Fall will get here, directly...

It was 2 years ago, in the Fall, that I began to post on this blog. Time flies. I think it goes faster with each year, although this year summer seems to be holding on longer than I would like. I am tired of the endless days above 90 degrees and I am definitely ready for fall to get here.

 For reasons I don't fully understand, Fall is my favorite season. Some of it may have to do with new beginnings. The start of the school year in the fall, though now the administrators have backed it up into mid-summer, was always a time of new beginnings and aspirations.  The cooler weather, when it finally arrives, re-energizes after the dog-days of late summer. Maybe that is why I began this blog in the Fall. Or maybe it had more to do with Jon and Ash going to Oxford and using this to have some conversation, but since that was tied to a school year it still has a connection to autumn. Many of our major moves in life have come in the fall as well. We moved to Memphis to start working with Kimberly-Clark in the fall; we moved from Memphis to Roswell in the fall; we moved from Roswell to Pittsfield in the fall. Of course, when I went to explore seminary, since that had to do with school, that move from Appleton to Chicago also happened in the fall. It has been a time not only of changes in the weather, but changes in life.

This year fall seems to be lagging, though. We were chatting the other day about the word 'directly'. I heard it a lot from my grandfather, and from my father. I recall times sitting on the front porch at my grandparents house when my grandmother or my mother would call to us that supper was just about ready. My grandfather would commonly say, 'We'll be there directly'.  It didn't mean we jumped right up and ran in: we just knew to 'mosey' that way shortly. And it was pronounced  'dreckly'. That way you didn't confuse it with something like the same word used for location, like 'he was directly in front of me' (pronounced 'DIE-rectly'). I expect good things from the fall season, so I am ready for it to get here. I guess it will get here directly.

You are what you were when...

Back in the late 1970's, a professor at the University of Colorado ( I think in psychology) did a film series entitled 'You Are What You Were When'. The gist of it was that the culture, the key world events, and your personal life experiences during your growing up years shape you in a way that stays with you the rest of your life, and to understand any particular generation you need to understand the key events that shaped their life while growing up. For those of us whose parents grew up during the Great Depression, we heard over and over about how tough life was in the 1930's, how a job is not to be taken lightly, how important it is to 'save for a rainy day', how we need to understand 'the value of money', and so forth. The severity of the Depression, the 25% national unemployment, the malnutrition they endured, all of those things had a profound impact on how they viewed the world, and they wanted to transmit those values to us who lived in much more prosperous times. Then the Depression ended in a global war, that brought yet another kind of hardship, often too difficult to even talk about. They sometimes lamented that the message did not fully get through to us the way they had hoped.

Recently Beloit College published their annual list about the mindset of this year's entering freshman class at colleges around the country. The list takes note of things such as this new class thinks email is too slow,  their phones never had cords to twist while you talk on the phone, Czechoslovakia never existed in their life, Russians and Americans always lived and worked together in space, and they never lived under the threat of nuclear missile attack. Even 9/11 is a distant memory to many of them now, half a lifetime ago. As with my parents, many of things that shaped my world view like the Cold War, nuclear attack drills at school, the Vietnam war, 'the pill', civil rights marches and riots, The Silent Spring, The Population Bomb, and double-digit inflation are all part of a distant history to my children, who are all older than this new class. Also like my parents,  I know of no way to really transmit how those things impacted my thinking in a way that comes close to living through them. Again like my parents, I also sometimes wonder if I have done a good enough job in transmitting values about faith, money, defense, the environment (and skepticism in the predictions made about it), family and any number of things.

In that regard the current recession will no doubt have considerable teaching power for things I could only talk about. Attitudes toward debt, jobs, the stock market are undergoing shifts now that will be part of lived reality for this generation. It will no doubt have an impact.

Now I am glad that I heard those Depression stories over and over again. I heard it enough that I at least could understand why my parents and grandparents viewed things the way they did. It does remind me, though, that we older folks need to pause to think about what has shaped the lives of our children and how different it was to the things we often assume as 'givens'. And we need to keep on telling the stories.