The Credibility Gap

By TAD BARTIMUS

Each spring I migrate back to the stately University of Missouri campus where I went to college. In exchange for an airline ticket and too many slices of cold pizza, I am trotted around to classes by well-meaning contemporaries urging me to tell their students what it's like in "the real world."

Standing before 200 fresh-faced kids who'd much rather be out in the sunshine than sitting in a lecture hall makes me feel like a dinosaur briefly allowed out of Jurassic Park for good behavior.

I assure the students the workaday world is waiting to welcome them and I promise that no matter what curves they will be thrown, they'll improvise and cope, just as their great grandparents did when they survived the Great Depression, their grandparents did when they made it through World War II, and their parents did when they lived through Vietnam.

Then I send the undergraduates out into the sunshine, well aware that the old can't tell the young anything.

It is spring. Redbud trees drop delicate petals onto tender blades of young grass and lilac scents the soft air. I walk across the quad to a shallow creek, pause on its bridge and close my eyes. I recall an awkward young woman with unruly hair dressed in pedal pushers and white Keds with raveling laces. She is carrying too many books and is late for class.

Soon she'll be on her own, heading off on the first of what she's sure will be a lifetime of adventures, changing the world while seeing it at the same time. Her only possessions are a used 1966 Mustang with two years of $58 monthly payments still due, a Sears stereo, a stack of LPs (including The Beatles, Rod McKuen, Glen Yarborough and Jim Morrison), and an adopted stray cat named Pulitzer (Putz for short).

Her teachers and their friends (who are introduced to the students as "outside experts,") repeatedly come to her classes to warn that the job market is tough, that everyone has to pay their dues and be willing to go the extra mile to get ahead.

She promises herself -- for the thousandth time -- that she'll do everything better and faster than they did, and that, unlike them, all her dreams will come true.
She wants to move someplace warm, where she will get her first furniture from the Salvation Army thrift store, buy her clothes in consignment shops and live alone in her own apartment.

I open my eyes, cross the creek, and feel the redbud blossoms fall on my face. I'm glad I saw that young woman again. I haven't thought about her in a long time; I've missed her energy, her optimism, her certainty that by wishing for something hard enough she can make it so.

Despite her generation's wars and recessions, the cancer that took her parents, her downsized jobs and lost safety nets, almost everything that young woman dreamed for came true. She learned every generation has to fight against discrimination and for equality, that women must work harder to prove themselves worthy, that speaking out for justice and freedom always exacts a heavy price.

She also found true love, got to sing rock 'n' roll, is her own boss and owns Salvation Army furniture now considered antique. She saw much of the world and changed a little of it. She avoided cynicism; is always the last one to get the joke; and still can't see the end in sight.

I think, I should have told the students all of that. Then I remind myself that the young already know the important stuff. The trick of being old is to not forget it.

© 2003 The Women Syndicate

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