Looking Back Read Online Free PDF Page B

orange roof of a Howard Johnson’s. Maybe I’m projecting on Hanna the feelings I have about my own childhood and growing up when I say that she seems, sometimes, to be so jaded. I think not, though. I watch her watching the monkeys dance and, sensing my eyes on her, and for my benefit, not from real mirth, she laughs a TV-actress laugh. She throws her head back (a shampoo ad) and smiles a toothpaste commercial smile so that baby teeth show—sex appeal?—and says, for my benefit, “This is lots of fun, isn’t it?” the way people who aren’t enjoying themselves much, but feel they should be, try to convince themselves they are.
    What all this has to do with growing up old—Hanna and me, five and nineteen, watching the circus—is that Hanna has already begun her aging and I, once having aged, am trying to return. We’re different generations, of course, but—though Hanna doesn’t know what Vietnam is, or marijuana—we’ve both been touched by the sixties or, at least, its aftermath. I’ve grown up old, and I mention Hanna because she seems to have been born that way, almost, as if each generation tarnishes the innocence of the next. In 1957 I was four going on twenty, sometimes; Hanna at the circus borders on middle age … I feel the circle—childhood and senility—closing in.
    A word like disillusioned doesn’t apply to a five-year-old’s generation or—though they call my generation “disillusioned” all the time—to mine. I grew up without many illusions to begin with, in a time when fairy tales were thought to be unhealthy (one teacher told my mother that), when fantasy existed mostly in the form of Mr. Clean and Speedy Alka-Seltzer. We were sensible, realistic, literal-minded, unromantic, socially conscious and politically minded, whether we read the papers (whether we could even read, in fact) or not. The Kennedys were our fairy-tale heroes, integration and outer space and The Bomb the dramas of our first school years. It was not a time when we could separate our own lives from the outside world. The idea then was not to protect the children—“expose” them, that was the term, and surely there’s some sense, at least, in that—but it was carried too far with us. We were dragged through the mud of Relevance and Grim Reality, and now we have a certain tough, I’ve-been-there attitude. Not that we really know it all, but we often think we do. Few things shock or surprise us, little jolts our stubborn sureness that our way is right or rattles our early formed and often ill-founded, opinionated conclusions. We imagine hypocrisy in a politician’s speeches. We play at vulnerability—honesty, openness, the sensitivity-group concept of trust, but what we’re truly closer to is venerability. I think of the sixteen-year-old McGovern worker who tells me she was an idealistic socialist when she was young, and of the whole new breed, just surfacing, of drug users who have come full circle and, at twenty, given up dope (before some of us have begun, even).
    All of which adds to this aged, weary quality I’m talking about. Oh yes, I know we are the Pepsi Generation. I know what they all say about our “youthful exuberance”—our music, our clothes, our freedom and energy and go-power. And it’s true that, physically, we’re strong and energetic, and that we dance and surf and ride around on motorbikes and stay up all night while the parents shake their heads and say “Oh, to be young again …” What sticks in my head, though, is another image. I hear low, barely audible speech, words breathed out as if by some supreme and nearly superhuman effort, I see limp gestures and sedentary figures. Kids sitting listening to music, sitting rapping, just sitting. Or sleeping—that, most of all. Staying up late, but sleeping in later. We’re tired, often more from boredom than exertion, old without being wise, worldly not from seeing the world but from watching it on television.
    Every generation thinks