Adults in Adolescence

Statistics class. 90 minutes of semi-consciousness, calculators clicking, and sarcastic remarks from hormonal honors kids raging against the machine; that is, my 40-something teacher, who had trouble connecting with students even when he was one.

In this class, students and teacher make bad jokes, go off on anecdotes unrelated to statistics, and I pull out a novel. But occasionally, someone says something worth hearing. This happened last week, between discussing stratified samples and tables of random digits, when my teacher said something about how he was "born old."

I guess it's slightly cliché. Still, something about the circumstances made me put down the book I'd been reading and listen as my teacher described his high school job at McDonald's, at which, among other things, he would listen to Vivaldi's Four Seasons while sweeping the floor.

To use the words of overzealous guidance counselors: I related. I remembered hours of folding, tearing, and refolding paper booklets for my mother, when I drowned complaints in 80s indie bands named after common nouns. I thought of nights spent cooking for my baby sisters because my parents had a fallout or too much beer and dammit won't someone make dinner.

I won't say that adulthood was thrust upon me, because that's unfair to my parents and also not true. I'm not an adult, not nearly; who is? We all spend days as a rebellious teen, notching up the volume on our music to block out the world and ferment our own misery. But we've all been in the kitchen, stirring cheese powder into macaroni because someone had to be responsible.

I'm sure someone else could dream up a philosophical insight to share about this, but I've nothing like that. My point is this: When circumstance necessitates adulthood, we dwarf ourselves in order to help others. How often this happens depends solely on when one feels it is necessary. Besides that, it's formulaic.

Because it's not about Vivaldi or the responsibility with which you handle your summer job; it's about the sameness of all of us. How thirty years and a gender doesn't change the fact that we are all a mix of child and adult - tips of the balance, some measure in rectitude.