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I used to think there was a secret plan to life, and that I was right in the middle of it. What I thought I knew was that the world was getting better and better. Part of this idea came from the era during which I grew up, part from my experience, and part from my mother's incurable optimism about her children.
I was nine when World War II ended. Our lives quickly returned to normal. We took down the heavy black-out curtains over the windows. Ration cards disappeared. And I vividly remember the opening of a tiny accessories shop across Franklin Street from my father's newspaper offices. I went to the shop soon after it opened. I don't know why I had money that day. We didn't get a regular allowance, and if I did have money I spent it on a bowl of ice cream and a fountain Coke (ten cents for the combination). But I did go to this shop and I bought a twelve-inch-square printed silk scarf from among the collection of new multi-colored scarves. I had never seen such a gathering of color, and it was hard to make my choice. This, to me, from my sheltered childhood, epitomized the end of the War. (In case you are wondering how we used those little scarves, here's how: we folded them on the diagonal and rolled them to make a ribbon of scarf, which we tied into a jaunty knot whose ends stuck out over the open collar, turned up at the back, of our white blouses. So chic.)
By the time I left university, the world was my oyster—the oyster of all recent graduates of that era, with job opportunities available to all comers. I'm not saying that I took any great advantage of them, but that was my own fault. They were there. And it was clear to me that there would always be jobs.
During a biology class at university, the professor (tall, with very dark hair, this much I remember) one day talked about ecology. About how everything fit together. The trees inhaling what we exhaled, the oceans efficiently cleaning up all the effluents we pumped into them. Everything worked well. His name was not Dr. Pangloss, but it might as well have been, and we were all his eager Candides. This was a few years before Rachel Carson burst that particular balloon.
At home, my mother gave each of her six children the idea that we were a special family. We always did this or we never did that because we were the Johnson children. She expected a bright future for each of us, and she would brook no hesitation on our parts. It was expected that we would perform well in the world. Bad things might happen to others (although she preferred not to think about that) but certainly not to the Johnson children.
I bought into her future just as I embraced my professor's sanguine view of man and Nature interacting forever in this best of all possible worlds. I bought into the Eisenhower era's prosperity and optimism. After university I noticed that parents now had the opportunity to learn about the psychology of families and children. All this learning would pay off. Each generation would be smarter about child-rearing and human relationships than the previous one had been. People were capable of learning and growing and eventually we would all be so wise (though I didn't expect this to happen right away) that there would be no more wars, no conflict, no bad seed.
Not only was my mother misguided, but so also were my teachers. Life turned out to be even more of a muddle for later generations than it had been for mine.
Any lingering optimism on my part is regularly tempered by reality. (Old but still true joke: the difference between an optimist and a pessimist? The pessimist is better informed.)
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