“Not only that, but my need to defy my mother is gone as well.
“The only issue now is how does it look—not who decides.
“So, for a week now, I’ve been parting my hair as it was as a child. Nobody has noticed—not even my wife or closest friends. Why should they? It means nothing to them. But it’s a big deal for me. I’m finally relieved of some nagging, irritating burden. This new ritual of combing my hair as naturally as possible makes me smile, and leaves me strangely at ease. I look forward to combing my hair each morning as I please. It’s a sign I am finally an independent adult.”
As for me, I’ll never forget the first time I voted in a real election—a presidential election: 1960. Because I was born in 1937, my political awareness was dominated by Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and the impact of the Second World War. It was my parents’ time and world.
With Eisenhower fading into old age and history, and the fifties coming to an end, I celebrated my twenty-first birthday just before the contest for the presidential election of 1960 began to dominate national politics. It was my generation’s turn, and my generation was ready. From early on, I supported John Fitzgerald Kennedy, working in his campaign in a small and local way. I admit that part of my enthusiasm came from his being unacceptable to my parents; he was so young—younger than they were by far—and he was Catholic.
When he was nominated by the Democrats, I was overjoyed. I watched the Nixon/Kennedy debates with intense interest and concern. The pundits of the press said this was going to be close—every vote counted. That meant me—I counted.
I was first in line at the voting booth that November morning. So wound up, I was shaking. I had never been in a voting booth before. But this was more than voting—this was an event in the making of history—an act to validate all my hopes for the future. I was carried away with self-importance as I solemnly stepped into the little booth with all the dignity of a student about to receive a diploma. Pulling the gray curtain behind me, I stared at the machine in fear. What if I make a mistake? I took forever to read the instructions and get each vote right. Saving the presidential vote for last, I voted—and pulled the validating lever with a mighty sound of “CHUNG.” Yes! I had done it. I threw back the curtain and walked out into the morning sunshine, feeling as though I and I alone had cast the deciding vote for Kennedy. An anxious youth had walked into that voting booth, and Citizen Fulghum had walked out, having taken his decisive place in the affairs of the people.
When my children were young, I always took them with me when I voted.
A family ritual of responsibility.
Even now I carry my voter-registration card in my wallet—reminding me of both my privileges and my obligations as an adult citizen in a free country. The card tells me much more than just the location of my voting booth. It’s one of the most powerful talismans of my identity—even more important than a driver’s license.
Anybody can drive a car.
“I’ll never forget the first time I had sex.” Charlotte, a gentle, dignified woman in her early fifties. “Looking back, it seems like such a brief moment—like jumping off a cliff and not getting hurt. I know I did what I wasn’t supposed to do. And I know I was lucky—nothing awful happened. Still, it’s a keepsake memory.
“In reality, having sex the first time almost consumed the last three months of my senior year in high school. My older sisters told me all about sex, and I found out about masturbation and orgasm on my own. But I was more than just interested. There was this mad urge—this upwelling of lust so insistently strong that I decided if the right boy came along, I was going to let him do more than kiss me.
“Mr. Right turned out to be a guy who had just come to our school the previous fall. He’d moved to town with his parents from New York City. Stan. Stanley. Oh, my. He was so different, so cool, so sexy. He smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes and wore a leather jacket. Flattop haircut, ducktails in the back. Oh, Stanley, where are you now?
“Anyhow. When we saw each other in our bathing suits at a swimming party that spring, we must have had the same thought at the same time, because about a week later we were out on a date and at the same lake in the middle of the night making out like animals in the front seat of a 1936 Ford—kissing and touching and licking and sucking—kept from going all the way only by the presence of the other couple in the backseat, who were doing the same thing and not doing the same thing for the same reasons we were.
“Stan invited me to the senior prom, and I knew why and what for. Yes.
“I really don’t remember the dress I wore or anything else about the prom itself. I do remember leaving the dance early, going out to the lake, stripping down to our underwear to swim, taking off our underwear in the water and touching and feeling everywhere, and having sex right there in the water. A wave of feeling hit me. I felt so weak I thought I’d drown.
“I can see that moment so clearly still—two kids there in the water—holding on tight to each other—overwhelmed, satisfied, scared, and exhausted. He laughed, and I cried—for the same reasons, I suppose. It was the first time for both of us. We had both lost our virginity, forever.
“It was the most powerful event of my senior year. Not even the actual graduation ceremony could compare. Sitting there in my little cap and gown, I felt silly. High school was over. I was a woman now.”
Nobody says, “We never will forget the first time we …”
The most powerful dimension of the threshold experience is solitary.
“I will never forget the first time I …” is the marker of self, alone.
It emphasizes your separateness from others.
Lifelong, there are uncountable first times that define you.
The first time you walk home alone from school, with a little time all your own. The first time you are left alone at home as a child—not having to go with your mother on errands. The first time you are allowed to be alone at home in the evening without a baby-sitter. And even more liberating, the first time your parents are away overnight or for a weekend, and the house is all yours.
On your own. Strong moments—scary and exciting.
Without much effort, I’ve collected enough of these first-time stories to fill a book. Stories of baptism, joining the Scouts, and initiation into a sorority. Stories of catching parents in a lie or deception, or catching parents making love. Stories of sleeping away from home for the first time, the first dance, and the first sexual encounter. Learning to tie shoelaces, learning something by heart, learning the news of the death of a friend or parent. “I’ll never forget the first time I …” is followed by accounts ranging from getting the first real job, to being elected to an office in school, to finding out you are pregnant with your first child.
These passages will be matched in later years when you experience your parents’ side of the ritual separation. Finding out how pleasant it is to not always have a kid tagging along. Experiencing the bittersweet disengagement of your last child moving out of the house, leaving you once again home alone in your house. And in old age, realizing you can no longer drive alone or go downtown alone—that you have done those things alone for the last time.
There are no parties or gifts or certificates to mark these times.
Most often, nobody else knows or takes notice.
But you know. You, alone.
Sometimes it’s wonderful. Sometimes awful. Sometimes both.
But never trivial.
The moment when something of importance happens to you, for the first or only time, may not be recognized at the time as a rite of passage or a ritual event. Only much later will you see its crucial moment in the scheme of things.
There is an exact word for this phenomenon: “liminality.”
“Liminality” is the word for the threshold moment—from the Latin root limin, meaning the centerline of the doorway. Liminality is the moment of crossing over. It describes the transitional phase of personal change, wherein one is neither in an old state of being
nor a new, and not quite aware of the implications of the event.
All the stages of life include liminality.
Life is nothing but moments of crossing over.
Stitching these moments together into the comforting quilt of wisdom is the task of one’s later years.
Only with the passage of time, the accumulation of information about the similar experiences of others, and the opportunity to fit a given moment into the overall scheme of one’s life does a threshold experience become understood. Then we know that the rite of passage is contained in a single move in a single moment.
Upon reconsideration, we invest the past with meaning.
This is ritual action—the ritual of remembering and revisiting the thresholds.
Last night a married couple in their seventies came to dinner at our house and stayed late into the evening, sitting by a fire, drinking coffee and talking. They opened a bottle of the wine of their lives—and shared a glass with us. “When we were young …,” and “We used to …,” and “I’ll never forget …”
This is not just storytelling. It is the sharing of personal mythology. It’s how we all make sense out of our lives and give its events significance. It parallels the mythmaking of the human race. It is the ritual of remembrance.
As I listened to the couple talk—not infrequently at the same time—I realized they had sanded and shaped each story again and again—embellished upon, subtracted from, and repaired as necessary. They could have made a tape of what they told and simply given it to friends, if all they wanted to do was share anecdotes. But it was their need to revive and relive those times that elevated the stories to the status of parable, legend, and allegory.
The couple told of a near escape from death in an automobile accident; of a time when a dimension of the supernatural entered their lives, as prayer was answered; of a great triumph where defeat was turned into success, as a failing business deal was saved by sheer grit; and the moment when invincibility became finitude, when nothing they could do would keep a newborn child alive. They spoke of the turning point when the gathering together of possessions turned to a letting go of possessions, as they moved from the old home to a condominium—a time of collecting stones and a time of letting the piles of stones go.
Old, old stuff—for them and for the human race.
A time for all things.
The next morning, I experienced the budding phase of this ritual of remembrance when I talked on the phone with my five-year-old granddaughter, who was home from school for a day with a sore throat.
“Grandpa, tell me again about the horseback ride, when the horse ran away.” I remember. It was the first time she had ridden a horse alone, without being led. The horse trotted off a little ways on its own, and she had pulled up on the reins to stop it. First we had lived that story, and then we had recounted that story the next day and several times since. A year later comes the request to tell it again. The actual event has acquired heroic dimensions. At this distance, I realize it’s become mythical—a story about becoming independent, about bravery when scared, about adventure and the taming of a wild beast. We will tell it again. And again. And someday it will change form and begin, “Well, I never will forget the time, when I was a little girl, my grandfather and I went horseback riding and the horse ran away over the hills and …”
No matter how personally unique the details may be or how idiosyncratic the telling may become, the great themes of myth and religion are revealed if you look at each person’s ritual of remembrance with a wide-angle lens. These personal events contain the universal themes that tie us to humanity, past, present, and future. The ritual is in the remembering—the remembering is self-revelation.
Though we tend to share the events of our personal odyssey, it is not necessary to the ritual of remembrance. We do not need to construct public rituals for many of the most important moments of our lives—the ones initially observed in secret. Our lives are rich with these occasions. It is enough to know that our parents and our children and our friends and most other people pass through these same doors.
Rituals do not always involve words, occasions, officials, or an audience. Rituals are often silent, solitary, and self-contained. The most powerful rites of passage are reflective—when you look back on your life again and again, paying attention to the rivers you have crossed and the gates you have opened and walked on through, the thresholds you have passed over.
I see ritual when people sit together silently by an open fire.
Remembering.
As human beings have remembered for thousands and thousands of years.
REUNION
Return to old watering holes for more than water—friends and dreams are there to meet you.
AFRICAN PROVERB
HIGH SCHOOL
Come to the reunion!” Does that invitation open your mental scrapbook and put the movie of your adolescence on rerun? The most common public ritual of reunion is this one, the high school reunion.
As I write these words, many of my classmates of forty years ago are about to assemble on June 17 for the reunion of the Class of 1954 of Waco High School.
I’ve thought more about high school reunions than most of my former classmates, because I was a high school teacher myself for twenty years and have been invited many times to attend the tenth-year class reunions of former students. I have also been the chairman of many of the annual commencement events, working closely with each class as they planned their graduation. I had an insider’s view of what was going on in the lives and minds of the students as they left high school. And I always looked forward with great interest to seeing them again at their tenth-year reunion. Teachers want to know what difference they made in the lives of their pupils, and reunions are a great place to find out.
When the students walked across the stage and out the door of high school, they were around eighteen years old, single, parent-dependent, living at home, and full of anxious plans and hopeful expectations.
By the time ten years roll around, the students have learned the lessons only experience can teach. Now they are twenty-eight—pushing thirty. College either worked out or it didn’t. Jobs or careers have happened or not. Love, marriage, family, children, and home have likely become realities—even come and gone already. Most of those who are gay or lesbian have come out. Some graduates have even gone full circle by the end of ten years and are once again living with their parents.
Faces and bodies have matured and even show early signs of aging. For all appearance of enthusiasm they may wear to the reunion, they are a more sober lot since last I saw them. They know the powerful part played in their lives by luck, circumstance, and the coming and going of love. They know a good deal more now about pain and sorrow, success and defeat, debt and gain, and the price paid for getting what they thought they wanted.
The high school reunion event is a powerful ritual occasion, whether you decide to go or not. And the real reunion is not with other people so much as it is with yourself. Daily, we reunite with self in the bathroom mirror. The first high school reunion is an invitation to look into a larger mirror.
Students tell me that the arrival of the invitation comes as a shock. Have ten years really gone by? Can it really be time? This wake-up call to the passage of time is the first step in the reunion ritual.
The next step is to find their high school yearbook. To first look for themselves. And then to review those years laid out in photographs.
Then comes the big decision: to attend or not?
Students tell me that the self-searching that happens between opening the invitation and making a decision about going is, to use their phrase, “heavy stuff.” A deep deliberation. It is not about high school. It is about Who am I? and What has become of me?
–
When I attend these ten-year high school reunions, I go early and station myself near the door. I want to see the entrance each person makes. When they went out the door, they were dressed alike in cap and gow
n. Even the hairstyles expressed a conformity.
When they walk through the door at the reunion, the costume announces who they are now—what they’ve become on their own. There are wide differences in attire now. They wear their adult disguises. A lot more careful attention has been paid to this entrance than they may admit. But the new clothes and shoes, the careful makeup, the fresh haircuts, and the companions they bring with them give them away. They come looking good. They come to say, “Here I am, now—what do you think?”
Often, the most important persons they want to see are those whom they loved during high school. Most all of us have former girlfriends or boyfriends who still shine in our memories. We’ve even thought about calling them up from time to time. Where are they now? What are they like after all these years?
We also want to see the wives, husbands, lovers, or companions the former loves have brought to the reunion. Those mates also have a ritual interest in the reunion—they want to see their companion’s past. Usually, the current companions will go to one reunion—after that, no way—it’s not their high school past.
What of those students who do not return?
Their absence is a telling statement about who they are now. The nonattendees often seek out former classmates to see how the reunion went—they still want to look into the mirror … but in private.
Whatever comes of the high school reunion, it’s an encounter with finitude—the brevity of life. The most common response I get to the question, “So you went—what do you think?” is this one: “All of a sudden, I realized how quickly time passes, how fast my life is going by, how much I’ve already aged. I can’t believe it.”
A college reunion is like a high school reunion, only more so.
My wife has just returned from the twenty-fifth reunion of her college class.
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