A few days ago I read something curious on my Facebook page. It was an entry by a young lady barely into her teen years, and it consisted of just one word: “Stressed”. A couple of her FB friends quickly made comment entries such as, “What’s wrong”?, ” Why”?, and “Text me.” No answer back, nor any further information as to the cause of the stress. It just ended there.
But…my curiosity had been stoked, and I wondered what in her life had caused her to feel that she had to reach out to her social contacts to tell them she was stressed. She was young, in middle school, and from what I knew had a pretty decent life. Since she hadn’t appealed directly to me, or anyone else for that matter–and she hadn’t responded to the immediate queries–I was just left to wonder.
After thinking for a while I began to wonder about my life back when I was a young teen, and even younger, and tried to recall when I may have first felt what we would now define as “stress”.
For those of you who know me well and are familiar with my early years already know that at about age fourteen I began to have some pretty interesting experiences when my parents decided to return to that Pentecostal religion that they had unceremoniously left long before I was born.
Up until that fateful day my life had consisted mostly of going to school, coming home to do my homework, slipping out to the back yard to shoot hoops on a raggedy-ass backboard and rim, and waiting for my mother to yell me back into the house for a lean dinner. Then it was off to my corner of the house (I never had a bedroom–hell, I never had a space to call my own in any of our many rented houses) finish off any homework I had left to do, and finally go off to listen to my parent’s only real earthly possession, the 1940’s vintage Philco console radio. There, with the lights off and while sitting on the floor with my back resting against the wooden front of the large console radio, I would close my eyes and float off into the wonderful world of my imagination. Thirty minute programs with names such as, “The Shadow”, “Gang Busters”, “The Inner Sanctum”, and “The Lone Ranger” (Hiyooo Silver, away…..), would take me to places I’d never seen, have me riding horses in dusty western towns, and soak me in mysterious intrigue and delicious mysteries. All these imaginary voyages were taken as I sat quietly on the cold linoleum floor, and seen through my mind’s eye as clearly and vividly as if I had installed a seventy inch HD Smart Plasma 600 mHz TV into my brain.
Before my parents started dragging me to the Pentecostal church just about every day of the week my only recreation had been that old radio and my back yard hoops. Because my father had been drinking away almost every dollar that he earned as a painter/diesel mechanic, my mother and I weren’t left with any”disposable income”. What money we did have came was as a result of her surreptitious rifling through my passed out dad’s pockets after he had returned in the early hours of the morning after his all night binges. The nickels, pennies, dimes, and the occasional crumpled dollar bill my mother found went for food mostly, then if able, a few clothes. Bottom line, that pretty much made any outside teenage social recreation virtually non existent; and that included activities such as movies, dances, or even dropping by the local drugstore for a malt. (Uh, we didn’t have a local drugstore in the barrio).
Oddly, I can truthfully say that I really didn’t know what I was missing. It is often said that the poor usually don’t feel poor, and that’s the way it was for me. It was what it was, and that was that! No stress.
So, admittedly, the late 1940’s, all of the 1950’s and the early 1960’s were a completely different era in most areas of life. The kids we now call “millennials” don’t have a clue, nor do I believe they are experiencing life in rich juicy technicolor as we did. As I begin to bring the memories of those times back into focus it’s clear that we were actually a pretty hip generation. For music and general media-type entertainment most of us had radios (mono), a privileged few had TVs (most with a tiny black and white screen), and most of us had telephones (black, large, and rotary dial). Much like today my generation’s taste in clothing, speech and general swagger was highly influenced by pop singers, TV and movie stars, and to some degree made up on the spot by those more creative “cats” in their own little individual clan-like groups. Hand-me-down words and phrases like “cool”, “groovy” and “you guys”, were imported from the previous generation and pushed on to the next; and overused phrases like “neato”, “hep cat”, “swell” and “rat fink” were driven straight into hip-talk extinction (thank God).
Of course I vividly remember having some mildly harsh feelings towards those kids whom I considered the “privileged” (hep cats driving raked 1950 Fords and Chevys), because I always had to ride the bus. And bullying? Yup, plenty of that for sure, and dealt with in one of several ways: be a patsy and get pummeled on a regular basis, or suck it up and attack the bully when he/she wasn’t looking then run like hell. The second option usually worked pretty good as it sent the bullies the message that the skinny little freak could and would hit back. But then there was a third option that a few of us lucky ones had access to: Personal Bullies. Robert was mine.
He was nine months older, way bigger, and knew to how to fight dirty (first you kick them in the balls then the rest is easy). But more importantly he was insanely loyal to me for a couple of reasons. First, we pretty much grew up in the same neighborhood, (thereby sharing a commonality), he’d never known his parents (lived with a grandmother), and was crazy envious that I had a real mom and dad, and oh, I also did most of his homework. No big deal for me as he was taking extremely easy classes, but the stuff I did for him pretty much kept him at my beck and call. Whenever I was threatened by some neanderthal I would sulk away quietly, then find and tell Robert. Then, much like today’s Energizer Bunny, off he’d go–pointy shoes looking for nut sacks. Most of the northside neighborhood we lived in, and that included an elementary school, a junior high and a high school, knew about Robert and his flying kicks and flailing fists. He was feared mightily and by proxy, so was I. Nope, no stress there.
Alright, so I would guess my first few experiences with stress occurred when report cards were issued. I usually started worrying about the state of my grades around final exam time, but mostly I worried about the state that parts of my body would be in if I brought home a report card with anything lower than an “A” or a “B”. You see,my mother only went as far as the 3rd grade and one of the things she retained in those three years was that “A’s” and “B’s” were good, and “C,D, and F’s” were bad. I lived and died by that simple equation, and so by default that made me a pretty good student. As someone very close to me once said, “Fear is a great motivator.”
The first time I had a mark lower than an “B” on my report card happened in the 6th grade. It was a “C” in Science that had been reduced from an “A” due to the teacher thinking that I had cheated on a quiz. I hadn’t cheated, and in fact had been telling the dweeb behind me that I was not going to give him the answer to number 3 during the quiz. The teacher rushed over, took both our papers and smeared a big red “F” across the front. That was enough to drag my final grade down. Stress building.
So now here I was, getting off the bus with my report card in my coat pocket. That semi-circle of a letter was oozing pure red fear; and as I walked the three blocks to my house my knees began to turn to jelly. Regaining my balance after coming close to toppling over I heard one of the neighbor ladies call my name. As I looked up I saw her coming down the steps from her porch asking if I was OK. I stopped. Then without even thinking about what I was going to say I screamed out: “My mom’s going to SPANK ME BECAUSE I GOT A “C” IN SCIENCE!” The last word trailed off into a wretched phlegmy whine, and big watery tears came flooding out of my eyes.
“Why is your mommy going to spank you?”
“Be..be..because I got a “C”…” (Yowl).
“Oh, that’s no reason for a spanking. No, no, no she won’t.”
“Yes, yes she will”.
“Well, don’t worry. I’ll walk home with you and make sure she doesn’t spank you”.
And so she did. And my mom didn’t spank me….well, not until the lady left. Then I got it really good. So, maybe that was my very first really stressful experience.
Home life after my full immersion into extreme Pentecostalism was, well, interesting. Not having much to eat on a regular basis before we got religion came as a direct result of my dad’s heavy drinking problem. He’d get paid on Friday and we wouldn’t see him until Sunday morning. Usually he could be found passed out on the porch if he wasn’t too drunk, or hanging out of the driver’s side of his car if he had tied on a real bender.
After he found Jesus (really, I think it should be the other way around) he developed a new obsession. Instead of throwing money away in bars he now tried to impress the brothers and sisters in the church with his extremely charitable nature by throwing what little money he earned on trivial bullshit like contributing excessively and extravagantly to the church fund to buy the pastor a new Buick every year. My mother’s developing health problems, agonizingly painful kidney stones, and the resulting crazy expensive medical bills resulting from her hospital stays, brought on rip roaring high decibel arguments and really did the hokey pokey on my developing teenage angst. OK, maybe a little stress there.
Because we pretty much lived in the poverty rut I never attended any football, basketball, or baseball games. I never went to one high school dance or after school party. Save for the symbolic membership in my school’s French Club (required if you wanted to take French), I belonged to nothing and pretty much didn’t socialize with anyone except maybe Robert. Besides my thug friend I had no close or really even distant friends. Lunch time in high school was spent on the front lawn of Jeff Davis High School usually with a small group of lonely girls who had also been outcast from school society for various reasons. We didn’t talk very much. Most of the time we just munched our bologna or pressed ham sandwiches in silence, buried in our common dejection. I’m thinking a more low self esteem thing than stress there.
Health wise, I was a real mess. Throughout my teen years I suffered from asthma, pus filled pimples and whiteheads, constant earaches, and a raging case of athletes foot. For a couple of years in high school I contracted chronic jock itch which would, at the most inopportune time, flare up and demand to be scratched mightily and repeatedly. When that urge subsided the athletes foot would start up. Neither of these conditions would demand scratching unless I was delivering a book report in front of the English 101 class, or reciting a Bible verse to Sunday School class at church. Itchy stress.
Then of course there was the dating scene. Actually for me, the non-dating scene. As a teen I never had any kind of serious boy/girl relationship because (1) it was prohibited by our church, (2) I didn’t have any money anyway, (3) I wasn’t popular or particularly attractive, physically or otherwise, (4) our one phone was on a 4 party line, so any date making conversations that I may have wanted to have with anyone would’ve been discussed, dissected and distributed to my entire neighborhood in 1.2 nanoseconds; and (5) any dates would’ve had to have taken place at our Pentecostal church–so that the unfortunate girl could be completely exposed to the “love Jesus or die in eternal flames you sinning scum” sermon. My constant thought: “I’ll never meet any girls and I will die an old maid”…stress.
But even with all that pressure I still don’t recall ever having to reach out to my social group (Robert) and scream, “STRESSED”! If I had, he would’ve probably whipped out his switch blade, assumed his pointy shoe balls kicking stance, and screamed, “WHERE?”
So, having recalled all these experiences– I guess in a way–my way– I may have been, OK, maybe a little stressed, but I was just just too dumb to know it. Also, and more to the point, my generation, and particularly the kids in my neighborhood, just didn’t use that word as part of our daily dialogue. The same for phrases such as ADHD, emotionally challenged, PC, culturally disadvantaged, and many many other current catch phrases and words.
Looking back at those colorful years I think we just tried to live the best we could and complain as little as possible. We lived day by day without understanding that all those feelings of inadequacy, guilt, sorrow, fear, angst, pity, melancholy, sadness, anguish and dejection could’ve just been lumped into that one word: Stress. But hey, who knew?
To be continued…….
