No Rules

I once heard someone say Gen X kids were feral. It's pretty accurate. I remember sitting on the roof of our green house, staring up at the night sky. No one even knew I was up there. I was a kid. Having fun. I also remember climbing into the attic of our garage. Playing up there. I remember lighting candles in a closet, hiding behind the clothes in a little hideaway. When I think of my childhood, I don't remember being supervised. Both of my parents worked, and though I had family around, they were not concerned about my activities.

Mostly, it was great being unsupervised. We went to the parks, the playgrounds, the schools, on our bikes. We rode to each other's houses, to the store, to the library. I don't remember feeling bored very often. But sometimes, it was lonely. Gen X parents were always busy. Reading became my pass time in the lonely times.

I was lucky to live close to a library. My favorite books were Ripley's Believe it or Not. I would flip through the paper backs with the strange illustrations, wondering if it they were true stories. I discovered my first ghost story, Natalie Babbitt's "The eyes of the Amaryllis." I made a nook in my bedroom, and read for hours. I fell in love with words. I wrote my first fiction story when I was ten.

Sometimes, being unsupervised was scary. I remember having a gas stove and deciding to see if a plastic banana would cook. It did not. But it let out an awful smell, and I figured out that putting it under water in the sink would be a good solution.

I don't say all this to indicate my parents didn't care about me. This was just the way things were in the 70's and 80's. And our parents didn't know a lot of the stuff we did.

Like smoking. I remember hiding under an awning at the church behind my house, smoking stranger's cigarette butts. Yuk! I thought I was cool at the time. Thankfully, I never became a smoker.

Alcohol was easy to attain back then too. Why was I drinking Mickey's Big Mouth beer in fifth grade? God only knows. I was lucky I never liked the taste of alcohol. I never got hooked on beer, although Bartles and James Wine Coolers tasted pretty good to me as a Junior in high school.

High School was very much like the John Hughes movies portrayed in the 80's. Alcohol, hormones, loud music.

The music of our generation was amazing. I remember walking through my neighborhood on a hot, summer night, hearing Led Zeppelin's "Heart Breaker," blasting from someone's back porch. I remember also, the day John Bonham died. My sixth grade class was devastated. Led Zeppelin and Michael Jackson were the sound track of our lives back then.

In high school I gravitated to punk, and new wave music. "I'll Stop the World and Melt With You," by Modern English was my romantic ballad. The Cure's "Just Like Heaven," is still one of my favorite love songs.

Despite all of the crazy stuff we got into, there is an innocence to my generation that is hard to explain. We really didn't know how wild we were back then. It was just how we grew up. And when I really screwed up, my parents were quick to ground me.

I have heard some from my generation complain of not being able to cry, or be emotional with their parents. I feel lucky that my parents were never that way with me.

I feel like I had a magical childhood, even without rules.