Comfortably Numb

12 year olds, circa 1971

It was not Halloween. There had not been a blackout, forcing us to get dressed in the dark. We were not in the midst of a cast party for a low budget performance of Little House on the Prairie. It was a day in June, 1971, a day when my best girlhood friends and I were celebrating our graduation from the sixth grade.

The hideous white shoes were perfectly legal as it was after Memorial Day; no excuse springs to mind, however, for the rest of the outfits. We thought we were hip in our peasant skirts and hot pants, free and stylish spirits living in a world of banned bras, flower children, free love, and drugs. Sure, there were anti-war protests, but the war itself was so removed from my daily life I barely gave it any though; as far as I knew, Jews sent their sons to medical school, not war.

The seventies were an ugly time. In the concrete school yards of middle class Brooklyn, we strutted our impaired sense of fashion as proudly as we ignored the ironies of white flight and desegregation. In our minds we mocked the cowardly departure of our neighbors for the picket fences of suburbia, embracing the rainbow of colors within the chain link confines of our school. We withstood the uncomfortable mixing of "us" and "them," watching with awe (and from a safe distance, of course) at lunchtime while the black girls showcased their loose limbed genetics in endless rounds of "double dutch." My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I think we at least shared common ground on the "bad fashion front" issue. Our hair hung in knotted unruly frizz from our scalps while theirs protruded in multiple odd angles from their heads in greased twists bound by colorful hair ties with balls. Different variations on the same hideous theme.

Shag carpet, olive green appliances, living room furniture covered in plastic. The carefree and socially conscious days of the sixties had waned, giving way to a culture obsessed with its own things, no matter how unattractive. A healthy dose of apathy had replaced any heady concern with a war that just seemed to drag on and an international community exploding with military coups and decidedly uncivil outlooks on civil rights. My father's Cadillac (which we affectionately referred to as the "jew canoe") sat in line with all the other outsized cars of the time, determined to fill up on their share of an increasingly limited supply of gas. Whatever was going on out there, we learned how to not let it affect our days. And we wore our stringy hair and our hot pants and our hideous peasant skirts, oblivious to what eyesores we were. The twin towers of the World Trade Center rose up, a testament to our superiority and our rose colored outlook on life.

Those of us who came of age in the seventies have at least learned from some of out mistakes. We are slightly less self-absorbed, many of us at least making an effort to give back and acknowledge the suffering of others. We're a bit more tuned in, having watched the twin towers fall and having felt the sting of vulnerability. At the very least, many of us look a hell of a lot better than we did during our formative years. We have access to charitable offerings such as shows called "What Not to Wear" and stores called "Hot Mama" (yes, I work there part time and yes, I am a true believer in its power to transform) where women who look and feel as if they have been repeatedly kissed by toads emerge with big smiles and shopping bags laden with garments that will no doubt make our world -- our immediate world at least -- a prettier place. We are women like Princess Diana and Michelle Obama, a generation of geeks turned fashion icons as we entered middle age. Okay, perhaps I exaggerate for the rest of us, but let's face it, Kate Middleton and her ilk have nowhere to go but down.

12 year olds, circa 2002

This weekend, my older daughter sent me a picture of herself and her five closest girlhood friends, all of them out of college and living some version of "the dream" in Chicago. Not surprisingly, they all looked spectacular. Heck, they looked spectacular when they were twelve. I dug up a picture. It was taken at the beginning of seventh grade, at the turn of the new millennium, only weeks after outside forces crashed into our world and showed us in one horrifying moment how quickly things could crumble. The girls were already fashionistas, sophisticated and put together; it's impossible to believe they are the same age as the girls in the picture up above. No stringy hair, no hot pants yanked over protruding, prepubescent bellies, no hideous peasant dresses. Looking at them, you would never know our world had begun to unravel.

As beautiful as they looked then, and still look now, they have inherited a scary world. What will they do when they hit middle age, having long ago mastered the art of sartorial splendor? Will there be a return to middle aged dowdiness, to growing old, perhaps, without obsessing about maintaining youthful beauty? With no room left for improvement, will they just let it go? Maybe they will become less self absorbed, look outward instead of worrying so much about perfect hair and what to wear. Maybe they will take it upon themselves to make the world a less scary place, even if they start to look like shit.


We'll have to wait and see, I suppose. As we watched the news this morning, listening to discussions about possible troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, my youngest daughter asked me why this war was still going on. Not so much apathy as exasperation, but I marvel sometimes at how different our reality here in deep dark suburbia can be from the harsh realities elsewhere. It's difficult for me to reconcile our detachment from the war with the all too real fears of the young man and his young family I met recently as he readies himself for deployment.

Our kids may have known how to look good long before my generation figured it out, but still, there's always room for improvement.