I finally got around to reading Joan Didion’s classic collection of essays from the Sixties this week titled Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In the title essay she highlights the empty lives of the young people she met in Haight-Ashbury. There are stories of runaways, spoiled trust fund teens siphoning daddy’s money for an idle life focused on getting high and vignettes of adolescents wandering the streets looking for life to happen. Didion said, “These were children cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values…they are less in rebellion against society than ignorant of it.” They parrot platitudes from gurus because they still haven’t found their own words to know what they think, who they are.
I grew up a part of that generation, but I was protected by the web of community in my small town. Were the values I mimicked any truer to what I really believed, though, than the platitudes adopted by the hippies in San Francisco? I wandered, too, and took a long time to grow up. I didn’t “drop out” or take drugs. I never lost touch with family, but I thrashed around in my forties—a late bloomer—causing collateral damage until I decided who I was.
Growing up is a process no matter what circumstances you come from. Some people rebel or misbehave making an external show of their struggles. Other people hammer out an identity through internal trial and error. A few freeze in place living a Groundhog Day life of perpetual adolescence. For others, life changes them without asking permission.
In a subsequent essay, titled On Keeping a Notebook, Didion again talks about growing up and how her compulsion to write helped her discover what she thought and who she was. Her writing helped her trace the path of her life, to give her perspective on how she changed over time. She says, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.”
I’m pretty sure that’s the motivation for my writing at this stage of life. My fixation on the subject of how we grow up, however, comes from the fact that my granddaughter’s adult life is in motion having left for Ohio State in August. I can’t help but compare this point in her life to my past. I was the first in my family to go to college. My parents were unable to provide guidance and I floundered on my own. She has tools and resources. Her parents are strong guardrails. Regardless, I worry. I know that even with the best support, life isn’t easy. I think about my oldest son. I worried about his ability to get a good job since he passed on college and didn’t have a trade. I never envisioned that his hardest challenge would come later in life when he was a single dad to a severely handicapped daughter.
A Christmas gift suggestion keeps popping up on my FB feed. It’s a key chain engraved with “Don’t do stupid sh*t—Love, Grandma.” It sounds like something I’d say and I’m tempted to buy it for her, but I know that no talisman will help her make good choices. I hope that I’m around to see her grow into a woman. I hope that the process is easy for her. What I know for sure is that it is her story to write however long it takes.
Crows Feet Chronicles 