Hang On for the Sudden Right Turn at Generation Gap

A couple of summers ago, my sister and her 12-year-old daughter visited for the weekend. We were taking a walk in the neighborhood when my niece playfully beseeched me to carry her the last block to the house, claiming she was too tired to walk the rest of the way.

I played along, lugging her on my back but telling her she was getting too big for such treatment. Since she visited only once a year, I remember telling her, “This is probably the last time I’ll be able to do this for you.”

Last weekend my niece, on the cusp of her 14th birthday, parachuted alone into my bachelor encampment. When she left 36 hours later, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Is being 14 some elaborate hoax these kids play on adults, or are they really serious? Do they dream up this behavior all by themselves, or do they get together in small packs outside convenience stores in the middle of the night and hatch strategies? You can’t mean that parents actually go through this seven days a week.

Let me say without equivocation that I love my niece. She doesn’t seem to have a mean bone in her body and seems to have the same cheery disposition she’s always had.

But first thing Saturday morning . . .

I was tipped early that the times they are a-changin’ when we were getting ready to go out for breakfast. I got ready in my standard 3.5 minutes and waited downstairs for Fawn. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Twenty-five. Half an hour.

There were no sounds coming from the bathroom but the occasional shoosh of hair spray.

At the 45-minute mark, I yelled that I was leaving. She came downstairs, looking as if she was heading for the junior-senior prom at Twin Peaks High School. Hair piled up and sprayed into place in a kind of modified peacock’s tail. Too much mascara. Too heavy on the deep-red lipstick. Wearing a black tube top covered with a sheer black top that looked more like lingerie than something to wear for waffles. And yes, black shades.

As a flower child from way back, I couldn’t bring myself to impose a dress code on her. After all, I signed a petition in high school in 1966 demanding that boys be allowed to have mustaches. So I didn’t say anything other than, “We’re only going for breakfast, you know.”

“Do you know how many people will see me, even at breakfast?” she asked.

Frankly, I didn’t, but I took her to mean that even if it were one person, she had best be dressed to the nines.

So on we went. When heads turned to look at her in the restaurant, she was convinced that it was because she had made the correct fashion statement. I was hoping that people in the restaurant would think she was getting an early jump on Halloween.

All of this was no big deal. I rationalized that it is a teen-age phase, and who cares, really, if everyone else in the restaurant thought I was a parental flop.

But then came Saturday night . . .

We were driving home from the Ice Capades in L.A., bopping down the 405, just a groovy uncle and his hip niece, listening to some rap music on the radio. The station was playing a “power jam,” and I hear the lyrics (and I have to paraphrase), “You can do me in the morning/You can do me at night/You can do me any time you want to do me.”

Elsewhere in this power jam, other songs were equally or more suggestive; one long invitation to some quick and easy sex.

I’m not hopping on the censorship train, but neither am I scornful of people who want to talk about lyrical content in a non-censoring context. It’s a conversation worth having. Those lyrics sound a lot different to you as an adult when you have a 14-year-old in the seat next to you.

I didn’t make Fawn change stations, but I had to let off some steam. I gave her a 30-second stream of consciousness about how irresponsible I thought the lyrics were and how it made sex sound like some game without consequences.

She didn’t say anything. At the end of the power jam, an ad came on for Trojan condoms. Fawn looked at me and smiled sheepishly.

I drove on, torn between new-found anger at the music and long-held anger at the many conditions that make teen-age kids so potentially vulnerable. I wanted to give Fawn a stem-winder of a speech, but I didn’t. So, we didn’t talk the rest of the way.

Besides, she had turned and was looking out the window, singing along with the next power jam and lost in her 14-year-old world that’s probably farther away than I can possibly imagine.