Play by Stuart Brown M.D. & Christopher Vaughan

Author:Stuart Brown M.D. & Christopher Vaughan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

from child to adult

The rites of passage in making the transition from adolescent to adult entail certain changes. Rites of passage involve achieving a sense of self, which brings with it a sense of confidence. They involve breaking away from the norm, making one’s own path, facing adversity, and contributing a boon to society. In mythology, the returning hero not only comes back more mature and stronger, but also brings something new that is beneficial to the community. This has been the case throughout human history, in reality as well as in stories and myths.

My own rite of passage involved no dragons but still had plenty of challenges. I got at job at the age of fifteen delivering groceries in a very poor section on the south side of Chicago. My parents knew I was working for the prosperous grocer who lived down our street, but they didn’t know any real details of my workdays. On weekends in a mixed-ethnic blue-collar neighborhood dominated by four-story old apartment buildings, I delivered huge boxes of groceries to very large families, mostly on the top floors (no elevators and no heat). The deal that the customers got from the grocer was free delivery if they made a major purchase. In the overcrowded and very smelly apartments lived a real cross section of postwar back-of-the-stockyards Chicago society. There were the dying elderly, the mentally retarded, the alcoholics, the crippled, many newly arrived to Chicago from everywhere. All of them were poor, with the maternal head of household very diligent in having to review every item in the weekly or two-week grocery supply. If I broke an egg, it was a shared tragedy. I spent long days struggling to get to their top-floor tenements.

I hadn’t known before this job that people lived like that. That this was often a dangerous part of town, a fact that never fully occurred to me (the witless young knight), but I reveled in having enough strength to carry boxes with bags piled on top up narrow, dark stairways. I dealt hourly with parking hassles, talked police out of tickets, and foiled any attempts to either steal the owner’s new Mercury station wagon or my enlarging roll of bills (all deliveries were cash).

This experience opened my eyes. It changed me. I found that I could handle myself in difficult or dangerous circumstances. Of course I look back now and see that I really didn’t understand how very dangerous it really was. If my parents would have known, they would not have allowed it. I guess parents of that time did not feel as protective as responsible parents do now. But as I reminisce through the lens of many years of personal experience, I recognize that it was well timed to open me up to actively identify with the struggles and pathos I saw. And though I was just a high school boy delivering groceries in the inner city, this adventure incited me do something more positive with my life than perfect my driving skills.

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