16-18: 'The Best Years of Your Life'

The reviews — "best years of your life!" — for the last phase of childhood come prewritten. Even the script, as penned by our great poets including Messrs. John Hughes and Kevin Williamson, seems to overpower the actual memory. "Sweet Little Sixteen," Sixteen Candles, "hold on to sixteen as long as you can"... no period of childhood, possibly no period of life, is so well-covered by the arts-and-entertainment complex. All in all, it's difficult to go on a nostalgia trip, difficult maybe to live through those gilded years, outside of the influence of the clichés from film, television, literature, even the feel-good-isms of the high school yearbook.

There are those rites of passage (see above, clichés) that provide signposts along the road into legal adulthood, each bringing into harsher relief the bizarre tension between expanding freedoms and continuing constraints. As for a main concern (wheels), either you or someone you know will have a license and access to an automobile. Odds are you'll be reined in by curfews. And while we're too young to legally purchase alcohol, that never proved an insurmountable challenge to anyone I knew.

I remember my own late teens as a time of bad heartfelt poetry and hopeless, unrequited crushes. I might not have described it as such at the time, although it was probably a big clue the day the one girl I was totally in love with commented that I actually seemed happy for a change. But even the Goth-y life-sucks counterpoint to "best years" propaganda is its own ingrained script and type. (The clue is, "angst." "______ angst.") So no escape perhaps from this artificial overlay and boundary.

But maybe the late teen years aren't drastically different, in essence at least, from life later on: a fairly amorphous collection of experiences given texture by our relationships, punctuated by incident and accident, given structure by the things we have to do, and only making any sort of sense in retrospect. There's a fair argument to be made for the much-dissected (OK, much-abhorred) high school social scene as dress-rehearsal for the interpersonal quirks and office politics of the 40-hour life. Really by 16 you're all but grown up, just lacking the good judgment that further experience i.e., bad judgment you live through brings. Adult, but not fully formed, even if the rules and mores of society insist to continue treating you like a child.

On the other hand, if you finds yourself a decade later still obsessed with pop culture, often brooding, desperately awkward and crushed out around any possible object of romantic interest, chasing each chance to alter your state, not sure what you're gonna be when you grow up... there are dangers in holding on to 16 as long as you can.

— Wayne Lewis (capsighs@pacbell.net)