Dylan got it wrong: The times have already changed.


Who remembers being twenty? If I rack my brain, I can vaguely recall being in a state of complete confusion. I had taken secretarial courses and was working at a law firm for a bully of a senior partner who kept me at my desk until late at night as he dictated corporate documents. I hated every minute of it, which is why I decided I had put off college long enough.
              Estlin—who is twenty—and Billy—barely twenty-one—are a different sort of young adult than I was. They may be the youngest couple to stay at Fern Forest Treehouse, and they may also hold the record for booking the coldest weekend ever. They had skied on Friday and settled into the treehouse as the temperature dipped to minus ten.
In the morning when they came in for breakfast, I asked, “Did you get cold?”
“No,” Estlin said. “It was toasty.”
They gobbled everything H and I put in front of them, fueling their furnaces for a cold and snowy Saturday. I wish I could remember when I was able to eat like that and stay as slender as Estlin. Never, I’d guess.
            They hung out in the treehouse after breakfast and then went to nearby Bristol to shop and walk around. That evening they accepted our invitation to come into the house and chat. I was a little nervous about what to talk to college juniors about. Nervous, too about offering them a glass of wine. But I offered anyway. Billy had a beer and Estlin took a little red wine. After five minutes, the generation gap vanished and conversation came easily.
            They’re both studying business at Plymouth State College, and Billy is thinking about law school after graduation. He’d like to do something in international law so he can travel. On the other hand, he likes medicine. While he was a full time student, he took evening classes to get his emergency medical tech certification for his ski patrol work. From six to ten p.m. one night a week, he sat in class with older guys—mostly firemen.
“They were loud, telling jokes and cutting up,” he said. He put the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and took notes.
The class interested him enough to think about medical school.
“I’d like to work in an emergency room,” he said.
We know an ER doc. The work isn’t easy. Drunk and drugged students in the middle of the night, car accidents, shootings, beatings. And weird stuff, too.
“I know all about that,” he said. “I’m in college.”
Oh, yes. I do remember those days.
Estlin is president of her sorority. We didn’t have sororities when I was at George Washington University. It was during the Vietnam protest era and student activists decided Greeks were counterrevolutionary. So sororities and fraternities were shut down on campuses across the country. But they’ve been back for a while. I believe Estlin takes her office seriously. She wants to go into marketing, especially helping to get the word out about environmental products and alternative energy.
“We’re called the entitlement generation,” Billy said. “People say we think we’re entitled to the good life instead of working for it.”
“I think you’re the responsible generation,” I said. “You’re responsible for fixing the mess we’re responsible for making.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “We’ve got a lot of responsibility on our shoulders.”
Before they left on Sunday, they took a dip in the hot tub. H told them to use the thick robes we provide, but Estlin dashed out in her bathing suit, barefoot. By that time the thermometer read two degrees above zero.
After a while, she came in rosy cheeked and smiling.
“Didn’t you get cold?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “It was great.”
Great, yes. If you’re twenty.
When H was their age, he was playing college hockey and thinking about the next game. When our son, who is 35, was their age, he should have been thinking about his chemistry class but was more interested in the next party. When I was Estlin’s age, I just wanted to write poetry and maybe become a movie actress.
Times change. And judging from the aspirations of this bright and ardent couple, I’m certainly glad they do.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sex and the Treehouse

Image
When Hana asked to book Fern Forest Treehouse for herself and three friends, H said there wasn’t room, the treehouse is only ninety square feet, he didn’t know how they’d sleep. “Oh, we’ll bring sleeping bags,” she wrote. “Don’t worry—we’ll fit in.” H is a pushover, especially for such youthful enthusiasm. And he thought it sounded like a good time. When the four gals pulled in from Boston around eleven Friday night, H was waiting up for them, the path to the treehouse lit by solar lamps, the treehouse itself all aglitter with colored lights. From upstairs, I heard excited giggles as he showed them around, more giggles as they climbed into the spa under a sky studded with a million stars. As happens in water at 102 degrees, the giggles calmed to whispers, and eventually all was quiet. The sun rose clear Saturday morning, warming the treehouse so that the girls were up a little after 7:00 a.m. We were still in bed when I heard water running in the downstairs bathroom, and H and ...
Read more

Octopus Fishing in Portugal

Image
Ann was studying in Spain for a semester, living with a Spanish family. When the university had a break, Portugal called. It’s an old country, remains of the first settlements dating back to the Neolithic period, five thousand years before Christ. The Visigoths invaded in the sixth century. In 1986, the hills were covered in wildflowers, and horses grazed in fields crimsoned with red geraniums. On the southern coast of Portugal, the area of Algarve is dotted with small fishing villages. Santa Luzia, Tavira, Lisboa, Faro, Cape Sagres, Salema. From the gold dust beaches, one can look across the sea to the shores of Morocco. Bathers swim topless—young women, old women, bathing tops cast aside, breasts bared to the sun. Ann felt strange covering herself. She was just nineteen and modest, but she wanted to fit in, to be accepted, even among these strangers on the beach. She’d worn a one-piece tank suit but slipped the straps off her shoulders, rolled down the suit’s upper half, lay...
Read more

A Treehouse guest discovers his roots in an old millstone

Image
In spring 1794, a group of men set their shoulders to clearing land in what is now Lincoln, Vermont. The footpath they blazed into the forest eventually became a road named for the Quakers who came to settle with ox carts holding all their belongings. They were young, strong, and healthy. Once they pried rocks from the fields, they found the soil rich enough to support their crops. A year later, nearly one hundred residents, mostly from New York and Connecticut, scattered over 24,000 acres of wilderness, most living in tiny one-room cabins made from logs they hewed by hand from trees they had cut on their property. They cooked meals in stick-and-mud fireplaces, spun wool from their sheep, wove fabrics to make their own clothing, and cobbled shoes for their families. They hunted game in the forests and guarded their livestock from wolves that prowled the land. When the crops failed and game was sparse, they went hungry. Quaker services were held in homes until they built a m...
Read more