When Did Gratitude Die? (Part 1)

When I was a kid, there was one boy in my neighborhood who the rest of us called “the rich kid.” He always got a pile of stuff for his birthday and Xmas. The rest of us tried to remember when his birthday was so that we’d be the first one to scavenge the trashcans in his parents’ backyard. One year, I rolled a go-card (with a dead motor) out of his alley and pushed it three blocks to our house. I was probably about 9, but I was sure I could bring that motor back to life. When my dad found the cart in the backyard, poorly hidden and partially disassembled, he made me take it back. That just meant some other kid in the neighborhood snagged it. It’s not that my father had a big objection to my dumpster-diving, but he did not want to get stuck helping me fix the motor.

In my family, and in most families where and when I grew up, Xmas was when kids got new socks, underwear, maybe a shirt or a pair of pants, and “one silly present.” The “silly present” was something we actually wanted like books, a small model train or some additional track or accessories for a previous year’s starter train set, or some other toy. No, we weren’t poor, deprived, or neglected. That’s just what most everyone I knew in the 50’s did for those “special events.” Otherwise, if a kid wanted something that kid (like me) got a job delivering newspapers, shoveled snow or mowed lawns, or spent a few weeks in the summer working on a farm. My wife, for example, picked apricots for a couple of summers for spending money. That had apricots in California and we had wheat and hay harvest in Kansas. You might say those aren’t jobs for kids, but tell that to most farm kids or some 50’s city kid who wanted to buy a guitar.

All gifts came with obligation, too. Anything from a modest present to a few dollars to a card deserved a “thank you card” or at least a hand-delivered note. Once we were old enough to be able to write our own cards, we were expected to do that. There was incentive, too. If you didn’t acknowledge the gift, odds were good that you’d be missing from that person’s gift list for your next birthday or Xmas. Once you fell off of a list, you almost always stayed off.

I was around 15 when gifts became one-way with my father; meaning I bought him something for Xmas or his birthday and he sent me a card for those events. Of course, I left home and moved out on my own about then, too, and there was a fairly long period where we didn’t communicate (or gift each other) at all. He wasn’t happy about my moving out, but I suppose he figured if I didn’t need his support I didn’t need gifts. That’s fair. He didn’t need anything from me, either.

My step-grandmother, Irene, was more “modern.” The kids in my family always thought she and my step-grandfather were “rich.” They owned their own business (which still stands today), lived in a very well-furnished but modest house they had designed and built in 1952, and drove modest one or two year-old cars. Until I was in my early 20s, my grandmother always sent a card and $5 for birthdays and Xmas. When I was 16, she and my grandfather drove me to Wichita and let me pick out my first set of nice clothes that weren’t intended to wear to church. I wore that long-sleeved, big-collar paisley shirt and the tan corduroy pants and sport jacket with elbow patches until they were only fit for garage rags. For 20 years, 50% of the reason I went back to Dodge for holidays was so my kids could get to know their extended family (as weird as it was) and 50% was for the part of a day or two when I could sneak away from the freakshow at my father’s house and hang out with Irene. When her husband died, she retired and soon afterwards she sent cards commemorating holidays and birthdays. We never imagined money could become tight for her, but it did. I have always thought the letter she sent each of her grandkids explaining that in retirement money was tight and she could no longer afford cash gifts was a special “adult moment” in my life.

For several years, my own family holidays were not much different than the ones I had experienced growing up. For the first 5-8 years, it would have been unusual for me not to have to work those days. So, whatever celebration my kids experienced for many birthdays and Xmas would have been almost solely up to my wife. Unlike my parents, we were actually “poor” for the first few years of our kids’ lives. I got my first engineering job in 1976, when our daughters were 3 and 5 and that was when we became lower-middle income and, for the most part, never looked back . . . much. Kids still got clothing for birthdays and holidays, but they always got more than “one fun present.” When we moved to California in 1983, everything about gift-giving was different for almost everyone we knew. Birthdays and Xmas were, apparently, a competition to see who could borrow and spend the most. Like today everywhere. One of my employees, who was his family’s sole income provider, made about half of my salary, and had two step-kids spent about $1,000/kid just for Xmas. My family upscaled, slowly and moderately, but I’ve never cared much about what the Jones’s were doing and I think one of our daughters really resented that lack of motivation and “competitive spirit.” Today, she and her husband appear to be fearless in the face of debt and spending while the rest of us watch in amazement.

To be fair and honest, I’ve also never cared all that much about what kids and especially teenagers think about anything; if “thinking” is what all of that self-centered, hormone-driven emoting is called. Even today, if my wife is watching a movie that includes one teenager as a major character, I’ll leave the room and find something else to do until the suffering is over. I might stay longer if there is a chance that the teenager will be eaten, drowned or burned at the stake, sold to a circus, or kidnapped by Gypsies. As long as that is the early end of the teenager’s appearance, there is a possibility the movie might be tolerable.

Since my kids became adults and had kids themselves and I have spent more time around other people’s kids as a teacher, I’ve noticed the expectations from children (apparently, anyone under 30?) has grown exponentially while the obligation those kids have to at least pretend to be grateful has vanished into ancient history. Young people used to assume they would be responsible for their “higher education” and support once they past age 18 (anyone remember summer jobs?). Today the expectation is that mom and dad will care for and feed their offspring well into . . . old age?

I think Boomers might actually have been the first generation to have that never-leaving-the-nest expectation, but many of us came to that conclusion late in life. The number of men and women who went out into the world in the 1960s, failed miserably at everything from supporting themselves to avoiding addiction and criminal prosecution, then moved “back home to take care of mom and/or dad” is almost sickening. Traveling around the country and, especially, living in Midwestern small towns, the number of old farts I have met who live with and leach off of an ancient parent and are proud of that failure-to-launch is a regular occurrence.

[To be continued]