YA Fiction for Forty Year Olds

  

Yesterday, while I was out, my wife asked my kids what they wanted to do tomorrow. My daughter was excited about a treasure hunt, but my son proclaimed, and I can only imagine loudly, “play with dad!”

I don’t know what I’ve done to merit this interest. I’m lousy at playing. When I’m not losing interest in the game and bugging the kids to do something else, I’m having to cut short the game, or pause it to make a cup of coffee or something. 

I enjoy playing with my kids—I’m glad that my son has picked up on this—but I don’t think I’m good at it, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before this realization hits. But reading with them? With enough library books, I could do that all day. 

As a reader, as an English major, I’ve been into reading with my kids since they were babies. From repetitive board books to the present-day YA graphic novels, there is nothing so enjoyable to me as coming home from the library, settling into the couch to explore new stories and characters together. 

My kids, unaccustomed to iPads or even much television, enjoy reading (or being read to), as well. For six and four, their endurance to listen to their dad narrate book and after book is impressive. They can sit there for hours just listening. And when I finish a book, they hand me the next one eagerly asking, “can we read this one now?”

When I go into the bookstore, even if I can sneak away for a moment, I don’t even bother looking at the rest of the store, I just hang out in the kids’ section, helping to steer the purchases into things I want to read as well. When we go to the library, I’m the one making almost all the selections, saying things like, “hey, look, the author of Smile has another book!” or “all right, a new Babysitter’s Club!”—Books which would’ve been anathema to me when I was my kids’ age have been transmuted into exciting worlds I may have missed out on earlier but I’m still able to catch up on. 

The sole catch is that the most common moral of these stories doesn’t have the same urgency or even relevancy for me. A surprising amount of these stories develop a sense of inferiority in the protagonist which is resolved in one of two ways. 1. They eventually discover what they good at (usually with the help of supportive peers). Or, 2, they have a glimpse of a talent, a heretofore unconsidered ability, that helps them understand that they are still developing; they have time to figure it out. 

I’m 42 years old. The idea that some unexpected talent should suddenly manifest itself is a bit ridiculous even at my most optimistic. Especially given that I consider myself a fairly adventurous person. It’s not like—as so often happens in the books—there is something I enjoy doing that I’ve never allowed myself to fully explore. Everything I’ve ever had the slightest inkling in, I’ve had a period in my life where I’ve gone after with unadulterated attention—like a dog chasing a ball. 

When I first discovered that I could bike across town at about 13 or 14, and that I enjoyed it, I started doing it all the time. For the rest of my young adult life, I eschewed cars and rode a bike everywhere. When I discovered I liked long-distance hiking. I hiked the entire Appalachian Trail. When I discovered I liked reading books, I switched my major to English and spent countless hours in diners and cafes late at night poring over 19^th century novels, making all kinds of senseless annotations in the margins. When I discovered I was interested in other cultures, languages, modes of living, I lived abroad for several years, and, really, I thought I would for the rest of my life. Sometimes, it still seems odd, accidental, that I live in the US now. I was never “good” at any of these things in the sense they present abilities and talents in books, but I enjoyed doing them, and I wonder now if that was enough. 

Simply, the moral of YA books is entirely misplaced on someone like me—not because I am old, but because I never developed any particular talent, though not for lack of trying. What I hope is inspiring/comforting my kids—making them feel as though they can be themselves and find strength in that—continually serves to remind me that, well, I don’t have my whole life to look forward to, that I’ve made all the decisions that the books are poising the readers for. 

So, I examine the choices I’ve made. Is there anything I neglected while rushing around in my youth? Were there any opportunities I missed? Should I have stayed a certain course longer, or cut another off more quickly? I can very easily say “no”, but that’s really because I never ardently pursued anything, at least not when I was younger. As I delineated above, I flitted from interest to interest almost as soon as they presented themselves as possibilities. I did not focus on becoming, say, a professional athlete and then, after countless hours of practice when I should’ve been eating/sleeping/socializing/studying, met with intense disappointment when I didn’t make the final cut, though I was close, so close that I reevaluate the championship game over and over as though I could go back and change it. No. Nothing like that. Nothing at all like that.

And the thing is, I’d recommend this ADD-influenced mode of living. If I could summarize it into a plot for a kids’ book, I would. Something like, “it’s a crazy, multifaceted world out there, kids. Why get too bogged down in anything? Why even worry about trying to be particularly “good” or “successful”? Just let life blow you where it will” –I’m not sure this “Tales from a 42-Year-Old Nothing” would sell well, however.

Constantly reading about the precipice of adulthood, I have to consider my formative years in high school, when I, too, was part of a social clique—though thankfully not a mean-spirited or exclusive clique—and made all kids of bad decisions. I read about kids forming meaningful relationships, and avoiding the associations which might mean social advancement, but would not permit them to be their true selves. It is tempting to lament my reckless adolescence. To summarize it as only leading me down a path where I have not learned to really focus on anything, or develop a solid character. I didn’t learn discipline by wanting to win the championship game, or get into the best school, but, I guess, I did eventually learn it, only when I realized that everyone else had it and it was something I would need. 

Rather than single-mindedly pursuing a goal, I did a bunch of disparate things which have led me to be the kind of person who likes making things more than buying them, reading more than watching TV (though reading YA graphic novels is probably on par with watching Game of Thrones as far as my mental development is concerned), riding a bike (or skateboard) more than driving, etc, etc. I might not be particularly good at anything, but I enjoy the things I do, no matter of half-assedly, and, at the end of the day, if my four-year-old son’s most anticipated event for the next day is simply playing with me, I can’t have screwed up too badly. Even if that playing, too, is something I’m not particularly good at. 

Windows and Figs

 There’s an abandoned house in our neighborhood. Who knows the reason. The siding has either disintegrated or been smashed off the back of the house, revealing the insulation panels beneath. From the front other angles, the house looks fine, It even looks like someone lives there because the neighbors use the driveway for their extra car. It’s not a scary-looking empty house. It must be a rental with a mowing contract, because someone still comes by and cuts the yard. The apple tree in the back yard still blooms and fruits. If it weren’t for the hole in the back and the long stillness around the place, it would be just another house: a focal point in routine for a small group of people, the place of constant return. 

The kids and I peeked into the windows the other day. I think it’s helpful for your children to see your curiosity outweigh propriety once in a while and—despite age and experience— still remain open to adventure. I pulled them off the sidewalk and said “’c’mon; let’s check out that house.” They of course, hadn’t been expecting this and hesitated while they calculated whether dad was asking them to do something too risky for their comfort (wouldn’t be the first time). But when they saw me cupping my hands to look into the back window—into someone’s house!—their own curiosity outweighed the possible risks.

I think it was the garage we were looking into, but it was clear it had been inhabited, or at least been a place of constant attention and traffic when the house had been in use. By the window, just under where we were looking, there was a padded chair next to an end table with an overflowing ashtray. There was a couch opposite it, and beyond the dull ring of light from the murky window, I could make out the edges of many other unrecognizable objects. The stuff that had been introduced into this garage rumpus room and had been left there either purposefully or not when the tenant quitted the place: a meticulously created museum piece of the life of the poor in the early 21-st century. 

The kids wanted to see it, too. For some reason, now that I had looked in, I didn’t want them to see inside. There was so much stuff and so many shadows. In my quick scan of the room, I hadn’t entirely ruled out the possibility of something frightful in there, something I wouldn’t want them to see. While they clamored at my waist, I took another look to make sure the room was devoid of corpses or obscene posters. But something about the room in the partial light was so nebulous that I couldn’t focus on anything and only saw the same gray tangle that I hoped they would also see. 

I held my son up first, probably because he was making the most noise; he’s also younger and more prone to complaint if he isn’t the first. He attached himself to the glass eagerly, but I had to show him how to hold up his hands to block out the light bouncing off the glass around him. 

I don’t know what he saw. He neither seemed interested, nor disinterested. He looked without moving his head and when I brought him down did not protest, nor say anything. It was like he was having to process what he had seen. All that stuff that belonged to no one. 

I thought my daughter might even be mature enough, or timid enough, to not want a look in, but as we turned to go, she protested and I held her up to the window realizing, with my usual concern, that I felt more hesitation in exposing her to the unknown that I did with my son. Is it because, as a male, I have a certain understanding of the female experience and an innate desire to, like, uphold that understanding? Do I see my daughter’s innocence as something more valuable than my son’s, or is it just that there is something in her personality, something quiet, empathetic, and kind that I want to protect and nurture?

I held her up and could feel the shift as she positioned herself to take in as much of the view as she could. She brought her hands up and leaned into the view while I pushed down anxieties that there was something in that room that I hadn’t noticed. But it was just an inert room. Interesting only for this selfsame inert quality among so many living, moving, functioning homes. 

My thoughts were interrupted by my daughter’s question as we continued across the neighborhood toward the massive fig tree we discovered the other day.

“But why did someone leave all their things?”

I started to tell her how people are evicted. Sometimes they aren’t allowed to recover their things. Sometimes, they just leave in a hurry, or they leave everything behind in a jumble as a protest. But this explanation was eclipsed by the intrusion of a memory and without thinking much, I started to tell her about it. 

“When I was about 16, my friend Jim and I found a house like this: empty but full of people’s stuff, strewn around everywhere. But being 16 and without a place to drink the malt liquor we’d purchased (I left this detail out), we went in. At first, we’d waded cautiously through the ectoplasm of someone else’s life. Even at 16, it was hard not to feel respectfully sad when we came upon a room that had obviously belonged to a small child filled with stuffed animals and fluffy pinkness. But deprived of order, deprived of use, the stuff—even the most personal objects—had become junk. And the more we moved through the house, and the more we drank, our sympathy for the former inhabitants melted away. We began to kick things aside, toss them at each other and soon, we were breaking them.” 

I paused, not sure how to back out of telling such a revealing story. I keep forgetting that to my children, being a hostile teenager is unfathomable. Why would you break the stuff? Why would you be in an abandoned house drinking malt liquor in the first place when you had a home you could go to, when you had a loving family and even your own room with a TV in it you could turn on whenever you wanted? 

Telling my kids stories of my past, I’m continually bumping into the fact that I was a pretty selfish and frequently obnoxious kid who, despite crying when he read Where the Red Fern Grows at 10, probably evinced little else that looked like empathy or kindness until after his 18^th birthday. 

If I hadn’t had kids, I don’t know how much I ever would’ve come to examine my own childhood in this way. I think we are all inclined, as adults, to give ourselves a break when remembering our childhood. Over the years, I have written many times about the experiences I had being young and dumb, but I never took myself to task for it. If anything, I overfocused on what still seemed like injustices done to me. Uncharitable teachers, a father who yelled, a non-verbal sibling who absorbed a lot of attention: I looked everywhere in my memories to justify my actions, but I have never had to confront my own stupidity, my own utter lack of empathy in that way that I have since I started telling my kids stories of my youth, particularly of my pissed off teenage years. 

They understand in the same uncomprehending way I did when my dad would tell me stories of his youthful misbehavior when I was a kid. When I was my daughter’s age, I wasn’t so different from her: a wide-eyed quiet kid who appreciated the difference between positive and negative attention enough to share my cookie with my sister if my mom asked me to. If I had been near an abandoned house, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to go inside and start throwing everything around either. 

In a way, I’m telling the stories back to myself. And it proves a maxim I repeat in my classes to my students that audience perception does a lot for the purpose of your stories. With that little hand in mine, walking through a warm spring evening toward a fruiting fig tree, it is difficult to avoid this aspect of myself that somehow atrophied after adolescence, or—more likely— just manifested as a stubborn selfish streak, albeit less destructive. 

I don’t know what happened to the kid who trashed that house many years ago. We live so many lives and that one was so far back that I no longer have a frame of reference for and, perhaps consequently, I have run out of empathy for, and I earnestly hope I have converted enough of that kid into someone good to be worthy of raising these trusting, intelligent, and  compassionate children who, thank God, have no understanding for the kind of anger and belligerence that hangs on the edges of my resume which can only be somewhat obscured, never completely covered by present-day good works. 

We walked on, leaving the dim, empty house and my memories of being an inconsiderate, angry kid to the shades of evening coming on from the east and, by the time we reached the fig tree, my kids had forgotten all about the story, or at least their interest in it, as they reached out to pluck the strange green and unripe fruit from the spindly tree.

Unripe figs, like most unripe fruit, have no taste and no texture, just empty white pith, but as we each chewed it took us different intervals to realize this, spit out the pulp and run off through the still-blooming azaleas to whatever was next. 

Samsara

 I have had two coworkers in the department since I came over about three years ago. They are both older than me, so I consider them both almost equal in age, or I did. The other day it occurred to me that one must be in her sixties, while the other just turned 50. Now that I’m 42, I’m closer to her, than she is to our colleague in her sixties. I’m sure she thinks of it this way, and, yet, to me, they were both “older”: a category which we all define once we are out of our twenties as “the people who are a few years older than we are” all the way up to nonagenarians. As you age, this category ages with you. 

Of course, there are moments of clarity. I work with young people mostly one day a week, and the experience of being jarred out of my pretended youth is concentrated. Many of these young people betray no differences between us, but others insist on reminding me of our difference in age by reminding me that they were not born and therefore couldn’t have witnessed 9/11, or that when Covid really got bad were only 12 years old. 

Did that happen, like, last year?

Still, the world, or at least our society was made for the old. The culture the predominated when I was a kid is still a referent and our tendency to revere things we couldn’t have been around for have made me something of a cool museum piece. I’m always telling my kids things like “Ninja Turtles, ya’ know, I was around when it first came out.” I guess this would’ve been like my dad telling me the same thing about GI Joe. But, c’mon, GI Joe was never a ninja, nor a turtle. Also, the kids these days are obsessed with this grindy, DIY band that my friends and I were obsessed with back when the band was still around. The other day I was in the record store, flipping through the “Punk” section and wondering what 50% of what I was looking at was, when a kid came over with an employee.

“I know it’s been repressed a few times, but I don’t think we have one.”

“Yeah, it’s been on a few labels now, but it’s a classic.”

They came over and flipped through the “D” section. I looked out of the corner of my eye. The kid’s disappointment was almost tangible as the employee announced :”no, we don’t have it. Do want me to put your name down in case any Dystopia records come in?” In 1999 (or maybe 2000), when Dystopia was on tour for their second and last album “The Aftermath”, a carload of friends of mine headed up to Detroit to see them. I was still at the age when I was having trouble getting permission for this kind of thing, but as it turned out, shortly after that show, my mom got tired of arguing about it, and I went up to the Trumbullplex for many subsequent shows. In short, I very nearly saw Dystopia live. 

Thank god I didn’t though. Who knows how long I would subject this kid—and others like him—to my “yup, I saw them back in ‘99” stories?

I tend to keep my memories to myself around the youth. It’s taken me a few years to realize that I am from another time, and that my experiences, too, are of that impossible-to-fathom period and therefore something like fiction. But there is one thing that I, if I were able to condense into something intelligible, I would tell these youngsters. 

There’s a lot of talk now about letting yourself be bored. And occasionally, while going to the bathroom, or waiting for something to load on the computer at work, I have to assert myself over the desire to pick up my phone and see what’s going on in the world, or check my email. The news, local or national, is outrageous and depressing, it’s designed that way, and the emails usually make me feel like I need to be working faster, or remind me that I’ve forgotten something, or still have something else to squeeze into the day. No, it’s better if I just start at the wall a minute. When I leave work (or the bathroom) there are also my kids. 

It's incredible how many parents complain about their kids’ use of screens, but then constantly produce their phones for little tasks. Turns out phone use is something like aging: we always think it’s someone else’s issue, no matter how often we are checking email, or even just looking things up!

There’s more to this, too, advocates very rightly say that there’s a creative power in learning to deal with boredom. I did a lot of dumb things in my quest to alleviate my boredom. Once, I climbed up on the roof and thought “I could make a secret entrance here that no one would ever see” but after I’d broken through the outer covering, I realized the myriad flaws in my thinking. 

I think of things like this, shudder, and hope my wife’s common sense wins over in our kids. 

However, you know what I also did? I made things, and a lot of them were inspired by burgeoning feelings of love. And while these things weren’t impressive in their own right, making them cultivated an ability to focus that I, otherwise, would never have developed, which has been such an important factor in successfully navigating the adult world. 

I imagine the temptation is too great, when one develops one’s first crush, to not just hang out on the object of affection’s social media pages. When I was a kid, all I had was the one grainy, black and white photo in the year book (maybe a millimeter of a color collage, too if you were lucky), and I spent plenty of time mooning over that, imagining her voice, speaking gently to me, imaging the smile in the picture being the result of something clever I’d said.

But yearbook photos can only offer so much solace for love. I used them more as starting points to clarify the picture I had in my head, but from there, inspiration dictated that I create something. It wasn’t enough to feel something so beautiful and calming and just sit there with it, nor would it have been right to just walk around with it and go about my day. No, something had to be made!

It started innocently enough as daydreaming plans to impress. I would imagine things I could do or buy that would make me worthy of her attention. But I learned quickly that buying things for someone you like doesn’t go beyond the moment you hand the object to them. After that, you’re back to where you were a moment before. And the first girlfriend I ever had cited “you bought me too many things” as the reason, or one of the reasons, for our breakup. Of course, I was 11 or 12. 

My second girlfriend endured much longer, and while we spent a lot of time on the phone together, I found an easier confessional in letters. It was in letters that I first declared my love, in letters which I first confided in her my dreams for the future, a future I had hoped we’d share, and it was in letters where we built this future. 

We wrote that at night. She probably did them after her homework or something, I wrote them instead of doing my homework, probably because, as enamored as I was, I couldn’t focus on homework. I had to get the thoughts, the declarations, the intentions, the whole incredible-yearning-for-the-future out somehow!

We went out all through jr. high and I amassed a substantial collection of folded 8 ½ x 11 notebook pages, each one with my name simply on the top fold. Some of the better ones with a heart around the name. By the second year, they all ended with “I love you”. The letters paved the way for this salutation that we could never bring ourselves to say. 

In high school, punk rock diversified my interests, and, while I thought about girls, I sewed patches on my sweatshirts, pushed studs into my backpack, and eventually, started writing with no direct addressee. 

I sat for countless hours with these intense feelings of love and well-being and tried to work them into things: a poem, a drawing, or an outfit. I could just as easily have squandered these thoughts and feelings while mooning over countless photos and posts across several social media accounts, and, very likely, would have, had it been a possibility because, when you’re in love, what better than a facsimile of your beloved, a digital effigy, pieces of her frozen in an array of moods, attitudes and poses. Hell, probably better than the real thing in that you can stare and stare and stare and no one will think less of you for it—after all, that’s what it’s all there for, right? To be looked at?

I have, once or twice in the last few years, been tempted on to social media, saw what a distant friend was up to via their posts and closed my account pleased to have caught up with them, but, of course, I hadn’t caught up with them. They knew nothing of me. We hadn’t connected, I had merely peeked into their curated life and realizing this, I had to resist the temptation to call them or write to them and tell them I’d looked at their social media page. Number 1, kind of a weird way to reconnect with someone you haven’t spoken to in five or nine years. Number 2, it would take too much time. When so much time has gone by, one doesn’t simply say “hi” and then duck back out of an old friend’s life. 

The issue is that my glimpse into their life was undetected. Likewise, all the teenagers looking into each other’s social media posts, all the photos, opinions, documented real-life events, and there to be perused and with impunity. 

While I’d had very strong feelings in early adolescence, the first actually dizzying feeling I felt for someone wasn’t until my senior year of high school and with this, I remember staring out over my parents’ snowy backyard in the porchlight for hours just focusing on how I saw it, focusing on the details individually, or taken together. I remember watching TV and not watching TV, being so in my head that the music of VH1 made tears start from my eyes. I talked to her while I drove around, imaging what I would say, how I would say it. I took the feelings, the strongest feelings we will ever feel, those of young love, and upended them, explored them, let them shape my trajectory, as I believe we were meant to do. 

If I had had social media, I can’t help but think, knowing what I know of my tendencies with it now, and what I see of its use, that I wouldn’t have committed to this critical moment in the same way, or, that I would’ve entirely squandered it, by making an altar or her posts. What’s worse, who can say what the development of this empty habit would’ve led to? I would’ve begun scrolling pages of my crushes in jr. high, even elementary school, by late high school, such an action would be cultivated and natural. I might never even consider the possibility of creating something to channel those feelings, or even just watching the snow fall. 

Ever generation has the privilege of being that last to do something noble or beautiful that had carried through ages. Cars did away with the ubiquity of the horse. Mass production of food did away with our generational knowledge of planting cycles. Phones and televisions gave us entertainment away from our neighbors—our community— and made us less social. I have the distinct old person’s privilege of seeing something good and tangible pass away without notice of those who would’ve inherited it. I can see it so distinctly, a box filled with notebook pages, filled with words, drawings, directions, linear notes: all the things teenage love compelled us to make in our stoppered up desire to speak it. To have known it so well, and have found so much inspiration in it, it seems to me like the records of an entire civilization, but, who knows, maybe mooning over social media posts will eventually lead the kids to find some incredible way to express themselves. After all, they managed to find Dystopia.