Grown. Growing up. Some have it difficult, maybe not enough food, or not a stable home, maybe an insane parent or guardian, maybe there’s a war going on outside your door. I get that, and not for the first time think that if we have to be licensed for cars, and guns and maybe even to vote, we should be licensed to have kids. Maybe pass a test or take a course, or something so that when a child is brought into the world they are loved and cared for, treasured for the future they promise and to, somehow, make good on that promise. I’m also talking about the angst, the Catcher In The Rye angst, the disaffected, totally egocentric angst. Did I not have it, or, was I not allowed to have it, which seems all the more likely. Not that my parents were strict, they were and they weren’t, but I was brought up in a stiff upper lip and stand tall, be tall kind of world.
I’m writing about a girl, her brothers and a stranger. First off, I didn’t have brothers, just sisters, two very alike sisters, and I was the odd one out. Sometimes more odd. But, siblings are siblings. Are girls more wicked than boys? I have no idea, but I know that the stereotype is not what I want to write. I wonder how much I knew about my sisters. I look at them now, what they are as adults. It’s a strange world out there. I’ve said before, I was an unconscious person, more interested in plot, setting and voice than character. Strange when I write that, because in the history I studied, it was the main characters on stage; Elizabeth I, Charlemagne, St. Thomas More, that fascinated me the most, that I couldn’t get enough of those characters that actually made a difference in the world.
Ha! An epiphany and maybe a help. It’s not the character that fascinates me, it’s the relationship the character had with the world. Elizabeth defining her age, much like her successor Victoria. Or Charlemagne defining what it meant to rule an empire. How a Twyla Tharp changed the world of dance, or Ayn Rand changed our view, maybe, of corporations and communism.
Hmm…I’m going to have to think about this. So, maybe it’s not that growing up is tough. It’s that growing up is a constant in the world.