Sentimental Notes

My oldest son recently turned sixteen. It was inevitable that he would someday, but these things always sneak up on you, I suspect because they (children) still seem quite young and little up to about age fourteen and then all of a sudden they are not anymore. And then of course there are all of the things you intended to do with them and to tell them that you did not do, or that did not really work out as you expected. When we started out going on hikes with the oldest two what seems like so many years ago I thought that one of the summers before the oldest finished high school we would climb Mt Washington. Now it would have to be this year or next year and I already don't see us getting to it this year. And then there are all the books I collected over the years, mostly for myself, but with the admittedly odd idea of having a decent library for my children or any visitors to be able to access and derive joy from. Yet apart from some picture books I have about baseball, I don't know that anyone other than myself has ever pulled a book down from the shelves. It's not how people live anymore and I'm even starting to wonder if keeping all the books is preventing me from engaging with contemporary life enough to do something I ought to be doing, though for the moment I am still too attached to them to just get rid of them. My son who just turned sixteen does at least read some books for school assignments, and I could see him developing an interest in literature someday, but I am not sure what, if anything, he is terribly passionate about. He has kept up with the Boy Scouts past the age when a lot of youngsters tend to drop out, and I am happy he has done that. I had no idea (for example) that he had any interest in the Red Sox, but apparently he enjoys watching some of the games with his grandmother, so he probably has quite a few areas of interest that I don't know about. He has some modest accomplishments such as being admitted to the National Honor Society and earning a medal on the National Latin Exam which indicates that he is not yet one of those boys who has become entirely alienated from formal education, which for a parent I think is probably desirable.


This is leading up to one of those poignant moments that I will probably forget if I don't write it down, and since I don't think anybody besides me reads this page anymore I might as well put it here. He (my oldest boy) was away for the weekend with the Boy Scouts at the State Jamboree, though as we live in a small state and near the middle of it the campground was only about 20 minutes from our house. He had a track meet on the Saturday as well so we picked him from the campground in order that he could go to that and then dropped him off again when it was over. They were holding the jamboree at the Nascar track, which when the Nascar circus is not in town, is actually situated in a nice spot surrounded by wooded hills with a view of mountains in the distance. I let him off at the edge of the parking area which is up on an incline and there was a fairly long descent down to the area where all of the tents were. It was a cloudless sunny day and after he mumbled his seemingly unhappy goodbye I sat there and watched him take the long walk down to the tent with a little strut in his step that belies the rather melancholy attitude he usually presents to the world. Only a couple of more years and, perhaps, all of these things that have made up his childhood, the Scouts, and the schools, and the beautiful, rather sheltered and anachronistic environment in which he has lived here will be behind him, and of course when you are me it is very sad to think of even if he were to go on and get a wonderful education and have a great and impactful career, though not as sad as if he were to end up miserable and useless, though I don't think that will be the case. I know many people live with their parents now until they are thirty and I suspect some of my children will do that but I would be surprised if my oldest did. I think he would be very stifled to have to spend his twenties with us in our out of the way town, especially with all of the young children who will still be in the house.




It used to be, say 5, 10, 15 years ago, when I took the children to the library I would grab whatever the latest book was that was out about whatever awful thing was going on in, or was imminently about to descend on, American society, and take it up to read while I sat in the children's room (which is a lovely area that I am still ten years away from not being able to sit in anymore because I won't have young enough children). But I find I can't take reading these kinds of depressing things anymore. Maybe the social and economic horrors engulfing so much of the population seem suddenly too near, as if I have passed the point in life where I have any confidence in being able to contend against or recover from them if I were to suffer such a blow (though no matter what happens, I swear I will never take out a payday loan). Instead I pick out a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia--which is still printed, and which the library still buys, at least as recently as 2016--and read a selection of their anodyne but oddly affirming and reassuring articles, with accompanying pictures. Sometimes I will read travel guides as well, though travelling has either become so much more expensive and efficient and upscale (and let's face it, internet-ty) since I was doing it in the 90s, that it is hard for me to reconnect with the romance with which I used to invest all of those trips I would one day make to the various provincial capitals of France or such like which obviously I am never going to make.


I refer sometimes on this site to the generational theory made somewhat famous by Strauss and Howe and which most credentialed thinkers seem to have a vehement dislike of, which has only intensified since it came out that Steve Bannon among other undesirable types put credence in it. While I find most of the denunciations of the theory of the cycles of history as a crock of doodlebugs to be more contemptuous than seems necessary, I don't get the idea that a generation is in itself a entirely meaningless designation. This seems so obviously true to me that people born within a certain band of time within a certain cultural environment would be conditioned by that general shared experience in innumerable distinct ways even if in individual personality they consider themselves to have nothing in common with anyone else their age (this last has always been a common sentiment among my generation). Anyway, I think I have figured out what is the secret source of my attraction to this theory and that is the promise that after this period we are going through now (The Crisis, which is likely to last about another ten years), if we survive it, there is going to be another "High" period of general optimism, well-functioning institutions, societal organization that has a broad agreement, etc, such as prevailed in the Western nations for the twenty years or so following World War II. I have a desire to live to see this High. Nothing else seems to be promising such a period of positive feelings widely diffused anywhere in our future. I see predictions that for the global top 15% or so, the talented, the educated, the tech savvy, the extraordinarily good-looking perhaps, life is going to get ever better, but the prospects for everyone below that level seem more hazy. My children, or some or them, might have a chance to crack that exalted class, which is more than most people can say, but I don't seem to be part of that group, so the promise of a more society-wide era of good feelings is more attractive to me...