Restuck in time
Monday, May 31st, 2010My parents joke that when I was born in the summer of 1980, I joined my childhood already ten or fifteen years in progress. Like everything really funny, there is a lot of truth to it. In elementary school, for example, I listened to Billy Joel instead of New Kids on the Block and my favorite TV show was “Cheers.” At gatherings of family friends, I preferred salmon and adult conversation to hot dogs and after dinner freeze tag. (Among my first lessons that you can’t always get what you want.) Perhaps the directive, “Go play with the kids” is a bit baffling to all only children, but I was probably exceptionally serious and sensitive. I had a premature sense of irony and the gravity of existence which is basically unchanged from memories of myself early in life.
My outlook and sensibilities have always put me somewhat at odds with my generation. I have usually preferred the company of older people, and I will admit that also unchanged from those early memories of myself is a delight in being considered cutely precocious. To those who have known me for any length of time, it can hardly be a surprise that I’m as happy as I am in a relationship with someone 17 years older. My generational ambiguity means that we don’t have those knee-jerk moments of “Oh God, you’re so old/young” that separate people by age group. It’s true that I can’t help but know most of the words to most of what was on the radio in the late 80s and90s, but those aren’t the songs that define me. Mostly, my own biological generation, with its isolating earbuds and failure to launch cases, has been a mystery, something I assumed I would just have to wait out until everyone was older and more interesting (which, I confess, is to say, more like me.)
But the conversations that began and sustain this new bigenerational relationship have revealed a stamp on my understanding of the world that betrays the time and place I grew up in, and it makes me think that I may have been serious and sensitive because of the culture of 80s America, not just alongside it. We late Gen-Xers and early Millenials grew up with crack and AIDS, with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer and skyrocketing rates of violent crime and unemployment. The news (in my outraged liberal household, anyway) depicted a world were things were not getting better and weren’t going to get better. We were filled to the brim with the idea that nothing was certain in the serious matters of life, but that fun had a price, too. I have a vivid memory of standing over the garbage can in the cafeteria the day after the ’88 election and registering real despair as I threw my tray away that I would have to live my life half again before we would have chance to elect a president who would do things differently. If the fashion and synth pop of the 80s seem a little frivolous, I think we earned it, because nothing else was. We were offered no innocence, no comfort that things would work out for the best, no moon landing.
I know that my individual experience is little more than anecdote, and that, since I was actually a child, there are holes in my memories and gaps in my understanding. Still, I see myself more clearly now as part of a generation that was introduced to the world as an uncertain, hostile place and it helps me to better understand and appreciate why we act the ways we do. Not every third grader that lunch period 22 years ago was fretting about the election outcome, but perhaps, by some subtle resignation, I’m more like the rest of that cafeteria table than I think. And maybe that’s okay.