What was most cramping in their point of view a few of us did find the audacity to strain against, but the intergenerational conflict never looked like it would twenty years laterThe neighborhood was never a field of battle strewn with the bodies of the misunderstoodThere was plenty of haranguing to ensure obedience; the adolescent capacity for upheaval was held in check by a thousand requirements, stipulations, prohibitions--restraints that proved insuperableOne was our own highly realistic appraisal of what was most in our interest, another the pervasive rectitude of the era, whose taboos we'd taken between our teeth at birth; not least was the enacted ideology of parental self-sacrifice that bled us of wanton rebelliousness and sent underground almost every indecent urge
It would have taken a lot more courage--or foolishness--than most of us could muster to disappoint their passionate, unflagging illusions about our perfectibility and roam very far from the permissibleTheir reasons for asking us to be both law-abiding and superior were not reasons we could find the conscience to discount, and so control that was close to absolute was ceded to adults who were striving and improving themselves through usMild forms of scarring may have resulted from this arrangement but few cases of psychosis were reported, at least at the timeThe weight of all that expectation was not necessarily killing, thank GodOf course there were families where it might have helped if the parents had eased up a little on the brake, but mostly the friction between generations was just sufficient to give us purchase to move forward
Am I wrong to think that we delighted in living there? No delusions are more familiar than those inspired in the elderly by nostalgia, but am I completely mistaken to think that living as well-born children in Renaissance Florence could not have held a candle to growing up within aromatic range of Tabachnik's pickle barrels? Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail, the weight of the detail--the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that'll be packed on your grave gucci back pack when you're dead
Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention; that's the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of thingsNonetheless, fifty years later, I ask you: has the immersion ever again been so complete as it was in those streets, where every block, every backyard, every house, every floor of every house--the walls, ceilings, doors, and windows of every last friend's family apartment--came to be so absolutely individualized? Were we ever again to be such keen recording instruments of the microscopic surface of things close at hand, of the minutest gradations of social position conveyed by linoleum and oilcloth, by yahrzeit candles and cooking smells, by Ronson table lighters and Venetian blinds? About one another, we knew who had what kind of lunch in the bag in his locker and who ordered what on his hot dog at Syd's; we knew one another's every physical attribute--who walked pigeon-toed and who had breasts, who smelled of hair oil and who oversalivated when he spoke; we knew who among us was belligerent and who was friendly, who was smart and who was dumb; we knew whose mother had the accent and whose father had the mustache, whose mother worked and whose father was dead; somehow we even dimly grasped how every family's different set of circumstances set each family a distinctive difficult human problem
And, of course, there was the mandatory turbulence born of need, appetite, fantasy, longing, and the fear of disgraceWith only adolescent introspection to light the way, each of us, hopelessly pubescent, alone and in secret, attempted to regulate it--and in an era when chastity was still ascendant, a national cause to be embraced by the young like freedom and democracy
It's astonishing that everything so immediately visible in our lives as classmates we still remember so preciselyThe intensity of feeling that we have seeing one another today is also astonishingBut most astonishing is that we are nearing the age that our grandparents were when we first went off to be freshmen at the annex on February 1, 1946What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happenedThat the results are in for the class of January 1950--the unanswerable questions answered, the future torebki louis vuitton revealed--is that not astonishing? To have lived--and in this country, and in our time, and as who we were
This is the speech I didn't give at my forty-fifth high school reunion, a speech to myself masked as a speech to themI began to compose it only after the reunion, in the dark, in bed, groping to understand what had hit meThe tone--too ruminative for a country club ballroom and the sort of good time people were looking for there--didn't seem at all ill-conceived between three and six a as I tried, in my overstimulated state, to comprehend the union underlying the reunion, the common experience that had joined us as kidsDespite gradations of privation and privilege, despite the array of anxieties fostered by an impressively nuanced miscellany of family quarrels--quarrels that, fortunately, promised more unhappiness than they always delivered--something powerful united usAnd united us not merely in where we came from but in where we were going and how we would get thereWe had new means and new ends, new allegiances and new aims, new innards--a new ease, somewhat less agitation in facing down the exclusions the goyim still wished to preserveAnd out of what context did these transformations arise--out of what historical drama, acted unsuspectingly by its little protagonists, played out in classrooms and kitchens looking nothing at all like the great theater of life? Just what collided with what to produce the spark in us?
I was still awake and all stirred up, formulating these questions and their answers in my bed--blurry, insomniac shadows of these questions and their answers--some eight hours after I'd driven back from New Jersey, where, on a sunny Sunday late in October, at a country club in a Jewish suburb far from the futility prevailing in the streets of our crime-ridden, drug-infested childhood home, the reunion that began at eleven in the morning went ebulliently on all afternoon longIt was held in a ballroom just at the edge of the country club's golf course for a group of elderly adults who, as Weequahic kids of the thirties and forties, would have thought a niblick (which was what in those days they called the nine iron) was a hunk of schmaltz herringNow I couldn't sleep--the last thing I could remember was the parking valet bringing my car around to the steps of the portico, and the reunion's commander in chief, Selma chanel quilted replica Bresloff, kindly asking if I'd had a good time, and my telling her, "It's like going out to your old outfit after Iwo Jima I left my bed and went to my desk, my head vibrant with the static of unelaborated thoughtI wound up working there until six, by which time I had got the reunion speech to read as it appears aboveOnly after I had built to the emotional peroration culminating in the word "astonishing" was I at last sufficiently unastonished by the force of my feelings to be able to put together a couple of hours of sleep--or something resembling sleep, for, even half out of it, I was a biography in perpetual motion, memory to the marrow of my bones
Yes, even from as benign a celebration as a high school reunion it's not so simple to instantaneously resume existence back behind the blindfold of continuity and routinePerhaps if I were thirty or forty, the reunion would have faded sweetly away in the three hours it took me to drive homeBut there is no easy mastery of such events at sixty-two, and only a year beyond cancer surgeryInstead of recapturing time past, I'd been captured by it in the present, so that passing seemingly out of the world of time I was, in fact, rocketing through to its secret core
For the hours we were all together, doing nothing more than hugging, kissing, kibitzing, laughing, hovering over one another recollecting the dilemmas and disasters that hadn't in the long run made a damn bit of difference, crying out, "Look who's here!" and "Oh, it's been a long time" and "You remember me? I remember you," asking each other, "Didn't we once
"Were you the kid who" commanding one another--with those three poignant words I heard people repeat all afternoon as they were drawn and tugged into numerous conversations at once--"Don't go away!"and, of course, dancing, cheek-to-cheek dancing our outdated dance steps to a "one-man band," a bearded boy in a tuxedo, his brow encircled with a red bandanna (a boy born at least two full decades after we'd marched together out of the school auditorium to the rousing recessional tempo of Iolanthe), accompanying himself on a synthesizer as he imitated Nat "King" Cole, Frankie Laine, and Sinatra--for those few hours time, the chain of time, the whole damn drift of everything called time, had seemed as easy to understand as the dimensions of the doughnut you effortlessly down with
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