False Gods

You hear a lot these days about our young people: How they don't know much. How they can't name the last three Presidents, say, never mind the first three. I read a survey of youth designed to reveal what they wanted in life - lots of money, they said, fast cars, fame - and It has me remembering the time a 13-year-old I’ll call Jenny came to my house and said it outright: “I don’t want to be known for any one thing,” she said cheerfully. “I just want to be famous.”“You know Jenny,” I  remember saying back.  “You could say that I'm so-called ‘famous’ in every town that runs a picture of me alongside my column in the paper but.. it’s nothing. I mean it doesn’t help. Mostly it just means strangers stare at you and think you don’t have feelings.”“Listen to this," I went on: 'One day an older woman beckoned to me from a group of women she was standing with. ’My friends wanted to know who Terry Marotta was,’ she said. They looked at me. Nobody spoke. ’That's all,' she finally added. 'They just wanted to see what you looked like.’ “So see what I mean? It’s not helpful. And sometimes, it hurts. And seeking it can be a kind of addiction.Years ago, I went to a wedding where the father of the bride was so famous he had to sit in a chair the whole night wearing an expression that said,  “Please. It’s my daughter’s day.” People respected that – until the second or third drink. Then they surrounded him, and his smiled was forced and tired.“No, don’t wish for fame, Jenny, I ended by saying. "The Queen of England has fame and who are her close friends do you think? The serving woman who helps dress her? The serving man who brings her her breakfast tray?”The survey also cited the famous people the kids said they wanted to be like: Entertainment figures and athletes to a one. There were no political or spiritual leaders on the list. No humanitarians. No inventors.But the kids aren’t to blame here. If they worship money it’s because we worship it. If they crave gadgets and fast cars it’s because we do too. If they covet fame and the big life is may be because they think it can protect them from a rising sense that the small life is not enough.One day, I was driving  with a 15-year-old I I’ll call James, who needed a ride to a place where he could take some standardized tests, because he wondered if he should go to a new school.He had had a bad year, and was at a loss. Three months before, a fire destroyed his home. His mother was severely burned. His little stepsister perished, as did the younger brother, who he had always said was his best friend in this world.But on this day we didn't speak of that. We spoke instead of the survey, for he had seen it too, and it bothered him.“Entertainers,” he said.“Fame,” I said.“Money,” he said. “Cars.”“Is that what we’re here for?" I asked rhetorically.He paused. He looked out the car window.“I always thought we were here to serve God.”No, fame and money don’t help – and they appear to have done very little to ease the troubled young heart of a Lindsay Lohan, say, or a Justin Bieber, who is  running widely afoul of the law right now.Let’s hope more of us can learn to be like James, who gave me permission to tell his story here; and who, in trying hard to do well and find his path is surely  serving God.

The Old Bait and Switch

I always got a great tan. Tanned legs like you wouldn’t believe. As a kid at summer camp I used to tell the new campers my father was black. They knew my mom was white because they saw her every day as the camp’s director, but I was safe with that fib about my dad. I knew they’d never meet him, anymore than I ever had, that guy with the map-of-Ireland-face and the blue blue eyes. Anyway it explained the tan, which I loved for how glamorous it made me feel.I guess that’s all light-skinned folks ever wanted from a tan: that “wow” moment when they entered a room.Tanned skin was once the sign of an outdoor laborer, but when most jobs moved indoors it came to signify leisure. Then they really came into fashion in the early 1920s, just after World War I and the great Spanish Influenza of 1918 -1919. Americans wanted a return to “normalcy,” as Presidential candidate Warren G. Harding called it, and so they elected him. Maybe they  just wanted to forget death and go out in the sun a while.Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, living in Paris in those years, journeyed to the South of France as often as they could for the purpose of “browning ourselves,” as Zelda wrote. Later, in the big love scene in her novel Save Me the Waltz, she describes the moon “cradling the tanned face” of her heroine. More glamour!Right on through the 60s and 70s the message remained clear: a healthy tan was a great thing. Certainly Coppertone made millions with that ad showing the waistband of a small child’s bathing-suit bottom being tugged down in back by a frisky pup, revealing how pale she was under her clothes; how burnished where the clothes didn’t cover.They called it a tanline; in Playboy centerfolds it was as erotic as anything else on the page.This is the world lots of us grew up in.The summer before college I lifeguarded at a city pool and patrolled all day under the sun. The soles of my bare feet grew as tough as horse’s hooves and my skin turned a dark mahogany brown.Then the next decade found me sunbathing on the hot tar roofs of various apartment buildings in quest of further bronzing. And of course like everyone else I wrapped tinfoil around an album cover and held it under my chin, the better to reflect the sun’s rays onto my face and chest.Eventually in the 80s, I began to hear more about sunscreen and I used it. I think. Sort of.Anyway I was using it last week when the call came from the dermatologist’s office to say “the biopsy we did on your leg? It came back positive. Basal cell carcinoma.” A surgeon will excise it next week.I asked this kind nurse practitioner if she had any advice for me as I await the scalpel.“Wear a hat. Wear sunglasses. Use sunscreens with an SPF factor of 40.” (She said an SPF any higher than that was fear-mongering.) “And for heaven's sake, steer clear of the ones with an SPF of 15. They don’t protect you at all!”“How about the Coppertone with an SPF of 4 that I’ve been using?” I asked, mostly to get the laugh.I got the laugh all right. She didn’t know I was speaking the truth.No one is laughing now, I can tell you, least of all me. Who said it first? We really are too soon old and too late smart.