Mike Tharp: Looking back on 'Teen Years'

Grow old along with me

The best is yet to be

The last of life

Mike Tharp

For which the first was made.

English poet Robert Browning could've written those words after spending a Wednesday morning in our Senior Center.

That is, if he'd sat in on Ron Loewe's writing class called "Creative Expressions: Life Stories." (Ron picked that name because he didn't want anybody wandering in, thinking "it might be a quilting class.")

It's a noncredit course offered through Merced College. And Ben Duran, president of the college, can take pride in knowing that the 20 to 24 students who show up once a week are sure getting their money's worth -- and then some.

Ron invited an editor to talk to the class this week. Luckily, the editor had enough sense to talk less and listen more.

Aside from one younger lady who mentioned skateboarding and boogie-boarding in her essay, all the writers are in their 70s and 80s.

This week's subject was "The Teen Years." Listening to their essays, a visitor time-traveled back to a simpler, kinder, gentler, neighborly era. Even though a recurring recollection involved World War II and the Great Depression, the virtues and values and ways to have fun in those years rang loud and clear during the readings.

Ron picked a letter of the alphabet. The person assigned to that letter walked up to the wooden lectern and began to read. And although the visitor had warned against using too many adjectives and adverbs -- nouns and verbs power prose -- three adjectives describe the atmosphere:

Enchanting. Elegiac. Inspirational.

Here's what they wrote about their teen years.

A: "Rainbow-dyed...clandestine conversations." Wartime rationing meant 12 pounds of butter a year for a family, sugar sold on the black market, war bond drives, Bobbie socks, re-soled shoes, Victory Gardens, Abbott and Costello, Hope and Crosby "On the Road," Glenn Miller, Louie Armstrong, Benny Goodman. Aug. 14, 1945 -- "the war had ended."

R: Getting off the bus the first day of high school in Oakdale, "stone-faced, scared, wondering what was ahead of us." Walking two miles to and from school to save bus fare so she could buy $2 new reeds for her bassoon. A rape attempt on her at 13 -- "God help her husband," her grandmother warned. "Raging hormones and fluttering feelings" from a romance with a serviceman. He was killed in Korea in 1952, and she gave her son, from a different father, the soldier's name as a middle name.

U: Born and raised in the Philippines, "never a chance of one-on-one with boys, no touching, not even holding hands. A boy had to join the family first before actually courting the girl." No idea about "the birds and the bees" until she married at 27.

J: (One man held her manuscript as she walked to the lectern with a four-pronged cane.) Brought up on the South Side of Chicago, "I gave nicknames to all my friends," including Andrew, her boyfriend, who became her husband.

V: Hearkened back to the days when she enjoyed "hot dates, not hot flashes" and "a stiff drink, not a stiff back."

Y: During her teen years, she barely noticed "the gradual withdrawal from family into the total immersion of friends." Mentioning the monosyllabic answers her granddaughter gives her on Facebook compared to the ornate responses to her friends. "It's different now -- or maybe it isn't."

B: Quoted Will Rogers: "When you are dissatisfied and would like to go back to youth, think of algebra." Now a mom, grandmother and great-grandmother, she recalled that when she was young "parenting was tighter, there were fewer temptations, they set limits, neighbors helped -- life in the slow lane. To put shame on my parents was the last thing on my 'to-do' list."