My first memory is standing at the top of the stairway in diapers, wondering if I could make it all the way down without falling. I had only an older brother at that time, and, although he is a hero of mine today, he was my monster back then. The best thing about my monster was that he was hilarious. The worst thing was that, as my toddles yielded to strides, his raids into my personal space morphed into interpretations of the books he read. And boy, did he read. He had distinct phases in his pursuit of literature, but back then his interests skewed heavily toward the macabre.
He taught me how to color inside the lines of my coloring book, and I learned how to make a flawless Jiminy Cricket with a knife-edge of crayon precision. You probably know where I’m going with this, that is if you remember who Jiminy Cricket was and what he meant to Pinocchio. My brother taught me how to color inside the lines, and he taught me how to have a conscience just like Jiminy did for Pinocchio. But as he earnestly instructed me, he was also slouching toward adolescence and reading literature like there was no tomorrow. He went through a terrifying Wolfman phase and then a Bram Stoker’s, Dracula, phase. So, yes, I could crush the coloring book thing, but when night fell, I had to fight the creatures of the night. And I spent much of my childhood suffocating under the covers because of the wolf growls at my door and the monster in the corner opening and closing his black cape like a bat. Then came The Turn of the Screw phase, and my ship was sunk. The sources of his roguery were richly informed by the contents of his library. I had to become a ninja or die. I can honestly say that the only way I learned to defend myself was to read the same books he read, and then just try to be one step ahead of him. By the time of Henry James’s, The Bad Seed, I was prepared and ultimately decided to study clinical psychology with a twist of genetics.
It takes a long time to figure out how you got to be the person you are, and to discover that much of who you are is authored by others. I was cosmically lucky that my big brother tired of his macabre period and launched himself into non-fiction, heavily skewed toward political science. He took his Jiminy Cricket to heart during the Vietnam War and became a conscientious objector. His reward was to be sent to Vietnam without a gun.
As a girl during the 60s, the last thing I wanted to grow up to be was a woman like my mother, she of the endless vocabulary, she of the New York City Ballet, she of “the problem that has no name”. It was a crushing time for girls back then. Fat was verboten, sex was taboo, hair was ironed. But it was a crushing time for boys back then, too. Boys couldn’t touch or feel anyone or anything; they had to “walk it off, son”. Sports and locker room banter was the only emotional outlet for boys. It was a time when only girls got “in trouble” for acting on their feelings – and boy, were they punished. And then the dam broke.
Which brings me to my inevitable subject – only 579 words after I began this. The question is: Should Joe Biden be subject to the ritual of compulsory public penance because he created his political persona in the 60s and 70s – when a man with emotions and empathy was considered weak? Back then, Joe was a rebel. Sometimes rebels get it wrong, and sometimes they’re right, but without them we’d calcify as a culture. Now he’s balancing on the razor’s edge of sexual predator. This has got to stop. This cannot be the way in which we take out competition; we’re eating our young with this tactic. We owe Biden an apology – and while we’re at it, we owe Hilary Clinton one too.
I don’t want Joe Biden to run in the 2020 presidential election, but not because he’s a proto sex offender. By that measure, every man I have ever known would be a danger to himself and others. I don’t want him to run because he has run three times in the past and lost all three times, because he is from another era, from another planet and another culture – the culture and time that I came from. It is the planet where Donald Trump came from. But Joe Biden was the good guy back then, and Trump was an abomination.
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Thank you, Joe Biden. Thank you for your decency and for a life well lived.
Image: Kurt Cobain Aberdeen Memorial by MiK Watson/Wikimedia Commons.
Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, controversial, or provocative, follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs
Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit, charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, controversial, or provocative, you can follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs