my generation

I was born smack in the heart of the Baby Boom generation, but I’m not feeling quite in step with my age mates.  Steps, in fact, are the issue.  A recent real estate survey indicates that one of the most important selling points of a home to baby boomer buyers is one level living, preferably a ranch, at the very least a master suite on the first floor.

I’ll confess that, aesthetically, I don’t like ranches. I like the separation of sleeping and cooking/entertaining/working space.  I like stair landings and gabled roofs. In the decades following World War II, craft, elegance, and beauty vanished from American architecture.  The fascists lost the political war, but their minimalist, function over form aesthetic grasped a cultural revenge Now  “ Vintage Mid-century architecture’”, as the tract homes of my childhood have been euphemistically renamed, is enjoying a new burst in popularity.

I’m not disparaging people’s taste (well, to be honest I am or I wouldn’t have a blog entitled “Wendy’s Opinion on Just About Everything”).  But my point is not to disparage people’s taste, but their preoccupation with their arthritic knees.  YOu see, the reason baby boomers want “one story living” is that they don’t want to stress themselves by climbing stairs>

This is pathetic!  We are not talking about summiting Mount Hood here.  We’re talking about climbing a flight of carpeted, guardrailled stairs to your bedroom.  When my family climbed a trail in the Pyrenees a decade ago we were passed by many impatient sept and octogenarians clopping along briskly with their walking sticks.  We had the same experience with elderly German and Italian hikers in the Alps.  And no Italian hill village is complete without ancient ladies sitting on benches.  How did they reach those benches.  They climbed steep hills, often carrying a string bag full of groceries!

And middle aged Americans can’t climb up stairs to their bedrooms.  Hmm.

My generation continually disappoints me in their failure to live up to their promise and their potential, which was evidently so much adolescent hubris.  I mean, promise a revolution, end up with George W. Bush?

I always took Pete Townshends famous statement “hope I die before I get old” metaphorically.  I didn’t think he actually wanted to die before he reached a certain birthday.  Rather, he didn’t want to live as a wimpy drip, all youthful zest and energy gone.  I know he’s still alive, now well into his sixties, and I hope he climbs stairs.

So at heart this is a metaphorical comment, not a rant against the aesthetics of ranch house.  (even though I really do dislike them).  Metaphorically, the time to stop climbing stairs is not when you’re tired or your knees hurt or when you think that perhaps ten years down the road you might be tired or your knees might hurt so you’d better prudently stop climbing ahead of time. The time to stop climbing stairs is when you absolutely, with all your strength and your last breath, cannot pull yourself up another inch. Not one second before then. 

pierce the sheltering sky

I read an article in the paper last week about an art exhibit by children with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism that seems to be the diagnosis of the year.  Pictured was an intricate drawing of an alien planet.  The reporter engaged the ten year old artist in a detailed discussion of his imaginary world, which included two suns, several moons, and an alien civilization complete with language and customs.

So I’m trying to figure out…what precisely is wrong with this child?  Better correct it now, before he grows up to be an artist, or God forbid, a science fiction writer.

Perhaps I feel a special empathy for this child because I spent half my childhood drawing detailed drawings of imaginary solar systems in the bluebooks my professor father used for exams.  During the other half, I created imaginary societies back here on Earth, complete with families whose ages I would cross off and change when another imaginary year went by. 

Luckily Asperger’s hadn’t been invented yet so I couldn’t be diagnosed.  A psychologist did label me hyperactive, though.  I read a symptom list for hyperactivity once that included the danger signal “cannot pay attention to things that are boring.”

My youngest son spends an untoward amount of time making detailed drawings of cities, “comics”, and little books he staples together about adventures with dinosaurs, mummies, and–yes–aliens.  I guess these abnormalities are genetic.  I did read–no kidding–a checklist for signs of “excessive creativity hyperactivity disorder”.  My son met every danger sign, but excuse me if I don’t run for the Ritalin.  He tells me that when he grows up he wants to be a rock star and a writer, and if he does so, I’ll be a very proud mommy.

It seems like if a person deviates in any way from a very bland and limited “normal” they get slapped with a pathological psychiatric diagnosis (that just coincidentally might be helped by some new form of psychotropic medication).  I also read last week an article in the New Yorker about a psychologist who participated in a trial of a new antidepressant.  I am not attempting to trivialize the pain of people who suffer from severe clinical depression.  But in this study participants were asled questions like “do you ever wonder if life has any meaning?” and if you answered something like “well, sometime I wonder if we’re just a random collection of atoms”, then uh-oh–points add up against you on the depression scale.  You’re also penalized if you’re depressed about something that’s genuinely depressing, whether it be divorce or an illness or global warming.

The message?  Don’t be introspective.  Don’t have deep feelings that cut you to the core.  Don’t ever, ever, think outside the box.  Don’t question the existence of the box or who made it, or whether other boxes of different configuration  exist somewhere out in the universe.

The truth is, that while existence may be easiest in the mild middle,  man’s greatest joys and greatest achievements only come from dancing dangerously close to the extremes.  Some types of extremity I have no personal conception of, which doesn’t mean I’m not impressed by them.  What about astronauts who can strap themselves in a little box and fly to the moon?  That degree of fearlessness is not standard.  Or “hyperactive” people who can multitask in the most confusing and stressful of environments, like a hospital emergency room.  Or the professionally diagnosed obsessive compulsive jewelry artist, who strings utterly intricate and perfect necklaces out of tiny beads?

Personally, I’m more of the hyper creativity disorder sort, and while it’s sometimes made my life more difficult, I wouldn’t have it any other way.  I don’t know any other way.  I certainly couldn’t write decently if I wasn’t an observer, a questioner, always a bit on the outside, a little weird.  Or lets put it more accurately.  I might still be able to write grammatically and concisely, but I wouldn’t have anything to say.

I wanted to quote Paul Bowles for this blog post, from one of my favorite books, The Sheltering Sky, but I couldn’t locate the book (Excessive Clutter Syndrome).  In the Sheltering Sky, the protagonist, Tanner, is suffering from typhoid fever hallucinations in a remote Moroccan village and he (in much more evocative phrasing) pierces through the sheltering blueness of the sky and sees the vastness of the universe beyond.  It’s an eerie and disturbance passage, cold and scary, one of those rare pieces of writing that leaves you stunned and wondering how the author saw something like that and came back to translate the experience for the rest of us.

Paul Bowles was a strange guy who didn’t play well with others.  In his autobiography he describes a childhood of writing and illustrating detailed little stories of imaginary worlds.  Maybe he had Asperger’s. I’d call him an artist.

Instead of labeling children (and adults) who don’t fit a limited cultural mold as deviant, we as parents and as a society should encourage people to build on their strengths and manage their weaknesses.  Not everybody has extreme gifts of any nature, but those who do, and stifle them, are truly living what Thoreau termed “lives of quiet desperation”. 

I’ll stick with playmobil

Talk about idiotic.  Check out this new item featured at this year’s Toy Fair.  The Smart Cycle, put out by Fisher-Price, features a preschooler-sized exercise bicycle that plugs into a television.  Children can operate video games (starring Sponge Bob and Dora the Explorer) by pedalling.  And don’t worry, parents–the video games are all “educational”, teaching about numbers, letters, and shapes.

“The concept behind the Smart Cycle is that children learn better when they are having fun and in this case they don’t realize they are involved in a scholastic and athletic endeavor” states  a Fisher-Price spokesman.

Whoa!  There are so many things wrong with this line of reasoning.  First of all, small children, whether or not they are athletically skilled, love to move.  They crave activity.  they will pedal a tricycle, swing, climb, dance, wrestle with their siblings, and llacking any other outlet, run in circles.

Small children also love to learn. Education is not an unpleasantness that needs to be disguised, like hiding ground up spinach in a meatloaf.  I’d dismiss the Smart Cycle as yet another silly item for parents to waste their money on except that it teaches insidiously bad lessons.  It teaches that exercise is a chore, only made bearable by another distraction (the video games).  It teaches that exercise is an activity separate from normal daily life.  Far from encouraging children to play actively, it keeps them literally plugged into the television.

The video games themselves are another problem, one hared by Leapfrog electronic toys, workbooks and similar toys defined as “educational”. Small children learn best from the big, wide, concrete and sensual world.  Why shrink it down to two dimensions?  Why shrink concepts like language and shape down to a few constructs to memorize?

If parents are so concerned about their children’s physical fitness, why not just LET THEM PLAY.  Toss a ball around. Walk down to the park.  Sign them up for soccer or dance if you have to be organized.  But as far as toys go, I’d stick with Playmobil.  For that matter I’d stick with Transformers or Barbie.