I took a course in college on the poetry of Wallace Stevens with a brilliant and eccentric professor (the best kind there is). Occasionally during class, for no apparent reason, he would launch into a completely unprompted tirade against Christmas. The seven or eight members of the class, myself included, would sit and listen, vaguely confused and a little horrified, as our professor would rail on about how the holiday was never as good as it was when you were a child, and after such complete and whole satisfaction in childhood, the dissatisfaction in adulthood was all the more awful. We, being only lately out of our teen years, generally didn’t believe him and would wait for him to get back to Stevens. In the last couple of years, though, I think I’ve begun to see what he meant.
When I was a child, for whatever reason, I developed a very black and white sense of rightness and order in the world. Certain things were supposed to happen in a certain way, and if they did, all was right and good in the universe. (Isn’t it amazing how you can track control issues to an early age?) So then, for Christmas, it was almost as simple as a checklist: tree, presents, family, Eggs Benedict. All present and accounted for? Success!
It was much the same for everyday items as well. I grew up in a remarkably nuclear family: my dad would be home at 6:30 every night for dinner, which was always a meat, a starch, and a vegetable, and all six of us (two parents, three daughters, and the dog) would be at the same table to eat. Dry cleaning on Saturday, church on Sunday, and the Nightly News during the week. A+B+C= stable childhood.
It’s difficult for me to track exactly when these things started to change. Some things were obvious, like when my sisters went away to college and we moved away from my childhood home. Others were more subtle. It’s hard to tell when adult worries started to get in the way of simple, childish satisfaction. This last Christmas I found myself with my head in my hands at the airport about to fly home. Anxieties about sibling tensions, traveling relatives, in-laws, a sister’s wedding plans, and the revival of old hurts and battles nearly made me turn around and head back to my apartment. I couldn’t help but think back to my crazy Stevens professor and started to wonder if he had been right.
Childhood seems to escape slowly, almost like air from a bike tire. It’s easy to qualify that loss in terms of siblings marrying, houses sold, friends made and lost, but I believe the attrition actually comes from many more sources, uncountable small losses that invariably carry you forward into adulthood. I only came to that conclusion the day Peter Jennings died.
On the morning of September 11, I sat on my parents’ bed and watched, sickened, as the towers fell. My father was at work, or rather making his way home from work by then, along with almost every other commuter in San Francisco. My mother had gone to the bank to withdraw cash, not knowing what the wake of the attacks would bring—in retrospect, it seems a little odd, but then, our normal now is having rainbow popsicle flavors determine our likelihood of being killed in an act of terrorism. (Still orange? Damn, I was really hoping for a purple one of these days…) I was alone in the house, trying to wrap my head around it, like trying to fold an origami cocktail napkin around a bowling ball, and looking back at me from the TV, I saw Peter Jennings trying to do the same.
We were an NBC family as I was growing up, and Peter Jennings had announced the news every night in my kitchen before dinner for years. I guess it isn’t all that surprising that I sought comfort in that newscast: if anybody could explain this to me, it would be him. I was almost sixteen at the time, but I hung onto that four-poster bed and his voice like a little kid. I had come to trust him like I trusted Christmas morning or weekday dinner: it would be there, it would make sense, and everything would be okay. Even though that particular morning would never be okay, in a small way for me, Peter Jennings made it a little better because he was on screen and kept talking. And desperate for solace, I kept listening.
Four year later, he died of lung cancer.
Historically and particularly in the last year, celebrity death has become a very strange, publicized phenomenon. Generally, I find sensationalized death unrepentantly tacky. Nevertheless, when Peter Jennings died, I felt that I personally had suffered a kind of loss. He had not only been part of my childhood, but also in a weird way, he had been with me that horrible morning. With his death, my childhood idea of order suffered another inevitable blow.
So what is it that we do on the far side of childhood, having passed through the angsty border territory of adolescence? I for one have slowly let myself trust Brian Williams for my nightly news. I have to laugh at myself when I suffer brief, ridiculous moments of anxiety when he has the night off—such things will happen. It was a valuable revelation that perhaps we don’t find order as adults; we have to make it for ourselves. My childhood stability was so comforting because I was fortunate enough to come into a world where it was already in place. There is good news, though, for adulthood: there can still be dinner, news, dry cleaning, and Christmas trees—I just have to arrange them myself.
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