Social Animals

We were all dressed in our finery. Usually it was white: white shirt, white shorts, white socks, white shoes. We were expected to stay immaculately white. Wrestling on grass could cause irremovable green stains. Worse, and more predictably, wetting our pants would spoil the fashion show. Everyone saw the stain but the wearer.

There's always an army of little guys running around in wet pants. They wet their beds, too. Their first social events are sure to be scheduled before a lot of them plug the leaks.

Birthday parties were a norm. Tom Thumb weddings and dancing classes were not. They were planned by the deranged. Smart kids came down with mumps or chicken-pox to avoid these sort of things when mothers succumbed to those ideas. I knew a guy who caught measles to avoid being shown-off at the Germantown Women's Club.

I played piano. That was the fashion. When my sister got enlisted into lessons I got conscripted as well. One of my contemporaries was Sergei Rachmaninoff. I never met him but he would put on a white tie and play to a crowd who knew their music. I wore white short-pants, I could barely reach the pedals, and I played crap like "Indian War Dance," a composition not much above "Chop-Sticks" to ladies in flowery dresses and floppy hats at the Women's Club. They also went to the Academy of Music to hear Rachmaninoff and overall they were great critics. They loved him for perfection and us because we were cute. Rachmaninoff accepted it because it was true. Most of us wished we could wet our pants. Unfortunately that's an involuntary movement.

There's a time after children's birthday parties go dull and we get too tall to be considered for roles in those insane Tom Thumb weddings and we become too embarrassing to perform for the ladies when we revert to being directionless boys.

Jean Shepherd referred to our condition as "kid-dom." It had three stages (or ages) and we evolved from the little kids of prehistoric dependency into middle age, from when we were ten to fourteen where we were left more to our own devices and formed up bonds that authors like Tarkington and Twain chronicled. They were Penrod and Sam and Sawyer and Finn, boys who were boys before smarter authors would write stuff like "The Tin Drum."

Before plastic surgery or rot, the most convulsive alteration in life is puberty. It has side effects that movie and TV directors aren't too graphic about. When they peep through key-holes they celebrate voyeurism rather than solitary dramas.

Our middle age was to us the Renaissance. To our elders it was more likely the Dark Ages, especially if they were protective and doting. Puberty was to us the Age of Enlightenment though not without apprehension. To our parents it might seem a further desent into the Dark Ages and their own participation in the Inquision — that's for sure.

When we got to the age of enlightenment we had new choices to make. The boyscout troop had peer competition from girls. If the troop met on Tuesdays or Wednesdays we would have extended our enlistments but Friday nights with Danny and Harry and Tommy were ridiculous if Nancy and Barbara and Madeleine were at the church dance. If we had preferred girls to boys when we were ten a red flag would have gone up. They played jacks and skipped rope and served tea and talked to dollies.

At fourteen or so and increasing in intensity to the end of kid-dom a chemical phenomenon afflicted us that was, to say witout hesitation, embarrassing. Pants wetting might have been void of trauma but this newer condition was one that might affect relations with peers: girl peers.

Dances are run by well meaning people some of the time, I suppose. They were big events in our calendar that demanded preparations hithertofore viewed as unnecessary if not repugnant. Soap and clothes and Sen-Sen took on a new use.

Boys get very critical once they see girls beyond being useless sissies. For a moment, we're not animals and we have taste. We compare notes, being careful not to make the objects of our attention too competitive with "friends" who might get ideas of stealing them away. We're civilized and avoid stealing girl-friends we really don't quite have.

The music blares from records. Boys don't look much like Fred Astaire or George Raft or Dick Powell wrapped around Arthur Murray's students. Dancing lessons? We didn't deal in futures. The boys are awkward. They step on the feet of their partners and bump against every other couple on the floor.

Excuse me, excuse me. Excuse me begins to sound like the only conversation in the room. Excuse me. The chemical affliction is responsible for all this awkwardness. Some one should interview the girls. Are they understanding? From our view it was awful.

We had damp palms.

Uhhgh!