When did you say goodbye to your adolescence?
By: Rabbi Paul Plotkin
Tags: Adolescence, Pandemic, Teenagers

When did you say goodbye to your adolescence?

WHEN DID YOU SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR ADOLESENCE?

The Sunday New York Times has a half page titled “Metropolitan Diary” dedicated to readers’ vignettes of life in New York. I used to skip it thinking it was like inside baseball, something only New Yorkers would care about. Then I found some interesting humorous and occasionally moving stories, so I now include it in my reading. Last Sunday had a story by Lois Lowry that I want to share with you as it got me to thinking.

“Dear Diary:

From 1951 to 1954, from the time I was 14 until I was 17, I lived in a large yellow house on Governors Island in what is now called Nolan Park.

I returned for a visit during a recent summer and found that my former home was being used by artists. The paint was peeling and everything about the place that had once seemed so elegant now looked shabby.

But the people who were working inside welcomed me. When I explained my history with the house, they allowed me to go up to the third floor. Now roped off. It had once been my teenage domain.

One section of the house had just two stories, and from my bedroom window I used to climb, wearing a bathing suit, onto the flat roof of the adjoining wing, where I would spread out a towel and sunbathe.

I actually only did it until my father found out and issued the kind of order that a military man is accustomed to issuing.

Now over 80, I stood at that window and remembered the feel of the hot metal roof on my bare feet as I carefully arranged my beach towel and my tanning lotion. Then, as if from the past, I heard the voice of the Colonel; ‘Do not even think about climbing out on that roof ever again.’

I chuckled and murmured, ‘Yes, sir.’ I backed away from the window, descended the stairs and said goodbye to my adolescence.”

After a moment of reflection, I asked myself, “when did you say goodbye to your adolescence?” My answer surprised me.

I thought it would have been my late teen years when being a teenager was proudly about not being an adolescent. That is what makes the teen years the most hated part of being a parent.

If not as a teenager than surely in my twenties when all of life was seen in the front windshield of life and certainly not in the rear-view mirror, but that was not true for me. Then I posited that it was surely at marriage, for nothing says grown up as loud as saying, “I do”. (Ok Jews do not say “I Do” but go with the rhetorical flow).

The more I thought about it the more I realized I have not only never said goodbye to my adolescence, but at the age of 70 I think of it more often than at any other time of my life.

Maybe it is because I remember 60 years ago more clearly than ten years ago. Maybe it is because those experiences that I remember were foundational. They were the first drafts of what would later become the book of my life. Maybe it was because I had a good editor in charge of my memory who kept the good experiences fresh and hid or obscured the bad ones.

I remember the kids from the block, “my gang”, more clearly than many of the people whose lives intersected with mine over the years, even though I have not seen or been in contact with them for 50 years.

I remember my journey of discovery with girls. It started so strongly with the feeling of those yucky girls that developed into a shy awareness of their presence and the strange feelings they evoked. Then came dating with the apprehension of inviting a girl out on a date and the euphoria of an acceptance or the crushing feeling of a rejection. I remember fondly most of the girlfriends, and still ache at not being noticed by the girl I had the biggest crush on. I sometimes wonder where they are now and what has happened to them? Secretly I hope the ones that rejected me or worse never noticed me, are now old portly grandmothers, and the ones that connected have somehow maintained a youthful shine, a slim figure and a mature beauty.

Is it because as adolescents we are near empty, a table rosa so that many of the now deeply enmeshed ganglions were just starting to form? I remember my first car better than my fifth, even if my first car was quite simple and came with a mother who decided she had equal dibs on it notwithstanding it was my getting into college gift from her father.

A car was about true freedom, liberation from adolescence, transportation was jus a free add on.

With all the angst of growing up and adolescence morphing into an eventual adulthood, it seems as if it was an easier and simpler time.

Or maybe I am overemphasizing these memories because of a deep repression or denial of the reality that the pandemic daily makes me face death in the mirror. The peace and certainty of exuberant youth at least as it relates to existential crises, feels like a much better place to visit than the reality of 300,000 deaths of my fellow citizens.

At 18 the greatest fear of my life was not getting into college. Now I tell my wife that I risked my life for her yet again when I went shopping at Publix. There were no threats to my life in the late 60s because I was in Canada and the war in Viet Nam was a television show. There was unlimited time ahead, in fact time was cheap and plentiful.

My diet today is more sophisticated than anything my mother or grandmother could have imagined, even less cooked, yet I can not make a recipe that gives me that sense of home and love and being taken care of. I can still smell the houses I grew up in, the flow of activity in the kitchen when my mom and Bubie cooked together for a Yom Tov and I stood by like Oliver Twist, bowl in hand, “Please Bubs can I have some more?”

Sleep overs at Bubie’s meant candies, late bedtimes, and full anarchy as compared to my house. I was sailing on the SS Mine Kind, with a kids’ version of midnight buffet because diets were for home and indulgence was for the kinderlich.

In the end I think that adolescence for us is akin to archetypal memories. Remembering it is like reading a Biblical story in Genesis. It is familiar and universal. It is like reading mythology or fables or even nursery rhymes. They are greater than life and widely shared. They were often the first thing that gave us an insight on the greater world. They helped build our foundation of comprehension and navigation in a world that would later become more convoluted, more complicated, and more threatening. A place that gives us respite and escape, that calms and centers us, is a really good place to be able to go back to.

When did I say goodbye to my adolescence? Not yet, maybe never. Until then I invite you all to share your current life with your adolescence.

As always please share with friends and family and encourage them to join the list by emailing a request to me at ravpp1@gmail.com