Without giving it a lot of thought, I always assumed I had lived a sheltered life. Not privileged by any means, but sheltered: you know, a mom, a dad, two brothers and a sister, three meals a day, a warm bed and a small school where everybody knew your name. However, in recent years, when I consider what we never experienced when I was growing up, I realize we were all deprived.
For example, we never had closure. Everybody gets closure these days. They insist on it -- can't live without it. Nothing can be considered complete without closure. It's the final curtain. It's like the cover of a big book slammed after the last chapter. The End. When I was a kid and something was over, it was over. We didn't hang around waiting for something else, because there wasn't anything else. No final curtain. We never had closure. Our lives where incomplete but we never realized it. No wonder now, all these years later, our kids look at us and think something is missing.
And since we never had closure, we never got on with our lives. These days folks want things to be over (closure) so they can get on with their lives. Getting on with their lives is like a major event -- like midnight 1999, when 1999 became 2000 and we inaugurated a new millennium. Now there was a new beginning. It never worked like that in my youth. We never got on with our lives. When something was over, we just started something else -- like another day on the job -- like going from April 4th to April 5th. We missed out on so much.
We were never trying to find ourselves. It seems we never knew we were lost. I suppose that means we were never in touch with our inner person. We generally thought that our inner person and our outer person were one and the same guy. Was there another person we never met? As far as those folks who are looking for themselves, good luck. But if they aren't where they are, where are they?
And we missed out on identity theft. We didn't have credit cards and we didn't have cell phones, so it was like we had no identity for anybody to steal -- an entire generation of nobodies. But it's no wonder: the most frequent victims of identity theft today are from households headed by people aged 24 to 28, in urban and suburban areas, with incomes of at least $75,000. With those requirements, even if we got credit cards and cell phones, still nobody would want to steal our identities.
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Another thing we never had was a point in time. We didn't graduate from high school at a point in time, we graduated on a date, May 30. When we got married it wasn't at a point in time, it was a date, Aug. 16, and every year after that was just an anniversary. Not nearly as dramatic, but more precise. We had hours, days, weeks, months and years, but points in time were never part of our language or our experience. At that point, no event was important enough to have happened at a point in time. Even the assassination of President of John F. Kennedy didn't happen at a point in time, it happened on Nov. 22, 1963. How we kept track of things in those days I have no idea.
It's no wonder my generation is so bland. We missed so much. No closure, no getting on with our lives, no looking for ourselves, no identity for anybody to steal and no points in time. I realize now how out of date I am, but it's too late.
