Published: March 01, 2008 10:02 pm         

The sins of our youth, both silly and serious

After a whole column on the old-fogy take on life, today I give equal time to the young folks. The catch: It’s all about me and my generation when we were young folks. Sorry, teenagers, if you want the current picture — get your own column.

As an adult now, it’s hard to regain the viewpoint of a child. One is much more likely to remember how it was when your own kids were new and needed so much care, and there is not much empathy for the young in that point of view. I well remember when my kids were newborn, I hung a sign on the wall that said, “Grant Me the Patience To Endure my Blessings” and I meant every word of it.

Martin Luther is said to have once looked at his family of six children, ages four to 12, and remarked, “Christ said we must become as little children to enter the kingdom. Dear God, this is too much. Must we become such idiots?” Yep, I have to admit I was inclined to think, as they say, “Hey, I should have kept the stork instead.”

But I want to dig even deeper than that, back to the time when I myself was the only obvious alternative to the stork, and the years that came after. The truth is that not every child is a dewy-eyed little innocent, certainly I wasn’t. I’ve mentioned this before: I stole the cherries out of Mother’s home-made jam, every time she put it out on the table for guests.

And (did I ever dare to admit it in this column before?) I also stole money out of the piano bench. That’s where Daddy kept our tithe for the church, which he put in weekly envelopes on a regular basis. This turned out for a year or so, to be a fine source of candy money, a nickel here, a nickel there.

I kept a record of it on the corner of the wallpaper in the dining room, telling myself I would pay it back someday. I did stop actually. It took a while, but finally my conscience kicked in enough to put a halt to the habit and I was never found out. (Daddy, if you’re reading this in heaven — that accounts for your bad accounting, and I’m SORRY!) As for the wallpaper, the house of my sin was torn down when I was in college and I don’t really remember what the final total was — somewhere around a couple dollars, I believe. You’ll be pleased to learn that I did pay that back as soon as I heard the house had to go, but I have never really felt comfortable about the whole thing — maybe this public confession will do the trick.

And here are some other youthful sins of mine. Yes, Charles (my older brother), I did it! I’m the one who tore down your mud dams in the backyard which you took days and days of architectural planning and hard work to build. I must say, they fell satisfyingly quickly with a couple swipes of a broom. Of course, you already know (we’ve talked about it in recent years) I’m the one who hid your pingpong balls. John (my other older brother), as you also know now, I stole a good number of chocolate candies out of that Valentine heart our Aunt and Uncle gave you when you were 11 or 12. (I would have been 7 or 8 at the time and I want you to know it was only after terrible temptation — and I had finished my own, of course.)

I suppose all these experiences worked together to make me into the person I am now, sort of. I can look back on them with a certain amusement that keeps me from feeling too guilty about them all. And I did learn from them. I mean, I don’t destroy other people’s life works any more, nor do I steal other people’s candy, except, well, naturally, in emergencies.

But there was another sin I participated in that I thought nothing of at the time, but which I look back on now with a certain combined guilt and wonder that I didn’t really notice the unfairness of it all. Nor did my parents, though they were enlightened people by the standards of the time.

Every other year we would drive to Florida to visit another aunt and uncle. They had a black maid whom I got along with well, and she invited me to go on a shopping trip with her. I was given permission to do so, and I don’t remember one thing about where we went or what we bought. What I do remember is that we passed up a lot of empty front seats to sit in the back. This was in the 1930s, and blacks in the South were not allowed to sit in the front. (I don’t know about the North.) I thought nothing of it. I still feel guilty that I enjoyed it so much. I had never sat in a bus before, let alone in the back, and I found it all strange and bumpy and exciting. The total injustice that it involved, that black people were not considered equal enough in the land of equality to sit wherever they wanted to on a public vehicle, and that I participated in such a stupid assumption, never even occurred to me until years later.

When we’re young we do a lot of things that we don’t realize until later are not the way the world should work. If only, on looking back, they all seemed amusing instead of depressing.

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland free-lance writer. Her column appears on alternate Sundays in the Times-News.