Remembering 19
Because I didn’t have to coordinate them or worry about ‘em getting into trouble, I got to kick back in Roscoe’s sweet lakeside cabin and enjoy. They helped get a musical theatre camp across the street ready for summer season, I took a nap in the quiet, sunny living room. Suh-WEET. When they returned, we all strolled down Main Street, ate ice cream, took a boat ride around the lake, ate dinner, played games, kicked back. On Sunday we devoured breakfast and took a leisurely riverside hike. I knew three of the students from my classes and enjoyed getting to know the rest. A cool group, as you might imagine.
I think the best part, for me, was remembering what it’s like to be 19. Of course, I’m around people that age pretty much all the time, but the away-from-school setting and the I’m-not-in-charge factor somehow opened the memory field and helped me appreciate.
I can’t believe it was 21 years ago already. It does not seem possible that two decades have passed. But I remember thinking 19 was a perfect age: not yet fully responsible but older than all the other teenagers. Fully developed physically but in a zone of total exploration. Parents paying for college (lucky me), college at UCSC being a complete heaven on earth. Like these kids in Grand Lake, I was pretty much psyched for everything–learning, talking, eating, arguing, relationships, sex, drama, partying, sleeping, laughing, absorbed with music, running around, freaking out about whatever, figuring out who I was. Like them I was ripe in my body, young in my face, carefree in my walk. Even when I got into drama about the guys I was sleeping with, even when I experienced my first self-inflicted heartbreak, I was absolutely in love with everything, with all of it.
It’s easy as every year moves us higher ed people further away in time from the students we work with–who stay 18-22 regardless of our changes–to forget what it was like; to think we were smarter, better, more engaged, cooler, less fucked up. That we didn’t have eating disorders, drinking problems, apathy issues, psychological disturbances. Of course we did. We weren’t cooler; we were just as privileged and sheltered as most of my kids now, and in some ways I think my generation, 80s teens, had it worse because our parents raised us in the tornado of the sexual revolution. I’m surprised that most of my students’ folks are still together; ours were not.
A student sought me out the other day to confide that a guy she’s been sleeping with has, she found out, been doing heroin. Heroin?! At first I was shocked, but I remember the kids whose latent schizophrenia got triggered by the LSD they dropped their freshman year. I remember suicidal Lowell being carried out in a straightjacket by paramedics. I remember the gorgeous size 10 girl in a size 6 California world who people called fat; she developed anorexia right in front of all of our faces and dropped to size 2 in the space of six months, ended up hospitalized. I remember the vomiting from too much. I remember 200 of us at Stevenson on a collective Ecstasy trip under a blanket of stars. I remember trips to the health center for VD checks. Stumbling through the hall on a Quaalude. Steven having a caffeine-induced, 3 a.m. hospital ride for a wildly beating heart. People getting so stoned they didn’t remember their names. And guys streaking through the quad drinking beer & lemonade (what was that called???). Date rape. And, in solidarity, my first Take Back the Night marches through campus (still happening).
Ah, but there was also Intro to Feminism with Bettina Aptheker, long runs through the redwood forest, daily views of Monterrey Bay, meandering musings with Cindy, and learning guitar with Kenneth of the Neord on the knoll. Banana slugs in the rain, and the smell of wet leaves. Laughing attacks with Gape and Whoolius. Trying every substance (except the really scary ones) once with Gabriela, who’d always come home with one earring missing when she’d gotten together with a guy. Watching Craig sprawl out naked on I 5 after a water polo meet while the passing semis honked. Road tripping with Viv, talking about everything under the sun while I squeezed my legs shut waiting for her to finally stop and let me go to the bathroom, for Chrissakes. Giggle attacks and doodling in geography, which I had trouble concentrating on, but total infatuation with the Soviet Union, Ancient Greece, Marx and Mill, African dance class, Feminist Theory, and the truly mind blowing History of Women of Color in the U.S. Why oh why did I not seize on the chance to take classes with Noel King (was it?), Peter Euben, Dan Wirls? Falling in love with a painter, whose smell and sexiness I loved, whose madess freaked me out.
The point is, I suppose, that it was such an intense time. An alive time, when alive felt on the edge and utterly sensual, which is probably why it felt so good to drink a couple beers and eat burritos at the edge of a cliff on Highway 1 watching the crashing waves at sunset. Even that wasn’t enough; we had to scramble down to the beach below and plunge in in our clothes.
I want for these young people not to get sucked into the moments of self-doubt, confusion, identity crisis and fear for the world–though I had them all too. I want them not to drop into drugs or eating disorders or suicide when it sucks, though I know some will, some always, succumb. But more than that, I want for them their total aliveness, their awkward, exhilarating flight, their moments of throbbing passion and acute grace. Their nineteenness, because it only happens that once.
Oh, and by the way, these kids were really into this guy Mika who to me sounds like a combo of Freddy Mercury and George Michael, kind of a post-eighties sound. Check out this awesome and disturbingly addictive video.
