The reason for my unreasonable animosity toward the wisdom of the ages was manifold. I had two grandmothers and a mother and father who lived within proverbs.
From an early age, when my overburdened and underpaid immigrant father came home tired from work, and occasionally shouted in our direction, "Children should be seen and not heard," to the times the adults surrounding me responded to my request for a measly two bits with, "A penny saved is a penny earned," it all seemed like prepackaged triteness conceived to frustrate my desire to enjoy my little life.
The maxim that really sent me over the edge began being hurled at me when I was a teenager. It went like this: "Youth is wasted on the young."
I knew in my firmly beating, girl-crazy heart, that all the spouting old farts near me: parents, grandparents, teachers and weird, neighborly solitaries, were simply jealous of curly-haired little Denny, pure and simple.
So it pains me to admit that, as I grow older, I am beginning to believe these tired phrases just might contain a tiny bit of wisdom.
The precipitating factors in my change of heart are two-fold. First, a friendly acquaintance back East just lost a son to the prison system for at least 30 years.
The kid got involved with a gang and in an unbelievably sad irony shot and killed a street musician who had played on a basketball team with his dad and me back in the 1970s. All the trouble came to a head when the 50-something musician resisted giving up his hard-earned wages to a group of kids I'm sure he thought were lazy, demented, heartless punks. They shot and killed him for about $25.
He was a good man and the killer's father, a good man also, could only say over and over, "If he (his son) had just gotten past this crazy phase..." And you know he is probably right. Study after study shows that criminal violence all but dies, even in repeat offenders, after the age of 34. A huge proportion of murder and rape in this country is committed by people between the ages of 17 and 34. But none of that will help my old teammate or his convicted kid. A young man doesn't often think about, or even see, cause and effect.
Secondly, 2008 marks the 40th anniversary of my father's death. He died young, at 57. Unbelievably, to me, I am now older than he was when he passed on. I think a lot, lately, about the many things he tried to impress upon my plastic, young-but-closed-off-to-him brain.
I stand 6 feet now, and have since the age of 17, but at 14 I was 5-feet tall, the smallest kid in a high school of 1,200 kids.
The same friends who had played ball with me, and the same girls who had played spin-the-bottle with me, at 12, tormented and teased me endlessly. My reaction, to the horror of my father, was to quit studying hard and start hanging around with the outcasts, called greasers way back then.
We slicked our hair back and stood on corners smoking cigarettes and swigging from stolen beer bottles.
"You're wasting your life. You have a high I.Q. and you won't study," my angry, bewildered father kept saying.
"They accept me. No one else does. You don't understand," I responded.
I never forgot his reply, but I couldn't see the truth in it for years. I had to live through youth to understand and by then my father was dead.
"In 20 years, you won't see any of these people," he had said. "Not the ones you're wasting your life with, and not the ones who are messing with you. Study, and avoid having to work all your life for people dumber than you."
I didn't listen. I was young and youth was wasted on me. As, you might remember, that hateful proverb explained.
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