I woke up this morning and thought, “In seventy-two years, I’ve never hired a moving van.”* I am not sure where this thought came from, but if I had to guess, I would say that it was the result of the trip I made to Madison last week. There I spent time in the homes of two twenty-something couples. One home was the apartment of my daughter Clare and her boyfriend Chase. The other was the new home of Xiao Wu, a former international student who I helped when he first moved to the United States ten years ago. He now lives with his wife Coral in a quiet subdivision just outside of Madison. Both households have, in only a few years, acquired as many quality possessions as Manyu and I have after having lived in the same house for over thirty years. When I was Clare and Xiao Wu’s age, I had a decent stereo and nothing else of value.
The reason for this difference is, in my opinion, interesting and somewhat complicated. It is not materialism. Both Clare and Xiao Wu have things, but neither are materialistic. It also is not that either has settled down any sooner than I did when I was their age. Both are in transition and will be living in a city other than Madison five years from now. They will, however, need to hire a moving van or at least a large U-Haul truck to make the move. When I was in my twenties, anything that did not fit in my car was either donated to the Salvation Army or left on the curb. Clare and Xiao Wu actually have stuff worth keeping.
The difference between them and me may be post-college expectations. When I was in my late twenties, I accepted that I would live in a studio apartment for several more years. I liked that my bookshelves were made of cinder blocks and 2 x 8’s, and I never assumed that the engine of my car (if I even had a car) would turn over in the wintertime. I was confident that this situation would eventually change, but I also knew that living like a college student was going to continue well beyond college. My daughter and my friend largely skipped this phase. Clare lived in a dumpy apartment with roommates for one only year after college, and I don’t think that Xiao Wu did even that. Both pretty much went directly from college student to yuppie, even though I doubt either one even knows what a yuppie is. I, on the other hand, stretched my student years well into my thirties and never was a young urban professional. I went, at age thirty-nine, straight from student ghetto to picket fences in the backyard.
I have no idea whether the difference between me and my friend or daughter is a widespread generational change, a matter of having been raised differently, or simply personal quirks in the lives of a few people I know. What I do know is that, as a parent, I do not worry about Clare at all. She already is living on solid ground. Unless the country or the entire planet goes to hell in a hand basket (a real possibility), she has slipped comfortably into middle class and has adulthood figured out.
When I think back, I suspect that my parents worried much more about me than I worry about Clare. My mom never commented on my situation, and I remember only one thing my dad ever said to me about the way I lived my life in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He openly expressed his displeasure when I started a Ph.D. program, saying that I was educating myself right out of employability. He did soften temporarily when he and my mom visited me when I was living in the California redwoods doing environmental education for $100/month plus room and board. As I took my parents for a walk through camp and the surrounding forest, he said, “I still don’t know what the hell it is that you are doing, but this is cool.”
- I owned almost nothing until Manyu and I moved into the house where we now live, so I’ve never needed a van.
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