Younger than That Now: A Shared Passage from the Sixties - Jeff Durstewitz - Hardcover

1. Jeff Idle Hands As you get older, you look back on how much you didn't know when you were a kid, and it makes you laugh. In some cases it makes you laugh till you cry. In early 1969 Ruth Tuttle and I were seventeen-year-olds in far-flung corners of America -- different countries, really -- who thought we knew how things happen and why. There was at least some basis for these thoughts. We were reasonably intelligent, imaginative kids, comparatively well read and well schooled. But your body, maturing so much faster than your mind and your emotions, deceives you as you begin to exit childhood. And one day the mirror shows your wondering eyes someone all too easily mistaken for an adult. What it doesn't tell you -- not that you'd listen anyway -- is that the act of growing up will take more time and inflict more pain than you can imagine, and that by the time it's done, you will be a patchwork of hidden scars and fractures. Part of our flagrant hubris came of youth, the universal intoxicant. But it also came of membership in the nation's largest crop of children: the Baby Boomers. We were accustomed to society stretching and bending for us as we moved from coonskin caps and Ginny dolls to college, and we expected more of the same as our birthright. We were quite certain that this accommodation would be all for the better, and that we, the anointed ones, would bring about the flowering of all of humanity's fondest hopes. Like most people, and certainly like millions of our postpubescent peers, Ruth and I were looking for love. And we found it with each other, except that it wasn't the kind we expected. But our mind-love, in many ways greater and better than the sweaty and transitory variety, helped sustain us through any number of dizzying amours, bitter disappointments, personal and generational delusions, divorce and death. All through this hard passage from youth to middle age, we wrote to each other and saved the letters, hundreds of them. We clung to them because we knew they contained something priceless -- the keys to our souls, the record of who we were and who we were becoming. It has been said that the gods first make people crazy before they bring them low. But in the case of Ruth and me, it may be more true that they made us bored before they enlightened us. It all began with a silly prank. It was a Friday afternoon in February of 1969, eighth period, and my usual crew -- Vinny Vito, Dave "Feldo" Feldman, Jerry Greenfield, Ben Cohen, Judy Vecchione, Sue Ball, Ronnie Bauch and a few others -- had assembled in the office ofHoofbeats,the student newspaper of Calhoun High School in Merrick, Long Island. We'd reached the winter doldrums of our senior year, and we were seriously bored. Into this hotbed of ennui dropped a seed: the latest newspaper from a high school in Yazoo City, Mississippi. It was one of several exchange papers we received, and as each school sent us its latest issue, I'd scan it with gimlet eyes.The Yazooanwas something of a joke around the office, not for its poor quality -- it was quite well written and edited -- but because it was from a place that had the nerve to call itself Yazoo City. The name in itself was enough for a laugh from us worldly "Noo Yawkas," and the fact that this jerkwater burg was located in Mississippi, the most backward state of the whole impossibly retro South, was also comical. But Ben pointed out two additional provocations in the latest issue. As editor ofHoofbeats,I was most affronted by the first: The student featured as the "Senior Pic" onThe Yazooan's front page was none other than its editor, Ruth Tuttle. But my outrage was tempered a bit by the fact that this miscreant Miss Tuttle seemed quite smashing, judging from her photo. The second crime occurred in an ad for the Toggery, a clothing store. TheDurstewitz, Jeff is the author of 'Younger than That Now: A Shared Passage from the Sixties - Jeff Durstewitz - Hardcover' with ISBN 9780553106497 and ISBN 055310649X.