I’m across the bay from San Francisco this week, visiting the newest member of the crew and the first grandson, Marcus James, born last month, thriving and calm.
Marcus is only the latest manifestation of my family’s knock-on-wood luck: generation after generation of healthy babies, growing up in a land largely spared the ravages of war.
I used to think peace was normal, war the aberration, that plenty was normal, deprivation the aberration, that “finding your bliss” was normal, drudgery the aberration, that happy families were normal, fractured families the aberration.
I had it exactly backwards.
Life for most people in most places at most times has been a struggle. I’ve struggled. Everyone I know has struggled. But in my case, divorce and a colon cancer diagnosis weren’t just the worst things that ever happened to me; they were practically the only bad things that ever happened to me.
Mostly, there have been modest successes and mild disappointments. Mostly, I’ve enjoyed myself. I grew up expecting to enjoy myself. I believe many of my peers, or at least — damnably — the white, middle-class kids among my peers, grew up with the same expectations.
I need look no further than my father’s life to see how sharply my experience has diverged from the norm. My dad’s immigrant family was poor, even before the Great Depression. When he came of age, he wasn’t casting about for a job that would be “fulfilling.” Something steady that paid a decent wage was all he hoped for.
He became a printer. Not only did he never get rich, but a series of poor financial decisions caused him endless worry and humiliation.
Nevertheless, he and my mom raised me and my sisters in a safe neighborhood with good schools and sent all three of us to college. For all the jokes about Jewish parents pushing their sons toward law school or medical school – supposedly, the two surest tickets to the good life during those post-war years – my dad said nary a word about my quixotic decision to study philosophy and literature. He didn’t say “follow your bliss” in so many words, but I felt like I had his blessing to do exactly that.
This was the gift our parents gave us. First and foremost, life was an adventure. Our goal was not to get by, but to flourish. America’s mid-century prosperity gave us a sense of stability and security so rock-solid that not even the arms race, assassinations and upheavals of the 1960s undermined it.
State College’s monthly storytelling events are instructive. Most of the State of the Story tellers are white and middle-class, born between the end of the war and the end of the century. Tales of woe are the exception. Amusing accounts of mild misadventures are the rule. A striking number of the stories are road trip memoirs, recollections of the kinds of things that happen when you’re young and free and don’t believe anything truly terrible can happen to you.
When I hear about skyrocketing levels of depression and anxiety among young people today, I think the stability and security that cushioned my youth was a blip. Maybe not, though. My children, all adults now, have had their own struggles, but they, too, are living well, or hoping to live well – if the creeks don’t rise (or dry up).
And this afternoon, I felt that same sense of well-being on a large scale in the East Bay town of Walnut Creek. This being mild California, it was an October afternoon in late November, kids and parents from all over the world, off school and work for the holiday, all making merry on the biggest playground I’ve ever seen. The American Dream, extended to all.
On a clear, crisp day like this in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, the journalist Martha Gellhorn overheard a comment on the fineness of the weather. “A disaster,” came the response.
A disaster because it was perfect bombing weather. I doubt anyone in the park was thinking about bombs falling on Walnut Creek. But who doesn’t worry that our current wars could widen into World War III?
Wars everywhere and always are started by lunatics and visited upon people who wish only to make a living, raise families, and eat, drink and be merry with those they love. People like us.
We live with the awareness that everything can be taken from us in a blink, if not by war, then by pestilence, madness or cataclysm, and the longer our luck lasts, the more we think it’s bound to run out.
Amid such thoughts, Thanksgiving tomorrow. I’ll be with the kids and grandkids, grateful for what we have, worried about what’s to come — for Marcus and his three little cousins, and for all of us.
