Lately, regularly, I’ve
been confronting the concept of Second
Childhood.
How jarring, familiar,
unwelcome. How “all over the place.”
Childhood seemed hard enough, even though happiness
was the presupposed, presumed norm.
First Second Childhoods I witnessed were my two grandfathers’. They were very different “hard men.”
One became aggressively quieter
after a lifetime making aggressive, purposeful noise building prisons, hospitals and apartment houses that looked like prisons and hospitals. Retreating into early New York Mets rapture, he renounced all
other relations. Only my brother, who was
assigned to be near him in order to spell his second wife and occasionally
relieve her from the aggressive silence, could
reach him.
The other simply added to and built on his
native menacing homicidal
character. He took no prisoners. Describing
him, my father once told my mother
that she simply didn’t understand the Jewish criminal mind. I believe this was the closest my father
ever came to poetry.
Sadly, I think Second
Childhood can also be described as reversion
to type. The actor/victim elects no longer to act and move forward, but instead falls
back, redoubled in every salient
negative quality (twice as angry, twice as mean, twice as sad) relevant to the situation.
It is the opposite of bravery (link).
I have no idea where I am at
the moment (I cannot list physical or spiritual proprioception among my talents
and skills), except to note that I am traveling
on the 6:19 a.m. Keystone from Paoli to New
York. I just phoned my daughter. She is on the way to school with her
mother. Clearly she is uninterested in hearing from me, but that
didn’t affect the smile I felt forming on my face after saying goodbye and wishing her a good day.
Alvin Langdon Coburn, George Bernard Shaw
in the Pose of The Thinker, 1906, Carbon print on platinotype.
