Fourteen

This post is going to be a little different than in the past. My oldest granddaughter turned 17 last weekend. When she turned fourteen I wrote a short narrative about some of the differences in our lives. In celebration of her birthday, I am sharing it here.

After she blew the fourteen candles out on the cake decorated with her favorite blue-haired anime character, I gave her a hug. Last November, our family gathered at my daughter’s house to celebrate the birthday of my oldest granddaughter Esme.

“I met the love of my life when I was your age,” I told her.

My daughter, Joy, scowled at me and hissed, “Don’t tell her things like that!”

She didn’t want Esme to follow in my footsteps of falling in love at fourteen. Joy has been feeling the stress of being the mother of three girls on the edge of teendom. Irritability and insolence reign in her family. So, because everyone in my family knows that a frustrated Joy is not nearly as pleasant as her name would imply, I let it go. Later though, I thought about how different life was for me at fourteen than it is for Esme. Not only in the context of different times but different cultures as well. I was a military brat in the 70s and Esme is a home-schooled kid in midwest America.

Iwakuni MCAS

Sitting outside of the guidance counselor’s office the day before Valentine’s Day of 1978, I was approached by three girls. The blonde in the middle stuck her hand out towards me,

“Laura,” she said. I stared blankly at her before realizing she meant her name was Laura. I took her hand in mine and gave a brief shake.

“What grade are you in?” one of the other girls asked.

“Eighth,” I said. They released a sound that was like a squeal mixed with a cheer.

“Us too,” Laura told me as Mr. Drake called me into his office.

I had only been fourteen for two weeks when I started attending Matthew Perry Junior-Senior High School on a Marine Corps Air Station in Iwakuni, Japan. Little did I know what an impact the place and people would have on my life. There were about 60 students in total, grades 7 to 12. We were a very tight-knit group, although most of us were only there for two years before our parent, usually dad, was transferred to a new duty station. I had started Kindergarten in Tachikawa, Japan. M. C. Perry in Iwakuni was my 7th new school since then.

Our school building was made from two Quonset huts adjoined by a hallway. If you are not familiar with a Quonset hut, imagine a steel-grey semicircular corrugated metal building. It was kind of like a big shed. Our lockers were outside in what was called the student shelter. It was basically a covered pavilion similar to what you would see in a local park. It was also the smoking area. All students were allowed to smoke if they had a note on file in the office from the parents telling them it would be ok. Surprisingly, a lot of kids had those notes, some of them were probably forged.

Each morning I would arrive at school on my bike and see Laura, who had become my best friend, sucking on a Marlboro out in front of our locker. She was usually talking to boys who were trying to bum cigarettes off her. Not a smoker myself, I walked through the cloud of smoke and took her homemade lunch out of the locker, and ate her bologna sandwich and cookies for my breakfast. My stepmom was very strict about our family nutrition and I craved cookies and candy constantly. Later, I would buy our lunch from the soba truck. It would drive around the base like an ice cream truck and it passed by the school during our lunch hour. Playing a distinctive song to announce its approach, sort of a trumpet sound played with an oriental flair, it could make our mouths water like Pavlov’s dog. The noodles were thicker and more wheaty than spaghetti with a magical brown soup that was slightly soy tasting but something more.

Cigarettes and Beer

Just describing this small part of my day as a fourteen-year-old shows a difference from the life of my granddaughter Esme. She is homeschooled and only goes to an actual classroom two days a week. Her meals and snacks are usually healthy options that have been delivered directly to her house from the grocery store. She has been raised in an environment of non-smokers in which smoking is considered evil with severe health consequences. Her generation has been bombarded with commercials about the dangers of smoking that have them convinced cigarette smoking will lead to certain death or severe disability. Even if she wanted to try it out, it would not be so easy. When I was her age, non-smokers seemed to be the minority. There was no minimum age for buying cigarettes; kids in elementary school could go to the store and tell the clerk one of their parents sent them to buy some. Most of my friends purchased them out of the cigarette vending machine.

Not unlike a snack vending machine, put the money in, pull the knob out (this was before button-pushing machines) to choose the preferred brand, and, kerplunk, it dropped out. These machines were plentiful, they could be found in most eating establishments on base as well as the bowling alley. They were also out in town but American cigarettes were not available off base. Cigarettes were not the only questionable item to be vended from a machine. In the barracks, there were beer machines. This was a little more of a risk because the legal age for drinking was 18. This did not deter my Iwakuni friends. To start off a good Friday night the guys would go to the vending machine for beer. The beer was a quarter, one guy would pump the money into the machine while another guy would hold out a bag and one more would fill it when the beer dropped out. Usually, they were able to get quite a few before a GI would wonder why someone was buying so many beers in a row and come out to investigate. Taking the bag, they’d go out by the golf course in the summer or to a heated utility shack in the winter. It put a crimp in their process when the price went up and they had to put a quarter and a dime in the machine. As for myself, I would spend Friday in my room, often standing on my balcony looking out to sea and wishing my Romeo would come and rescue me. I wasn’t permitted to run loose like the majority of my friends. (This sort of backfired later but that’s another story)

Music and Friends

In 1978, we were totally disconnected from our family and friends, and culture in the United States. There was no internet with e-mail or social media. Long-distance phone calls were so expensive they were implemented only for family emergencies. No cable, satellite TV, or YouTube; we did have American television shows but they were sent on tape by mail to the TV station and arrived months after they had played stateside. American Top Forty with Casey Kasem would come on Armed Forces Radio every weekend. It was our connection to the States. If I listened every week I could gauge when my favorite song would be coming on and get my cassette set up in my tape player to push the record button at just the right time. Esme and others of her generation do not have to even think about this. Any song they want to listen to is available on demand. I couldn’t have imagined that. Song lyrics are also readily available. If an artist did not include lyrics in the album, which sometimes was the case, we had to wait until the 7-Day store on base got the latest copy of Song Hits magazine. It would have the lyrics of the most popular hits as well as pictures of the artists. Because, unlike Esme, I did not have a video to see if my favorite artist was really as cute as he sounded.

These days, almost everyone over twelve has a cell phone. Esme got one when she was ten. When I was fourteen, if we wanted to “text” a friend, we would write it on a piece of paper, fold it up and pass it to them in class. We had cute little folding styles; some girls folded theirs into triangle-shape. I preferred a rectangle with a triangle flap folded in so the note looked like a small envelope. Boys usually just folded the paper in half two or three times. If we wanted to track down a friend, we would first call their house, “I’m sorry, Franky has gone over to Shawn’s house.” Calling Shawn’s house we would often be told he and Franky had gone somewhere else. Then it would be a chase, on bikes, all over the base and throughout the housing areas. Everyone at our school rode a ten-speed. There were small buses that some of the elementary kids rode, but I don’t recall any of us older kids taking them. Generally, each family only had one car so Moms could not chauffeur us around. Dependents, which were what we were called, were not able to get a driver's license until they turned eighteen.

First Job

My daughter spends so much time driving Esme and her sisters to class and different activities that I don’t think she has a life of her own. Now that Esme is coming up on the age of employment I just wonder what is going to happen. Esme and her sisters are growing up in a much more restricted manner than we did. These days we would be called free-range kids. We were just normal kids. In Iwakuni, there was a summer work program for kids 14 and older. In a big room at the beginning of the summer, we were all sworn in as department of defense employees. There were various jobs throughout the base. Some kids worked at the commissary or library; still, others worked at the radio station or for public works. My job was as a day camp counselor. Our program was completely run by ten to twelve of us students ranging in age from 14 to 18. Each of us was responsible for a group of about five kids from ages 6 to 13. We had a supervisor, Major Day, but outside of hiring day, we rarely saw him. He never stepped foot in our clubhouse. Every week we would supervise the kids on off-base excursions. We took them to the zoo, movies, and the Peace Park in Hiroshima. We had the use of a small bus and a GI driver. I cannot imagine Esme babysitting, let alone being a camp counselor. We learned a lot of life skills that summer. As I told Esme, It was also the summer I fell in love.

True Love

J.R. was a young black man with a wannabe afro and a hint of a mustache. At barely sixteen, he was devoid of any real muscle, but he had a good form to build some. That summer he worked for the public works department and by the end of the summer, he was built. He had chocolate brown eyes that always seemed to be sparkling. We became inseparable when we weren’t working. The hot summer romance we shared was the reason Joy insisted I was not to divulge this information to Esme. He broke my heart into pieces when he broke it off in September, only for a minute though, because, after all, I was only fourteen. He made up for it when we got together 20 years later and he immediately proposed. So, I can understand Joy’s anxiety with Esme knowing about my romantic interactions at that age. Her fourteen seems so much younger than mine did. In fact, a study by psychologist Jean Twenge derived from 40 years of research has shown that teens in this decade "are less likely to work for pay, drive, date, drink alcohol, go out without their parents, and have sex than adolescents in previous decades.”

Cool Like That

I worry that kids these days are hindered by helicopter parents and the technology-driven socialization of iGen life; so-called because of their extensive attachment to iPhones and iPads. Esme told me that her wish for fourteen was to be cooler. At my fourteen being cool was to smoke, drink, and make out. I’m not sure what being cool means these days but last spring she played bass in a band at the Girls Rock festival. That seems really cool to me. I wish she could have had the cultural experiences I had, but there are similar aspects of the age. With only two months until fifteen, I asked her how fourteen has been.

“Full of adventures and discoveries.”

“Exactly,” I said.