Shooting StarsThis is a question every child faces when some friend of your parent's sees you after a long absence. "My, how you've grown!" is another common exclamation uttered by adults when they see a child after an absence of almost any length, because the main job of a child is to grow.
It's natural enough. By a certain age, kids start to seem to be growing right before your eyes. Day after day, they seem bigger, taller, closer to their future adult selves than their pasts as children.
They've entered the tender, vulnerable, exciting, depressing, frightening, invigorating acceleration of time that is life as a teen or a twenty-something. After that, life will slow down, settle into the inevitable patterns that constrain us all, and become far more complex than we ever could have imagined it to be when we were still young.
Twenty-year-olds laugh ten times as frequently as fifty-year-olds. That is not a scientific conclusion but an anecdotal study I've been conducting the past eleven years or so.
After SchoolAge, aging, the aged. Everywhere one turns, we are confronted with dire predictions of the negative impacts on society as the Baby Boomers begin to retire. Without directly engaging in this debate, I will say just this: My generation has always been one to surprise everybody, and we're about to do so again!
LizardOther societies are not so anal-retentive when it comes to determining a person's biological age. Traditions vary. In Japan, for example, the old way, probably from Buddhism, is to count a person as age "one" at birth.
I have a friend from China who's parents could not agree as to whether she was born on July 3 or July 4. I have a friend from Cuba whose parents could not remember whether he was born in 1946 or 1947. In Afghanistan, people could "buy" whatever age they wanted to be from corrupt officials.
Dinosaur Many Internet services offer tests to determine your "real" age, as opposed to what your driver's license or passport claims to be the case.
Rainbow EtchedIn my way of thinking, everything fits with every other thing. Thus, a rainbow is related to a shooting star, and all of us, as living beings, are shooting stars, doomed to the fate of all shooting stars.
Street BallAt our peak, we can move with the grace of an antelope, but when we grow older, our bodies stiffen and sloop, and there is no longer anything so obviously graceful about us. But, please look closer.
Street Ball 2We may not move like gazelles, but we carry ourselves with a sense of modesty. Dust to dust. As we approach our return to dust, we appreciate youthfulness in all of its glory, yet mourn its wastefulness.
By the time any of us are old enough to understand what the gift of life truly represents, our voices have been drowned out by the louder voices, until we think, who is listening any longer?
2 comments:
David,
You may not realize just how right you are in predicting that your “...generation has always been one to surprise everybody, and we're about to do so again!”
I just left your blog, opened Yahoo! And the featured headline was “10 most miserable cities”. My heart anguished with the immediate reminder of the Jimmy Carter era “Misery Index”, that infamous “formula” for continuously insisting how unhappy we all were supposed to be. It was depressing to nausea.
Then I read the tag line, “high rate of unemployment and crime puts this city on top of the 'Misery Index'” followed by the teaser “where is it?”. I thought, “By God, this idiot is actually talking about exactly that!” My anger had just flashed for an instant when my eyes hit upon the “where is it?” line and I laughed out loud. I just can't be angry when stupid goes to ridiculous.
D-E-T-R-O-I-T you idiot. (It was about 130 decibels inside my cranium.) I knew before opening the page... Detroit has been all over the national news with its Mayor's latest scandals on the heels of an avalanche of national attention over its abysmal school system, city services, and crime statistics. Most all of the news coming out of that city is filled with ASTOUNDING stories of corruption and incompetence, at every level in virtually every city government agency. They could use a “Ridiculous Index” now. As a bench mark they could use Mayor Kilpatrick... he's literally been been caught with his pants down and now turned to the church for his defense - Thank you Bill and Hillary for the template. Fwami now says that he did wrong, but he's on a mission to do God's work for the people (so we should forgive him, and oh, yea, you know that scandalous orgy that everyone but me says happened – well, being on a mission and all of course you know that they're all lying and I'm telling the truth, and, and, New York City refusing to supply detectives to protect me when I visit there because the low life places I like to go to, and, and, that young dancer who was supposed to testify, but was found murdered in her bullet riddled car a few days before, and, and, and – it's all God's divine wisdom, you know?) Honestly, the next politician that runs to religion after abusing the people's trust should be sentenced to life as a sanitation worker (for the people) at half pay and benefits, with a “Ridiculous Gage” to be worn at all times on the outer garment.
The good people who still struggle to live in that city today could give you the most accurate “ridiculous reading”. Those from the baby boomer generation, in particular, will recall the insidious and irrepressible growth of this now institutionalized malfeasance. Go back 40 + years. Seeds were sewn before Coleman Young; he simply watered and husbanded the weed patch a little more. (As a former member of the Tuskegee Airmen, I am paused over saying things negative about Mr. Young. He was one of the “101s” and shared in courageous and monumental events as a young man. But that earlier honor no more excuses his dishonorable mayoral acts than John McCain's courage as a POW requires that he must be elected president today).
This is not a “minority” problem. It's an American problem. Pentergast of Kansas City, Daley of Chicago... go back through our history and find thugs and hooligans cropped up from every background to dominate and abuse our cities from time to time.
It is not an American problem in the sense that we Americans are all pagans hell bent to go there. We are all too susceptible to that siren of Shangralah so oft promised by self serving politicians – “just elect me (and send more money), I am the way”. “My coffers runneth over (it's easy street for you if you just keep me in charge). And the ugliest, most twisted myth of all as it is elevated to a political art form, “profits are evil; all those who have more than you must pay for their sins and share it with you – support me and I'll fight those dirty SOBs who stole it from you”.
There's a significant level of disgust among baby-boomers, especially those not often moved to acting up (you know, the ones who are busy working every day struggling to make their lives better, the ones who still believe in the American dream).
We baby-boomers may indeed surprise...
Thanks, Dan. The destruction of Detroit ought to be our national shame, but of course, we have become a people without shame. Detroit was the city that welcomed my Dad and my Mom into this country when they were immigrants. It's the city where my Uncle Ed and his brother had a hat shot on the border with Hamtramck, and the city where my Grandma & Grandpa lived. It's the city with Hudson's and the place where Tiger Stadium stood. It's where the Red Wings played hockey (Olympia) and the site of Greek Town. It is the place where I gave one of my speeches for Rolling Stone after the Patty Hearst stories, and the place I have always yearned to return to...
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