About Good Takes and First Loves

Post 1532:

Once every so often I have a rogue dark thought about reading novels, something like what’s the point?

After all, who, especially an adult, has time for such ridiculous distractions and diversions? There are things to do and money to make and people to impress and products to produce.

And then I read something in a novel that makes the dark thought implode on itself. Screw you, dark thought.

Take in the following passage from Empire Falls, a Richard Russo novel:

His mother would be no help at all. The cutthroat savagery of high school romance inspired in nearly all adults a collective amnesia. Having survived it themselves, they locked those memories far away in some dark chamber of their subconscious where things that are too terrible to contemplate are permanently stored. The more skilled you were at the game in high school, the more deeply your guilty recollections were buried. This was the reason parents so often worried vaguely about their high school children, yet balked at inquiring after the details of their social lives. Heartbreak, they reassured themselves, was “all part of growing up.”

I love this. Anyone who went to high school knows that trying to figure out the dating thing is one of the most daunting parts of life. The inscrutable process, coupled with the hormones, makes everything insane. But no worries. Incredibly challenging trials ahead? Just ask mom and dad…

Now maybe you asked your mom and dad, but this was the last thing me or my friends did. First, kids don’t want to think about their parents dating or being young or doing anything fun or even being human. Second, parents certainly don't want to think about their kids venturing down into the always joyful world of romance and emotion. No matter how old the kid, a parent is always a parent.

So this is great. A time of supreme formative importance is being mismanaged and mangled by generation after generation because it’s awkward and hard to communicate. Of course there are lessons to be passed down, but who wants to pass them and who wants to listen? Nobody. And so the suffering continues. Humans are brilliant. We’re also dumb.

And I love the way Russo puts it into words. Of course his description rings true, but I’d never quite thought about it this way. It’s funny and it’s sad and it makes me look at the world and my parents a little bit different.

Has my life changed from reading this book? Well, no. But also, technically yes.

Cheers and see you after.