Sweet summer stirs up generational contrasts

Over this last, past sultry Fourth of July weekend I had the opportunity to speak to a number of "Millennials" - visiting friends of my college-aged sons.

On the whole they seemed to be as hard-working a group of earnest, capable young adults as I can recall meeting. But they did not strike me as particularly thoughtful people.

They didn't seem to burn with the youthful passion for challenging established ways of thinking. Maybe they were only being polite when I tried to draw them out, but unless I see something else from this newest generation, and soon, I will be tempted to join the growing chorus of Baby Boomers and Gen-X'ers decrying the lack of critical-thinking skills in "kids today."

If I do, I have my suspicions as to why.

What follows is a description of a stereotypical first day of summer vacation for children of my generation. It is a bit of a composite, but true enough to the facts.

I would get up at dawn to "help" my bigger (cleverer) brother, Jim, with his paper route by delivering all his papers for him while he slept. I received 15 cents for my assistance - just enough for two hot, fresh yeast doughnuts at the bakery down the street.

My brother pocketed 82 percent of "our" take by acting as a labor broker. I could not legally deliver any newspapers until I was 12, so I needed him. In return, he gave me a valuable lesson in capitalism, in addition to my 15 cents hard-cash, spending money.

I said hello to the policemen behind the counter at the bakery helping themselves to unlimited free coffee and doughnuts. The local baker must have benefitted from some early lessons in capitalism himself, because those doughnuts cost him almost nothing and for "almost nothing" he got the most secure bakery in town.

The policemen could see that I was not, not nearly, 12 years old. They didn't care because their job was to catch actual bad guys, not hassle little paperboys, and they never seemed confused about that.

I read the paper while I ate my doughnuts, which the cops seemed to think was quite funny. They asked me what was in the news.

In those days, mostly, the Yankees were winning, the Cubs were losing, and people were dying in Vietnam. It never seemed to change, not at all like today.

By 6:30 I was at my best friend's house to play with his yappy dog and wait on his family to wake up. I ate a second breakfast with Paul and his brothers because their mother let them eat Frosted Flakes, while my mother only gave us a choice of between oatmeal and bran flakes, or dry toast - if we "didn't like our choices."

Paul's mother told me I was an "earlybird." She was not smiling when she said it. She usually smiled at me. I might have figured out what it meant - if between the doughnuts and the Frosted Flakes I had been capable of concentrating on anything more than keeping my heart from exploding.

After breakfast, we went to the drainage ditch behind Paul's house to catch crawdads by washing them out of their holes in the banks. We staged gladiator combat between the mudbugs.

That is where I learned, sadly, that no matter how hard you cheer, the biggest crawdad always wins.

After enough kids had gathered, Greg, the oldest kid in the "little kid" sub-group (he was 10) led us to a vacant lot to play baseball. After about an hour different cops from the ones in the bakery showed up to tell us, yet again, that we were trespassing on "private property" - and still not hitting the cut-off man.

We hid out until the dust settled in the oak tree that was hit by lightning. Greg told a pretty convincing story about a cousin of his who met a ghost. She (the ghost) served his cousin ice cream, he said, Neapolitan.

Court, the richest kid in the neighborhood, made an appearance, so it was time to go to the store. It took some doing to talk him into buying the Spider Man comic over the lame Iron Man issue he was leaning toward. I pointed out that you never knew what Spider Man would do, while Iron Man was boringly predictable.

We headed back to Court's house because he had a basketball hoop where we could play. Teenagers controlled the schoolyard. At best you could shoot around a little bit between their games. We could play all day long at Court's.

While waiting my turn to play, I read the comic book. The pavement was hot, so I was starting to drift off and almost missed the Angelus ringing at the Catholic church at the top of the hill. The bell meant it was noon. I was supposed to go home, check in with my mother, and eat lunch.

Erik, the poorest kid on the block, tagged along for no spoken reason, but I knew it was because his mom was hung-over. She yelled a lot and threw things around when she was hung-over. She was Hungarian. Hungarian cursing sounded like a cat trapped in a dryer with a bad bearing. I didn't blame him for following me home.

My mom fixed us both baloney sandwiches. My sandwich was sliced in half, while Erik's was cut into festive little party-wedges and the crust was trimmed off. This was not explained because it neither needed to be, nor could be. It was (and still is) called "kindness." Boys who do not witness it in their mothers and fathers, especially their fathers, turn into men who can never convincingly counterfeit it.

My mother threw a reminder at us to wash our hands and bless our food because, as she put it, she "did not want to be responsible for anybody getting sick."

After lunch, we headed back into the bright summer sun, with a mere one-half of one day of summer vacation expended. We possessed a quantity of unscheduled time numerically equivalent to the combined wealth in the treasuries of the 16 richest Egyptian Pharoahs.

We had not attended any programs at the local college, or a minute of "quarterbacks" camp, or any of the French language, full-immersion courses at the community center. We had not completed a carefully constructed, interactive module of a STEM enrichment application, or scratched out a highly supervised line of "journaling."

Yet we still had had lessons in economics, reading, good government, natural science, physical education, literature, psychology, civics, hygiene, and our most precious Christian faith.

Take a breath, young parents of today.

Love your Generation Z children enough to "do" a little less with them in the summertime. Let them "be" instead. Give them the gift of slack time. Let them discover on their own that Spider Man is superior to Iron Man, and why. A summer day is a wildly romantic proposition, not another box to be checked off.

One of the saddest and scariest questions that can pass the lips of a young adult child is, "What do I do next?" You don't want to hear it from them at the very moment they should be launching themselves into that bright summer sun.

Paul Matthews is an architect who lives in Rathdrum.