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 own after having lived in the same house for over thirty years.
The reasons for this difference are, 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 expectations. When I was in my late twenties, I assumed that I would live in a studio apartment for several years. I expected my bookshelves would be cinder blocks and 2 x 8’s, and I expected my car (when I even owned one) might crap out at any time. I was confident that this situation would eventually change, but also knew that it was it was something that I would go through after college. My daughter and my friend largely skipped this phase. Clare lived in dumpy apartment with roommates for one only year, and I don’t think that Xiao Wu even did that. Both pretty much went directly from college student to yuppie, even though neither may even know what a yuppie is.
I have no idea if this difference is a widespread generational change, a matter of different upbringings, or simply personal quirks in the lives of a few people I know personally. What I do know is that, as a parent, I do not worry about Clare. 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 will be more than fine in life.
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. Actually, now that I think about it, I remember a second thing that my dad said. When he and my mom visited me when I was living in the California redwoods and, at the age of twenty-eight, doing environmental education for $100/month plus room and board, he said, “I still don’t understand what the hell it is that you are doing with your life, 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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