Generation gaps
A moment from my work day: I am getting my too-many-th cup of coffee. Beautiful 20-something comments, nicely, that she doesn’t drink coffee because caffeine is bad for you. (And she’s right!)
So I remember sneaking across the street from my high school to order a mocha at the newly-opened Second Cup there, feeling so devilishly grown up and urban. (But still needing the chocolate to cover the taste of the coffee.) I remember when I went from mocha to a “columbian,” with lots of cream and sugar. And I remember my calculus (also philosophy) teacher Demosthenes “happening” to drop in on me there and shoring up my dreadful understanding of trig by easing it between philosophical thoughts (I was a philosophy star and in danger of failing the calculus). I remember how adult I felt sitting having coffee and discussing Kant. I remember how the combination of the drug and the adultness would put me a few years ahead of myself and I would go home and survive the weekend.
I remember when my parents started making me cups of coffee. My dad still does when I go over there. When I was pregnant and breastfeeding all the time, he would make decaff, but it wasn’t quite the same.
I was in high school on the cusp of AIDS awareness: I started exploring my sexuality before condoms became a lifesaving device; when the big fear was getting pregnant. Although there were fat kids and anorexic kids (my school leaned towards the anorexic), food had not yet become the enemy, not even day-glo orange cheese. We wore seatbelts but we didn’t have airbags. And we were still a long, long way from no-fly lists.
And caffeine, while not good for children, was one of the pleasures of getting older. It was one of the ways you knew that soon you would be driving, and moving out, and getting married, and making coffee every morning in your own home.
I suppose I’m getting old now, and my nostalgia is increasingly misplaced. Certainly there “were no” gay kids at my school; gayness was something that happened in weird places like San Francisco, and oh, a million other strange omissions and commissions.
But I guess I’m a child of my era enough to think that in one’s early 20s one should be able to enjoy a cup of coffee with a coworker and not always be flipping through the health ramifications. How do kids come of age now?
Comments
Leave a Reply