Sixteen at 40

The path I walked yesterday was a most rewarding one.  Venturing a few blocks beyond my standard march to the train, I veered down the very block on which I lived my teenhood. Being able to do that, residing so near to your pristinely maintained teenage setting and having the freedom to stroll down that very block anytime is a precious gift. I think I’ve avoided it as a habit for so long, to prevent ever taking it for granted.  Like any kid with a graced adolescent upbringing, there were laughs, drama, and a good amount of tears, many of which were probably unnecessary.  But the one ingredient that bonded my teenage foundation, perhaps the most impressionable time in my life, was one of life’s most critical: Worry.

When you’re ordained in the art of worry, you’re halfway there, certainly at that age.  My mom didn’t need to be a “Tiger Mom”. The tiger was in my own inner cage, giving me that excoriant look, one that plagued my mind and my stomach always.  Almost every weekday, on the way to my high school commute, I’d be absorbed with some modicum of worry over what the day would bring.

Even when I wasn’t specifically worried over that particular day’s fortune, I was not one to bear a sense of laughable joyfulness with friends on the way to first period.  I was lucky if I wasn’t too tired to get to first period altogether.

Like many grind-driven high-schoolers, Honor Society-candidate, eyes-to-the-sky, nose-in-the-books, fear-in-the-heart, I never slept all too well. Even if I was out cold by 1am and up at 6, barked awake by the popped-on newsanchor on the FM radio station reminding me what time it was, that was just a catnap. There was an art to knowing all the regularized, safe intervals for momentary drift-offs, in band class, history class, and sometimes, even Physics.

By the second half of my junior year, I wasn’t frightened of Physics anymore.  I was nearly on the flunk when it all started in the fall.  But only one round or two with a hired tutor confirmed me to the fact that, in contrast to nearly every classmate of mine who couldn’t conceal how lost they were in the course, I had the concepts down completely.  I found that hard to believe, but true it was.

I wasn’t steeped in the math world of pre-calculus, like my classmates.  Because of a comprehensive setback in math a few years earlier, I was in a more remedial algebra directive.  Being steeped in, and finally on top of the whole algorithm and quadratic equation scene, it was the ultimate bridge into what looked a hell of a lot like the same thing two periods earlier.  That’s because it was..!

But there was in fact this looming matter of the Regents Exam. Like most courses, it was genuinely all about the Regents Exam at term’s end, the exam grade, and how it all piles up on your Permanent Record, the one that’s analyzed and scrutinized by the keepers of College Admissions, who will allow you through that precious gate into the passageway to a life of Success and Happiness.  Only on one’s Judgement Day at the Gates Pearly will one again bear such trepidation.

At age sixteen, I didn’t know whether the latter might precede the former.  Nothing, to this high school junior, or perhaps one such as this, was scarier than an oncoming Regents Exam.  It defined your immediate future worth, let alone whether you’d be held back in course, forced to repeat the prior five months.

Time spent with the Barron’s Regents Sample Guide did not prove too intimidating, but I had to be mindful about putting mental blocks and fear traps aside, and simply reading and absorbing the questions and following through with answers that were stunningly easy.  The biggest trap with these exams, I discovered, was overthinking the questions in a state of doomed panic. The winning cat will be the cool one.

The Spring of ’84 was not the breezy jeans-commercial parade I viewed an early-schedule junior’s life to be, one year earlier.  Somehow I wasn’t strolling out of school in my designer denim jacket, on my way with the Cool Kids, roaming over to the pizzeria at two in the afternoon.  I roamed with my friends to the avenue, waited eternally in the April frost for a local bus packed to the rafters with rambunctious kids from a nearby school, and squashed in for the bounce-fest home, where my mom and I would convene over an afternoon sandwich.  I’d then collapse for a two-hour nap, and awaken into a pile of homework, dinner and exam crams ‘til David Letterman ambled out on Channel 4 at 12:30. If the opening bit looked good, I’d turn in at the break. 

Mornings were no longer Darkness Visible.  At least the sun was breaking through the earlier rise at 5:30am.  The soft-“AC” FM station I somehow preferred to those kid-friendly rock and pop stations would be purring me awake with the last half of a Spandau Ballet or Cyndi Lauper number leading into the local newscast.  I’d made the switch somehow to NBC’s Today on my bedroom portable from ABC’s Good Morning America.  Back then, I think it had something to do with the fact that NBC began their news presentation thirty minutes earlier.  If I needed to be up that early, they ought to be as well.

School life and it’s differing schedules introduced me to the element of application, that of applying one’s self. From the time I was in grammar school, steeped in homework, 12 pages of history book and essay questions, three pages of math problems, comprehensive English assignment essays…..dragging my dizzy self out of bed on a freezing, dark morning…trudging out to the bus stop and waiting indefinitely in a blizzard that the city just lived around…..I knew there was some greater reason to succeed at it all.

There was some expectation and demand upon me, the way it was on every towering individual around me, to prove myself, in such way that no less would be tolerated.  There was no such thing as a “mental health day”, or an award for “showing up”.  When I was a youth, showing up was your only alternative to getting into trouble, or by parental definition, “destroying your life”.

Back in the tenth grade, my mom and I spent a spring afternoon one Sunday with my aunt and her daughter, a professional woman in her late twenties.  She was “temping” at the time, at some high-end real estate and retail offices, edging her way into the upscale social circle.  She’d attended community college briefly long ago, and always made light of her poor grade average in high school. 

While the folks all convened in the kitchen, I adjourned to the bedroom down the hall, the traditional bored kid watching TV and doing his homework, which I brought with me.  In the kitchen, my mom asked me how the homework was going.  My aunt’s daughter enjoyably spoke up…..”I am soooo glad I don’t have homework anymore….! I hated it…!”  I was entertained by her recollection, but both her mother and mine almost leered her out of the room.  The young lady quickly apologized to the impressionable schoolboy, one driven to aspirations clearly much further than hers.  The apology was more to them.  I found it all amusing.

Today, that woman is thirty years married to a retail executive, residing for many years in suburban affluence. I live in the urban mid-scale, eternally rent-threatened and treading the common precipice of prayer and one-unknown-disaster-away from it’s-all-over.  It’s a life I don’t take for granted for one moment, and I despise myself for any moments I don’t.

I took too much for granted when I was sixteen.  When you’re a kid, you’re not really expected to know much better.  But I enjoyed the life I had plenty.  I didn’t have the commitment of peer pressure, and expectations of friends that I had to live up to.  No girlfriend to please, other than the ambivalent friendship-relationships that have long since arrived prominently en vogue amongst the young these days. I didn’t “go out” by day or by night.  I went to school and came home, and my ideas and imaginations were my life’s décor.  Action figures and accessories were my actors and sets for my invented movies and plays.  Late Saturday nights meant an old-school Lebo headset full of the vintage LPs from my mom’s discarded folk collection….Dylan, Donovan, Leadbelly…I had little to do with the predominant culture. By preference.

And when the weekend was over, it was back to Barron’s and Regents Trep. 

The spring prior, it was all about the Math Regents, the Spanish Regents, the Bio Regents….I did a lot of obligatory learning in those few years. Like too many, I have retained too little of it since. And for all the driven fear that fueled my unquestioned purpose during those arctic morning trudges and those spring afternoons in my breezy bedroom, chained to my desk with the Regents guides, I now ask the formerly relevant and now belated question:  What has all that rigor, all those exams, that foolishly irrelevant SAT exam and its costly prep course given me to bolster my life’s direction, self-worth and economic future at middle age..?

No one will dare hazard an answer to that question.  The young high-schooler won’t understand the answer.  The stranded middle-ager, the Liberal Arts-minded, unexecutive, unaffluent, underachieved laborer adrift in an ocean of younger and far advanced grownups, won’t consume something so fatally toxic and self-destructive.

But as the sixth decade draws past the fifty-yard line, and I stroll the shady block I walked when Blondie played on WLIR-FM, and The Uncle Floyd Show on Channel 68 made dinner on Monday night something to look desperately forward to, I know what the precious tool was. 

It’s the blindered structure of life. It’s worry as directive. Daily rigor, long and short-term goal as purpose. It’s “worry” as Aristotelian practice, the achieved balance of realistic as well as “un-“.  Like the gym membership we all adhere to a little late in the game for reasons we now know, school for those of us mis-directed “nerds” was life’s critical preparatory architecture, the gift and relief of a job well completed, the struggle for acknowledgement and acceptance in the eyes of decisive authority.  You can’t have a “day off” without a majority of “days on”.

A life structured on such tenets is not perfect.  When one’s life is crippled by loss, of a job or a loved one, perhaps one’s home, the lesson is one of betrayal.  But for one that can establish or re-establish that structure in one’s life at any time, it’s the very gift of thinking and feeling as one walks that very same shaded block one walked as a child.  And the knowledge that young or old, large or small, we really all walk that same path.  I’m going to walk it again tomorrow.

-Noah F.