Joni Mitchell, as I recall, stopped discussing those Seasons after 20 years of age ... so much, indeed, does occur in those 20 or so years during which time we're learning that we can pretty-well figure out what we need to figure out. At the close of High School (I'm so glad I never graduated), lots of kids take on the patina of those dances we observed in Mom and Dad. Some kids go to actual dances, to Proms ... Gowns and Tuxes, Corsages and Boutonnières, drunk and out till dawn ... just like Mom and Dad, or, at least, as their Mom and Dad may have dressed up in their costumes.
I suppose the next Quarter of Life's Circle Game, as she called this progression of stages, is spent in actualizing those things that we figured out or thought we had in the earlier one. We build our little fortresses and some of us have babies. Oftentimes, things go pretty smoothly. Kids until the age of 5 or 6 can be picked up by their pants-belt and carried off from protestations about not wanting to leave Grandma's house or not ready to leave their play ... outside ... in inside play-areas ... or on the beach. M and my first two kids were less than a year and a half apart and I must've felt pretty darn cool to be able to carry them off the beach, together.
Sometime during our Third Quarters they begin leaving and proceeding in their own Circle Games. Nasties trick of Creation? They do that just as we're losing our parents ... we begin to or actually say good-bye on both ends ... to the totable kids and to the parents we carry in their repose. Indeed Khalil Gibran was on the cusp of the Second Quarter yielding to the Third when he wrote his piece on ... or made peace with ... the Children he apparently never had.
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
I woke up, as I have so many times in the past 30 or so years, thinking of my role as a Father. How many songs have been written since Malachi suggested that the Messianic Days for which he longed were dominated by his God's ability "to return the hearts of the parents onto their children and the hearts of those children onto their parents." I think it was the mystics of Bobov who put Malachi's closing words to an intoxicating song. Indeed, I recall being intoxicated on more than one occasion as a young man singing and dancing to those lyrics. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young asked that we Teach Our Children Well and Tim Hardin -- the guy who Bob Dylan called the best of the songwriters of that era bemoaned the fact in a song whose title has been lost to the Fog of Middle Age that what the Father feared most was that he would repeat precisely what he, himself, had done as a youth.
Song after song confirms that belief that we cannot know or appreciate our children's lives. I was reminding one of my middle-aged kids of a conversation we had had 33 years ago. He walked in the front door ... I was sitting and reading in the next room during an afternoon break in my work. I offered up:
"Hey, how was school."
His response was pithy and to the point:
"Don't gimme any of that psychoanalytic bullshit."
There is, I suppose, in each generation a certain sense that we took ethics and values, wit and wisdom, decency and tolerance ... to their final and finished form. Dammit ... We got it figured out. We were strong, like T-Rex. We knew just about all there was to know like my friend T-Ruth. And we were about as vile as T-Rump. And we had it all figured out, solved, and tied in a bow and then our kids hit puberty ... puberty hits back ... and we get force-fed a dose of our own limitations and a spoonful of humility.
Two brothers I knew and admired ... two psychoanalysts ... both dead, now ... Harold and Abe Feldman each told me (they didn't talk much to each other when I knew them) that one of their Dad's favorite expressions was:
"In this World, y'gotta take your medicine
but y'don't gotta lick the spoon."
Joni Mitchell, again ... ".... and the Seasons, they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down ... we're captured on a carousel of time!" I wish my kids an easy trek through the late adolescences of their kids ... through the years of Pubic Shock and Awe!
With love ...
