Free Blue Nights by Joan Didion
Authors: Joan Didion
success as the ability to encourage the child to grow into independent (which is to say into adult) life, to “raise” the child, to let the child go. If a child wanted to try out his or her new bicycle on the steepest hill in the neighborhood, there may have been a pro forma reminder that the steepest hill in the neighborhood descended into a four-way intersection, but such a reminder, because independence was still seen as the desired end of the day, stopped short of nagging. If a child elected to indulge in activity that could end badly, such negative possibilities may have gotten mentioned once, but not twice.
It so happened that I was a child during World War Two, which meant that I grew up in circumstances in which even more stress than usual was placed on independence. My father was a finance officer in the Army Air Corps, and during the early years of the war my mother and brother and I followed him from Fort Lewis in Tacoma to Duke University in Durham to Peterson Field in Colorado Springs. This was not hardship but neither was it, given the overcrowding and dislocation that characterized life near American military facilities in 1942 and 1943, a sheltered childhood. In Tacoma we were lucky enough to rent what was called a guest house but was actually one large room with its own entrance. In Durham we again lived in one room, this one not large and not with its own entrance, in a house that belonged to a Baptist preacher and his family. This room in Durham came with “kitchen privileges,” which amounted in practice to occasional use of the family’s apple butter. In Colorado Springs we lived, for the first time, in an actual house, a four-room bungalow near a psychiatric hospital, but did not unpack: there was no point in unpacking, my mother pointed out, since “orders”—a mysterious concept that I took on faith—could arrive any day.
My brother and I were expected in each of these venues to adapt, make do, both invent a life and simultaneously accept that any life we invented would be summarily upended by the arrival of “orders.” Who gave the orders was never clear to me. In Colorado Springs, where my father was stationed for longer than he had been in either Tacoma or Durham, my brother scouted the neighborhood, and made friends. I trolled the grounds of the psychiatric hospital, recorded the dialogue I overheard, and wrote “stories.” I did not at the time think this an unreasonable alternative to staying in Sacramento and going to school (later it occurred to me that if I had stayed in Sacramento and gone to school I might have learned to subtract, a skill that remains unmastered), but it would have made no difference if I had. There was a war in progress. That war did not revolve around or in any way hinge upon the wishes of children. In return for tolerating these home truths, children were allowed to invent their own lives. The notion that they could be left to their own devices—were in fact best left so—went unquestioned.
Once the war was over, and we were again home in Sacramento, this laissez-faire approach continued. I remember getting my learner’s driving permit at age fifteen-and-a-half and interpreting it as a logical mandate to drive from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe after dinner, two or three hours up one of the switchbacked highways into the mountains and, if you just turned around and kept driving, which was all we did, since we already had whatever we wanted to drink in the car with us, two or three hours back. This disappearance into the heart of the Sierra Nevada on what amounted to an overnight DUI went without comment from my mother and father. I remember, above Sacramento at about the same age, getting sluiced into a diversion dam while rafting on the American River, then dragging the raft upstream and doing it again. This too went without comment.
All gone.
Virtually unimaginable now.
No time left on the schedule of “parenting” for tolerating such doubtful
It so happened that I was a child during World War Two, which meant that I grew up in circumstances in which even more stress than usual was placed on independence. My father was a finance officer in the Army Air Corps, and during the early years of the war my mother and brother and I followed him from Fort Lewis in Tacoma to Duke University in Durham to Peterson Field in Colorado Springs. This was not hardship but neither was it, given the overcrowding and dislocation that characterized life near American military facilities in 1942 and 1943, a sheltered childhood. In Tacoma we were lucky enough to rent what was called a guest house but was actually one large room with its own entrance. In Durham we again lived in one room, this one not large and not with its own entrance, in a house that belonged to a Baptist preacher and his family. This room in Durham came with “kitchen privileges,” which amounted in practice to occasional use of the family’s apple butter. In Colorado Springs we lived, for the first time, in an actual house, a four-room bungalow near a psychiatric hospital, but did not unpack: there was no point in unpacking, my mother pointed out, since “orders”—a mysterious concept that I took on faith—could arrive any day.
My brother and I were expected in each of these venues to adapt, make do, both invent a life and simultaneously accept that any life we invented would be summarily upended by the arrival of “orders.” Who gave the orders was never clear to me. In Colorado Springs, where my father was stationed for longer than he had been in either Tacoma or Durham, my brother scouted the neighborhood, and made friends. I trolled the grounds of the psychiatric hospital, recorded the dialogue I overheard, and wrote “stories.” I did not at the time think this an unreasonable alternative to staying in Sacramento and going to school (later it occurred to me that if I had stayed in Sacramento and gone to school I might have learned to subtract, a skill that remains unmastered), but it would have made no difference if I had. There was a war in progress. That war did not revolve around or in any way hinge upon the wishes of children. In return for tolerating these home truths, children were allowed to invent their own lives. The notion that they could be left to their own devices—were in fact best left so—went unquestioned.
Once the war was over, and we were again home in Sacramento, this laissez-faire approach continued. I remember getting my learner’s driving permit at age fifteen-and-a-half and interpreting it as a logical mandate to drive from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe after dinner, two or three hours up one of the switchbacked highways into the mountains and, if you just turned around and kept driving, which was all we did, since we already had whatever we wanted to drink in the car with us, two or three hours back. This disappearance into the heart of the Sierra Nevada on what amounted to an overnight DUI went without comment from my mother and father. I remember, above Sacramento at about the same age, getting sluiced into a diversion dam while rafting on the American River, then dragging the raft upstream and doing it again. This too went without comment.
All gone.
Virtually unimaginable now.
No time left on the schedule of “parenting” for tolerating such doubtful