"Brittany"

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My son bounced cheerily up the front stoop last night as I sat on the porch having a smoke. I asked him where he had been. He started by telling me he had been to see a longtime female friend at a nearby college where she had just checked in as a freshman ... then he paused and reversed course and told the truth because it was pulsing in his veins and said, "Now don't tell mom, OK?" ... and he waited for my assent. I gave it much as I imagine his mother had given similar assent in the past: "Now don't tell pop, OK?"

Actually, he said, he had been to visit another girl at another college ... someone he had been texting with for a week or so and had been dying to meet ... and the meeting had been every bit as delicious as he imagined it might be. His voice and presentation and posture told me he was ass-over-appetite in ... infatuation... which he readily admitted ... but don't tell mom ... you know how mom's are when their male offspring hook up with another female ... and he wanted to enjoy his joy without interruption or contradiction or caveat.

Well, amen to that!

Who hasn't felt the same? The deliciousness may be a bubble, but I'm not in the mood to have it popped at the moment: It's too damned delicious. As far as I was concerned, as long as my son hadn't stuck up a convenience store or gone into debt with a loan shark or run over a Volkswagen, his secret was safe with me.

And what name did this beautiful bit of deliciousness go by, I asked? My son paused a moment before uttering the name as if he were a swooning postulant speaking the name of the savior:

"Brittany."

Brittany, Ashley, Courtney -- popular names in this day and age and yet in my mind's spectrum as I felt my son's adoration, a somehow tinny punchline on a tale of soaring savor. It felt a bit as I had felt once when I sent away for a BB gun advertised on the back of a comic book and then, because I had been stupid enough to give my true age (eight or nine) on the application, received a popgun and a space pistol. What a letdown.

The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once noted tartly that "youth is wasted on the young." It's one of those apt yet sniveling observations that leaves out the delight that older people can take in dissecting and complaining about the young. If youth is wasted on the young, how much the more so is age wasted on the elderly?

And still my mind wasted its time ... "Brittany?!" what kind of a flat-tire name is that?!

On the phone yesterday, a friend whose age was somewhat behind but still close enough to my own and I took a trip down memory lane and recalled the education we had received -- an education largely cast aside by our offspring. We had learned a bit of Latin and perhaps Greek, choked down the works of the Founding Fathers, slogged through Alexis de Tocqueville, did science and math, Aristotle and Plato, Dewey and Nietzsche, Shakespeare ... memorized poetry, fattened up on history, studied the Bible, wrote papers on wars with purpose and some without ... the list went on and on and, even if we had forgotten the better part of it all, still, it was meat on our bones. Perhaps most important, we flunked: Academic mediocrity was not greeted on every hand with the invariable, pseudo-supportive "Good jooooob!!!"

And what did the kids have today? As often as not, the answer seemed to come back, what the younger generation seemed to have was texting and tits... and the same assured certainties that we had expressed at a similar age. The culture and community we had grown up with was gone and what remained was ...  "Brittany." Of course the well-to-do were still privy today to good education and more 'substantive' names, but in our day, everyone seemed to be welcome and the names sounded less like some advertisement for "lustrous hair."

Basically, my phone friend and I were wishing things might be as we looked back on them through our rose-colored glasses. It wasn't ever going to be that way, but that didn't diminish our between-the-lines whining.

Funny how no matter what the framework and no matter what the names and no matter what the age, still things remain ... changed but unchanged: Deliciousness remains delicious; secrets remain secrets; bubbles of delight remain bubbles of delight ("don't tell mom"); sorrow is always like swallowing barbed wire; certainty jostles with uncertainty as sure as the sun rises in the East; and it all, as ever in the past, comes down to...

Brittany.

PS. And in some kind of serendipitous melding, the Associated Press ran a story this morning about the mindset of incoming college freshmen -- a reminder to teachers in one sense; a reminder to the rest of us in another.
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