing about this.
As well as the facts of life, the fact of death obtruded. Of course, if you came from a large Irish family, somebody was always kicking off. There would be a solemnity to the nagging in getting me into my Sunday school clothes and no baseball game on the car radio. Funeral homes shared their architecture with branch banks. Drive-through deposit windows looked like the porte cochere where the hearse was parked. Why funeral homes were called “homes” was puzzling. And a strong smell of cut flowers in any kind of home was as surprising then as the smell of boiling cabbage and tobacco smoke would be in a home today. Other than that the atmosphere, full of grim faces and dull carpet, was reminiscent of a visit to a larger and more populated principal’s office. Up at one end was a dimly remembered kin of Dad’s, partly scary, partly waxy, and partly covered by the horizontal Dutch door of the casket. A weeping aunt would say, “The good die young.” I’d wonder what she was talking about. He was in his forties.
But these deaths were adult matters. Sonny Merton was our age. He lived several blocks away, a sinewy, freckled, and unpleasant boy. He’d grab you by your wrists and yell, “Do you know why they call me Sonny?” and shove your fists into your nose if you didn’t say, “Because you’re so bright.” He rode his bike out into the middle of Central Avenue and was run over by an oil truck. For the next few weeks we huddled on the school playground every day before the first bell and talked about nothing else.
Mostly we discussed how squashed Sonny had gotten. Several kids claimed to have special knowledge of the accident. “I heard the siren when the ambulance came.” “My dad talked to somebody who lives right near Central.” “I saw a oil truck downtown that I bet was the same one.” According to the evidence of this testimony, Sonny had gotten very squashed.
We all said, “There’s no one like Sonny.” We all said, “Gosh, that Sonny!” We all said we’d known Sonny well. A few kids, who had, went to his funeral and were objects of envy. “They had to use rubber and stuff to make him look human again but then they wouldn’t let us look at his body anyway.”
It was the most interesting thing that happened all year. And now, when I listen to myself and my friends rue distant violence among hostile peoples or possible extinction of man-eating sharks or thawing ruination of inhospitable arctic wastelands, I confess that sometimes—not always, but sometimes—I hear an echo of Sonny’s name from the school playground.
We weren’t soft kids. We aren’t a soft generation. We couldn’t be or we wouldn’t keep getting our own way. And we’ve been doing so for more than sixty years. Our parents called us soft because we didn’t get up at 4 a.m. to help Pa drag a mop through the dust bowl or wear underpants made of barrel staves because Ma couldn’t afford burlap or work two jobs to put ourselves through grade school or squat in the basement all night with a piece of cheese in our hand because mousetraps were too expensive.
We kids were called soft because we didn’t go through what our parents went through, which they were usually lying about. And now we call kids soft—their flabby fingers plopping out text messages, bodies barely capable of enough wiggle for Wii, mounds of suet parked in front of LED screens with body mass indexes to make Jerry Harris look like Olga Korbut. I say that and then I go outside and see kids on skateboards and funny little bicycles and snowboards and twin-tip skis doing things that would have scared the worst word I knew out of me in 1959.
There’s no such thing as soft kids, at least not in their hard little hearts. I admire the way modern children are trying to break their necks, but I also worry about them. They wear helmets and knee pads and wrist braces. Every post and pole they slam into is padded. The piles of wood chips beneath their slides and swings are as deep as the curbside autumn leaf piles that no one’s allowed to burn anymore for fear of harmful air pollution. The rubber mats under their monkey bars are more cushy than what their moms use for yoga. And skate parks, ski hill terrain features, and indoor climbing walls have been built with care to make youthful high jinks harmless.
You’ll never get to be a splendid generation like the Baby Boom doing harmless things. Run, kids! Flee! Go ride your boards and bikes down the handicapped access ramps with which every building in America has been so inclusively and sensitively equipped. Nobody’s using them anyway. They’re too steep and treacherous to be ascended in a wheelchair, except by Paralympic medalists. (And you may become one.
) Or, better yet, get the Uncle Walter that I had.
He was not one of those happy-go-lucky younger uncles like Uncle Timmy whose antics had to be discussed out of children’s hearing. Uncle Walter was a respectable uncle, a vice president of something in a corporation and graying at the temples. We celebrated the Fourth of July at his cottage on the lake.
The summer after I turned eleven Uncle Walter gave me a grocery bag filled with fireworks of every type and kind. Then he handed me a lit cigarette. Not to smoke, of course—the 1950s were a different time, not a different planet—but because this was considered a sensible way for children to ignite fireworks. Playing with matches was dangerous.
I and my like-equipped cousins were turned loose on the beach. Fourth of July taught the Baby Boom an important lesson (albeit one we’ve frequently ignored). It’s a given that the stuff of life will blow up in your face, just try not to set it all off at once.
If I could go through it all again,
The slender iron rungs of growing up,
I would be as young as any.
—Robert Lowell, “Realities”
6
ENDS AND MEANS
Then one day childhood was over, darn it.
Youth, of course, would last forever. The infinite prospect of being young stretched to a horizon that no member of the Baby Boom has reached yet, unless we’re dead. But it takes a lot of growing up to stay permanently youthful, so we put away childish things.
Or we claimed that someone put away childish things for us. Billy and Bobby Stumf were going on a scenic picnic with my family. Such was our region of the Midwest that the limestone outcroppings at the local state park were considered scenery. One particular rock formation also made a credible scale model of Iwo Jima. There was a crag to represent Mount Suribachi; two flat stone shelves for the Japanese airfields Motoyama No. 1 and Motoyama No. 2; loose gravel mounds where the fierce battle of the “Meat Grinder” took place; and a little crevice to use as the cave where General Kuribayshi would hold out until the bitter end and, to our delight, commit hara-kari. All around was a sea of grass controlled by the U.S. Navy. (Billy and Bobby and I had been there before.)
The Baby Boom would become the Generation of Current Events—highly aware, highly informed, highly involved. But like many Baby Boom characteristics this was self-generated. It didn’t come naturally. If you’d asked my young friends and me about the U-2 spy plane flown by Francis Gary Powers being shot down over Russia or Adolf Eichmann’s capture in Argentina or rioting in the Belgian Congo, we would have regarded them as hazy events of the distant present. But we knew everything about Iwo Jima.
I suggested to Billy and Bobby that we bring our cigar boxes full of lead soldiers on the picnic. “No,” said Billy, who had attained the dignity of eighth grade. “Our dad says we’re too old to play with soldiers.”
And so was I.
Mr. Stumf—he of the machine-gun noises and the dead Jap money in the attic—carved miniature fighter planes out of balsa wood in his spare time. He built a train layout that consumed the Stumf basement, barely leaving Mrs. Stumf room to squeeze between the freight yard sidings and the Maytag. Fifty years later it occurs to me that Mr. Stumf would have been the last person on earth to tell his sons they were too old to play with soldiers. It was Billy and Bobby who had gotten to the point where they used the train layout mainly for train wrecks involving their sister’s dolls—and not so often anymore even for that.
Then there was the day when my new pair of Keds didn’t fit into the diamond-shaped openings in chain-link fence the way my outgrown pair of Keds had. Chain-link fence seemed designed to accommodate children’s feet. And childhood was hemmed around with chain-link fence.
The neighborhood had a few short spans of pickets or palings or split rails, randomly located for decoration and keeping nothing in or out. When the Greatest Generation really meant to fence a place they used chain link. Nice people strung it upside down, with sharp twist-tie points on the ground and smooth folded ends in the air so kids wouldn’t rip themselves to shreds. Less nice people did the opposite. We scrambled up and over regardless. For twelve years it had been a shame to use a gate. And now my foot was stuck. What if girls were watching?
We’d quit not noticing girls, not that we noticed much. We were blinded by the dazzling thought that, under their clothes, they were naked. So we still didn’t know what they were doing. I asked my wife, “What were girls doing when they were thirteen?”
“We were spying on the boys,” she said. “We’d get together and say, ‘Let’s go spy on the boys.’”
I was afraid of that. And me looking like an idiot with my foot stuck in the chain-link fence.
Looking like idiots may be why we stopped jumping off airing decks. That and the fact that our growing weight meant we had to find and drag home at least three discarded mattresses to break the fall. And we were too big to fit down clothes chutes. What if somebody found out about that at school, how Mom had called the fire department to pull on my ankles because I was butt-stuck with my legs flapping above the laundry hamper?
What ever happened to clothes chutes and to those second-floor decks at the back of the house where the dust mop was shaken and the bedclothes were aired? They were once such common features in the Midwest. Modern houses are full of conveniences—climate control, WiFi, home entertainment centers, indoor gas grills, elliptical exercise machines, and custom-built walk-in wine cellars. But what do you drop the cat down? And where do you heave water balloons from?
But I wander from the subject. And because the subject is the coming of age of a large portion of the American public, all of whom have been through that, maybe it’s just as well. I’m certainly not going to talk about sexual awakening, especially not my own. The human heart, with all its mystery, wisdom, and inspiration, is worthy of endless exposition. The human penis is another matter. Let’s just say that, like childhood, it was hard to let go of.
The Baby Boom faced a difficulty in leaving childhood behind. We had no motive to do so. Our fathers weren’t household tyrants. They weren’t even home that often. All the domineering patriarch sob stories of the past—from Abraham’s insistence on a career path that was all wrong for Isaac to King Lear’s overcompensation for his inability to express affection to Cordelia—could have been resolved by the introduction of golf. And our moms were “understanding.” They’d read Dr. Spock, women’s magazines, and newspaper advice columnists. Maybe they couldn’t bring themselves to discuss sex in detail but, in general, you couldn’t shut them up about “the changes young people are going through.”
My mother took me aside and solemnly informed me, “If you ask a girl to go swimming, and she says she doesn’t want to, don’t insist. Not even if it’s a sunny day and she’s in her bathing suit and you’re right by the water. She may have personal, private reasons for not wanting to.” I was baffled. And I remained baffled for several years, until my high school girlfriend—that great reader of information on feminine hygiene product packaging—explained the problem and how it could be fixed with a switch to tampons.
Our understanding moms were more useful when we sneered, pouted, had snits, and went around slamming doors. Then Mom would start in on “the changes young people are going through” and Dad would go play golf instead of grounding us.
We didn’t feel cramped by the limited, provincial circumstances of our upbringing. We’d get to that. Circumstances seemed okay at the time and were going to get lots better when we were old enough to drive. Our parents told us they’d given us everything. An obvious untruth because where was the moped, the .22 rifle, the aboveground backyard pool, and the pony? But they told us so often that we half believed them. We had it good at home. Subsequent generations figured this out, which is why they’re thirty-eight and living in their mom’s basement.
We were eager to mo
ve on. It’s a phrase we’re still fond of using, even now when what we’re moving on to is assisted living. We wanted to be older, greater children—cooler kids—and we were willing to make the necessary sacrifices.
Instead of jumping off airing decks we went to a flooded quarry where there was a cliff called “Suicide.” It was as high as a church steeple or, anyway, as high as a phone pole. And girls could see you. (Although some of them didn’t want to go swimming.) I spent most of a junior high summer day nerving myself to jump off Suicide. But I took a wrong lesson in graceful descent from circus trapeze artists leaping into their nets. I held my arms straight out at my sides. Palms, posterior forearms, triceps, and armpits got spanked bright red on the water. I spent the rest of the afternoon flapping my elbows as if playing Flying Horses—looking like an idiot.
We endured private lessons. These were not as ubiquitous as they would become, but the intent to give children “advantages” and “accomplishments” was the same. Not that our parents had any idea what advantage we’d gain by having these accomplishments or how our accomplishments were supposed to be an advantage. “Condoleezza Rice would make a great secretary of state, but can she figure skate and play the piano?”
Music was the most frequent of the lesson crazes our parents went through. Billy Stumf had a trumpet and was very good at getting spit to dribble out of the spit valve, and he could make extraordinary farting noises with the detached mouthpiece. Steve Penske produced haunted house ghost groans on a Hammond organ. Johnny MacKay sang in the church choir. He was so embarrassed by his boy soprano that he practiced hymns at home with a voice like the wrong frog being kissed by a princess. Susie Inwood was learning the violin, and Jerry Harris, who lived directly across the street, had taken up drums with special emphasis on the cymbals. Between the squeal of one instrument and the crash of the other it was as if our block were having an all-day car wreck. Nobody’s parents objected much when we abandoned music lessons.
Baby Boom Page 7
