Yes, We were All Young Once

“Everything you need to know is on television.”           
                                      Homer Simpson

  It seemed  there were always buzzing noises coming from my brother, Steve.  I remember that clearly about him during those years when we barefoot children living above the river.  Constantly there were buzzing sounds, changing pitch occasionally, then stopping abruptly, then continuing on into another earnest drone.  Moving away, unaware of the rest of us, he and the buzzing progressed on into the yard away from the house to where the land broke away into the broad valley and the river. 
       And there were hand movements too, and facial expressions….and postures.  All, I presume, fit to the particular adventure he was having alone in his mind.  There were wars being waged, featuring our local hero. There were epic confrontations between good and evil. The world hung in the balance. And many times the unfolding plot required a motorized vehicle of some description:  a tank perhaps…a Porsche… a speeding motorboat. The chase ensued, and now the buzzing reached a fever pitch.   
      “Buzz,” we should have nicknamed him!

       Steve did what all of we brothers did: Dream!  As we had little else to occupy our youthful minds, we found adventures within ourselves, invented plots to fill our time. 
       That was then, now is now!  If you are of roughly my age group, you likely have and appreciation of the vast difference in children’s psychological landscape, the contrast in how their time is filled. Whereas children of my age were forced to create their own entertainment, modern kids seem to be overloaded with activities, besieged with stimulations competing for attention.   
       No, I don’t think one is better or worse.   My point is only that they are so astoundingly different.  If early life and youthful experiences shape us as later adults, it is a wonder that we will maintain similarities with the current younger generation. And, if, as seems exceedingly evident, change itself is moving at an ever faster rate, today’s youth will find an even greater gulf between them and later generations. 
        Video and computer games absorb modern kids into a new virtual reality.  In my youth, we were occasionally able to score a couple of pinball games at Chamber’s Drug Store on the corner of the square.  That’s if we could find the coin.  Now, at home in their own rooms, modern kids with a computer can be in instant communication with locations all over the globe.  Information for the asking on the Internet dwarfs that found in any physical library. TV is beamed from satellites, providing hundreds of diverse programs. Cell phones keep us in constant contact.  The entertainment industry and movies overwhelm kids with graphic versions of how they should act, who they should be. And so on.

        We older folks should be in awe of modern kids.  I am!  It amazes me how they find their way through all the options presented to them, how they pick and sort and make any sense of it all.  I would fear overload, a sudden striving for simplicity again…for easy answers and fewer choices.  But, for the most part, somehow kids emerge from their formative years with a vision of who they are and the paths they wish to take in their lives.  Amazing! 
       And some day these same kids will tell tales to their grandchildren -- tales passed down from their own grandparents.  They will speak about how things were for kids back in the middle of the last century.   And the younger set will probably exclaim, “Wow!”  Maybe kids will still say wow!

 “Kids lives were so simple back then,” they’ll probably say.  And they will be right.  My brother Steve’s daydreams required only self-made sound effects and a shuffling gate.  We other brothers were less vocal; perhaps more inward.  But, like Steve, we preserved and guarded our own particular corners in the world of make believe. My older brother was submerged in science fiction.  When searching for Jim you only had to locate the couch and peer behind his current sci-fi book. 
       Dave, my next youngest brother and I, were futurists, I think. We dreamed of our lives to come. We rehearsed our greatness!  We studied how the common man would hold us in awe.  Raven haired beauties, exotic locations.  The wind in our hair, circling high above the African plain, diving much too close to the herds below, then aiming again for the sun above.    We were lonely men in the north woods, struggling to keep our fires lit and our cabins warm. In our minds, destiny lay ahead:  Great white hunters, adventurers…gentlemen wise and true. 
       And back then we were simple suntanned, barefoot kids with miles of dirt roads between town and us.   And we were young and the world stretched out ahead of us like a silver ribbon in the moonlight.  We yearned for it!  But there were years of penance to do here alone on this bluff… in these rocky, wooded hills.
      The horizon etched a line dividing earth and sky away over the hills to the farthest ridge.  We dreamed in that distance.  We imagined beyond that last ridge.  We pictured the distance ahead…. across the horizon, beyond the curvature of the ground we knew.  And, then, years moved so slowly!

 It seems to me that children – the children that we all were, and still are – are always victims of the time and place of their youth.  That environment shapes us in ways we can’t imagine.  It creates the gulf between future generations and us.   It provides the precursors to our life views and our understandings in many ways.   And, of course, we have little control over any of this! 
        Most of my generation found during their childhoods, that if they were going to be entertained they would have to do it themselves.   We’d need to find ways to keep our minds occupied during those childhood times that for today’s kids are so crammed with sounds, images, computer reactivity and furious motion, all in the pursuit of amusement. For us, there was no other choice but to find a haven in our own inner life.  We were hostage to our time and place.  
       Today’s children are just as firmly held hostage by their own environments –  by their own inherited time and place.  And their children as well, and theirs too….and on and on.  And we oldsters must keep the faith that even then it will all be well -- that an essential humanness will still permeate the greatly changed future environment.  And they, in their own turn, will discover in books and historical documents, a sense of how it was for those of us who came before them.  And they may feel a certain kinship and wonder how it would have been to live in such times long ago.

       Still, it I suspect it would do me good right now, if I might suddenly discover some lone child, lost in his own imagination, living an internal adventure.  Some of the years between us might evaporate in a instant and I’d find myself remembering my own sunny childhood days.  I think I’d recognize, too, the shambling gait and the low, shifting buzzing noises.

 (From "a View From Rock Eddy Bluff")   Tom Corey