Generations

So yesterday my mother called herself giving me cooking lessons. I had a taste for spaghetti so I made sure we had everything, so that under the guise of me cooking, my mother would make some spaghetti. Can we just know that I ended up eating spaghetti?

Whenever we're in the kitchen we have discussions about everything from our LoCo family to current affairs. Somehow we ended up talking about the generations in our family. My oldest cousin and my youngest cousin are separated by something like 25 + years. In my mind I realized that a generation separates them. Sometimes I feel like a generation separates my little cousin and I, though in our case its only 8 years. It struck me though that time changes quickly. My little cousin's in the eighth grade, and after I maligned her about being parked in front of the television, she told me she didn't get homework three out of four days. In my day, ha, we got homework on the regular. Now it wasn't always hard, didn't always take long, but we were assigned homework. I can remember elementary school days coming home changing clothes, eating a snack, exercising (because my nutritionist said I had bad eating habits and I still wanted to eat what I wanted while losing weight), and doing homework. The kids of today it doesn't seem make life as easy. I constantly remind my 2nd cousins that they should read as many books, as they have favorite television shows, they are 7 and 5 and aren't trying to hear that, at all.

Today I visited an alternative high school here in Baltimore. I went along with members of the board of a non-profit, on whose board I used to serve. A few times a month they go out to schools and community centers to conduct workshops about leadership and community improvement. It was unbelieveable what I saw. These kids were unique to say the least. While the charge of the day was to explore community problems, community resources, and community based solutions, it was hard to get this across. The young people who ranged in age from 16-21, were faced with realities, I don't even encounter as somewhere whose nearly 21. A few of them were parents, and I couldn't imagine being a parent at less than 20. When a fellow facilitator tried to make the point that as parents, they are leaders of households, or at the very least role models, people disagreed with her assessments. They had parented children but didn't see themselves as role models.

This took me back to a bus ride earlier in the day. There was this older gentleman who took it upon himself to "school" those of us who were in hearing range. He talked about having worked 40 years having retired and now enjoying his retirement. "I live at home, it's just me and my wife no kids. All our kids are grown and gone." He went on to say that he "trained his daughters well." Since he did they have to be socially responsible, and accountable for their actions. "I don't do no babysitting. My weekends I watch my sports. I don't want to hear no screaming or crying kids. I don't want to be making nobody milk, nobody egg sandwiches. You say you're going to babysit they drop the kids off on Saturday, and you won't see them til Tuesday." What he said that really struck me was that the prison system was now glamorized. "They get 15 minute phone calls more than once a week, they get hour and twenty minute visits from people 4 and 5 times a month. They got T.V.'s in their jail cells, no wonder they don't want to come home. Or they come home and go right back to jail. Their momma's bring them clothes like they going downtown. Prison wasn't like that 50 years ago. I worked a chain gang where you broke up big rocks big as this bus for 20 cents a day."

It just struck me how generations change, priorities change, and people's lives are oh so different.