by Mark Morelli
I just bought a house. Now it is my obligation as an adult to wave the
rake handle and holler, "You kids stay off the grass!"
Am I being ironic? Darn it, just a few weeks I resolved to give up kitsch and irony for the new millennium.
I long for the company of straightforward people who mean what they say and say it without a wink in their voice.
Straight from the shoulder is want and to what I aspire. That's probably why I'm enjoying Tom Brokaw's book "The Greatest Generation," which lauds the men and women who fought W.W.II.
I grew up in a world shaped by the GI generation. All the adults in my neighborhood were veterans. Their attitudes trickled down to us. When one of us pouted on the playground, the others would jeer: "Look who's having a pity party!"
God know how much self-esteem we blasted right up through the hole in the ozone.
Now that I am closer to 40 than 30, a homeowner, the father of a school-age child in, I want to live in a culture that expects me to act my age.
Fat chance.
It wasn't always so. A few years ago, John Rosemond wrote: "Forty years ago, if Frank Sinatra had invited pre-adolescent children over to his house for slumber parties, adults would have been horrified, and when the news got out, that would have been the permanent end of Mr. Sinatra. Today, Michael Jackson, age 35, invites pre-adolescent children to sleep-over at his house and the adult community (including the press,) who has for more than several years
been aware of Jackson's particular affection for children, asks, "What's the harm?"
In a 1997 New Yorker article "Kids Are Us," Kurt Anderson writes: "Youth
isn't being wasted on the young anymore." The icons of the baby boom generation are now the uninspired subjects of big Hollywood flicks like "Flubber" and "Mr. Magoo." Video game arcades are likely to be filled with adults, as well as comic book subscription lists.
"In the early sixties, I would have been frightened to meet a grownup who read "Fantastic Four" or "Justice League of America," states Anderson.
In "Wobegon Boy," Garrison Keillor describes a small-town boyhood of
the not-so-recent but long-gone past: "Kids migrated around town as free
as birds...You were free, but you knew how to behave. You didn't smart
off to your elders, and if a lady you didn't know came by and told you to
blow your nose, you blew it."
Parents, Keillor continues, didn't "read books about parenting, and when
they gathered with other adults, they didn't talk about schools or about
prevailing theories of child development. They did not weave their lives
around yours. They had their own lies, which were mysterious."
I knew there was something wrong with contemporary adults when, as a
teenager, I first heard the phrase, "Parenting is the toughest job you'll
ever love."
Typical petty Baby Boom solipsism. Parenting prior to 1970 was, I guess, chopped liver.
Take me instead to the world of Charlie in "Death of a Salesman," whose
son Bernard went on to a great law career while Biff Loman failed even as
Willy hovered and doted on him. Willy asks Charlie, "What did you do?"
Charlie says the best thing he did was not take an interest.
My job is to create an environment that is ripe for discovery, then get the hell out of the way.
Let kids be kids . . . and let me holler at kids to stay off his grass without thinking he's playing a sitcom character.
