Teach your children well, their father’s hell will slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams, the one they pick’s the one you’ll know by.
Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry
So just look at them and sigh, and know they love you.
Graham Nash
Last Tuesday, I took off work to visit the doctor. My twenty-something niece Felicia came with me for the exam, and afterwards we decided to take a drive into the city to kick up our heels.
Listening to the news while crossing the bridge, I turned to her and said, “I’m so sorry the way this world is turning out for you.”
She asked, “How so?”
“I mean, it’s lucky that your parents are pretty secure, but I know it’s so very hard for you and your brother to find your way in the world as it is right now. Everyone seems to be tearing everything in two. We can’t seem to talk to one another. We can’t seem to get things done. And we’re going to be leaving you with an awfully big mess to clean up.”
She said, “Don’t worry, Auntie Fe. We’ve grown up with a lot of kids who have been home-schooled. Some of them devout Christians and Republicans. Some of them even Tea Party kids. But we’ve learned we can talk to each other. That we can talk to each other.”
I took a breath. With those words between us going across the bridge from Berkeley to San Francisco, I realized my niece and I were also crossing a bridge to another distant shore: the generational divide.