WAITING FOR THE LIGHT

On a drive down to the lakeside road early Saturday morning, I was waiting for the village traffic light to change when I saw a boy on his way from the train station to the junior high school, also waiting for the light to change.

He was standing there alone in his world, as we all do at such times. Wearing his sports uniform, apparently on his way to practice, he began to do incipient teenagey things: wriggle one shoulder, then the other, making his uniform fit his new body more perfectly, then flicking his head this way and that to fling his hair into the just-right random position, then fingering his forelock to casual perfection, tweaking his posture, fiddling with all those things I remember fiddling with back at that age, not possibly decades ago.

Leaving the uneasy edge of certain childhood and entering the bewildering dawn of the outer self-- what a journey that was: standing this tall for hours in front of mirrors, pursuing the unattainable form in the ideal shirt, perfect pants of precise fit, these shoes and no others, all of a style that would last forever, every waking moment the focus of a new-life look at this historic and invaluable instant: gleaming shoes, hair combed per minute, rat-tail comb in pegged pants back pocket, as I recall in flashes...

Then three junior high girls from the train came up quietly behind the boy and stood there at a discreet distance, remaining silent lest he turn and behold them and then what, and began doing the female version of the same choreography of hair care and mini-twerks, not one of the four wondering, any more than anyone does at that age (and beyond), "What is causing this odd behavior? Why am I doing these things?" These are not questions we get to ask, or even conceive of-- until perhaps decades later, while maybe waiting for the light...

Cultures are formed around these cosmos-driven, reflexy things. If we were placed in full charge of them we would never have evolved this far, let alone have developed the simple, cogitative, aggregative sapience that evolution has permitted us, assuaging some living need in us to deal - if only in a limited way - with such fundamental concepts as sex, subsistence and society, all of which we're still having global problems with. We are new to this, after all; as a species, we're not even out of beta yet, really...

Those tweaking, flicking, twerking kids are doing big work.