Smells like teen angst: Day 4 toward 60

A JOURNEY TO AGE 60 THROUGH MEMORY AND SONG: DAY 4

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE RAIN
CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL
Someone told me long ago
There's a calm before the storm,
I know
It's been comin for some time.
When it's over, so they say,
It'll rain a sunny day,
I know
Shinin down like water.

            I find it instructive somehow that there are no tales in the scriptural canon about Jesus’ teen years.

            Those years are tough, no matter your circumstances. Even for the perfect one, I imagine, though he never fell to sin like I seemed daily to do.

            But I want to talk today about shyness, the kind of silent foe that fells many of us in the worst of times.

One report I read for this blog said, “The problems of impending adulthood can upset many teenagers. Weighing on their minds are such issues as changes in their bodies and how to respond to the opposite sex. They're worried about grades and fitting in. They may even be pondering the big "What am I going to do with my life?" question. Even if she was outgoing, her confidence may falter.“

            Check. Check, and check. I had the all at one time or another. I was a card-carrying member of the shy nation. President, in fact.

            Introverts, I've read, are persons who are energized by being alone and whose energy is drained by being around other people. Introverts are more concerned with the inner world of the mind. They enjoy thinking, exploring their thoughts and feelings. They often avoid social situations because being around people drains their energy. This is true even if they have good social skills. After being with people for any length of time, such as at a party, they need time alone to "recharge."

            When you look up introvert in the dictionary, you will find a picture of me. Some find this laughable, but the truth is I can speak to a crowd of 500, but struggle to do so to one of them.

            I tried to overcome a lot of my shyness and even melancholy by being the funniest person in every room I was in, usually by making fun of myself. I still do this.

            A study shows that that the funnier a kid was (assessed through peer nomination) tended to be more distanced from their families, reported less cohesion in their families than what was reported by their peers, and reported greater family conflict. The authors interpret these findings as suggesting that humor represents an attempt to relate from a distance. They also found that the majority of professional comedians in their sample had imagery of smallness. The comics tended to have lower self-esteems and to say bad things about themselves. They argue that the comedian's focus on his or her smallness may be a result of the reduced significance he or she felt as a child and that much comic behavior is aimed at reducing the discrepancy of smallness between themselves and others.

Oh. Uh, yeah.
Smokey summed all that up by singing about the tears of a clown all those years ago.
It’s come to my attention that as I journey these 10 days to my 60^th birthday by looking back on my life, this entire first week will only take me out of high school. In other words, 10 entries should cover about six years each by my math. Instead, the first five will cover 18 years or so.
            That’s because changes were coming at me more quickly than I ever imagined, and the most I ever changed was my teen years. I reckon that might be true for many if not most of us. And as near as I can tell, lots of permanence was attached to what I learned and what I did in my teen years. I froze there for decades.
            My imperfect, perfect life was coming to an end as high school beckoned. Events were gathering like storm clouds in the distance. As I grew older, my relationship with my father grew worst. As I grew older, and things other than sports and reading began to enter my life, I began to change, grow, even dare say it, mature.
            My father’s drinking grew worse all the time. At one point, a drunken spectacle was made when he walked into the wrong bathroom at a baseball field while we were playing. Another time, he sat behind the fence just behind home plate riding me on every pitch (I was the catcher) until I finally stood and asked him if he thought he could do better, then come take my mitt and try.
            Let’s take the memory out for a spin:
            First girlfriend: Can’t really remember.
            First A in a high school class: No idea. Never made an F. But any D coming down the pike was in some math class.
            First debate: Somewhere in Louisiana as part of the Key Club.
            Memories, like butterflies, have drifted away.

But I remember to this day I went 32-for-50 at the plate when I was 12. I remember batting .467 as a 15-year-old on an unbeaten team. I remember being continually disappointed off the fields, and continually at home on them.

            And all the while, Creedence sang words I couldn’t understand but couldn’t help but relate to. Lodi, one of the saddest songs I know, could have been this day’s song. Or the title of my first book, Looking out my backdoor, or Green River, or Down on the Corner, or any of another 10 or so CCR songs. John Fogerty wrote my teens.

            But as I headed for my senior year in high school, two things happened that would shape my life completely. As soon as I got my driver’s license, I left my mother’s church, Lockhart Church of God Holiness, for a church with my friends in it, Andrew Chapel Methodist Church. Though that seemed so inconsequential at the time, God had a way to make it meaningful much later.

           In my junior year of high school, at my house, with the parents gone somewhere, I drank my first beer. I had sipped whiskey when allowed earlier, but this was an official moment. Rickey and Stanley were there. No idea how we got the beer, but we did. And we laughed as if the night were our last. They say an alcoholic remembers his first drink. I can’t actually dispute that. I was 16, and time froze. They also say that from the time you begin to drink, you don’t age emotionally. Again, time froze. Emotions froze. What I discovered was that when I was drinking, I could be someone else, someone who was more funny, more open, able to fit into any situation more.
            Or so I thought.