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In Afteryears…
The Passing of Passions
Summer 1998
by Joseph Youngerman ’64
Written in 1989, for the Class of 1964’s 25th Reunion Classbook.
Just in time for our 25th reunion, I’ve been working on my nostalgia. Yale seems so long ago, a wonderful moment sometime near high school which is better as a goal for my children than as a focus for fervid remembering. Having grown up in the Midwest—small town Champaign, Illinois, to be more exact—I felt so privileged to come East for my education, and so fascinated and excited by what I found here that I never went back “home” again, except for family visiting. What a world Yale was back then, including fine philosophy seminars and sweeping history and art lectures, and crew and glee club, but principally they were so many people, roommates, and friends who mattered more than I cared to acknowledge, a new family based on difference rather than homogeneity. Even a girl friend in New York City for a while! Boy, I was over my head, awash in the galaxy.
The civil rights movement gave me direction I could be proud of. A few weeks before graduation I decided to go to Mississippi that summer of ’64, and though I registered voters and taught school, the education was one-sidedly of me. Not just about okra and collard greens, but about fear and noises at night and the power of black churches and white policeman in Delta. It was a whole new college, which I attended the next summer in Roxbury, Boston’s ghetto, and the following summer in Appalachia, until medical school closed off those voyages and narrowed those vistas to hospital wards. My next chance came disguised as the government’s rejection of my request for deferral of military service until after my residency training. Rather than serve as a general medical officer in Vietnam, I chose to serve two alternative years in the Indian Health Service as the village doctor in an abandoned post office transformed into a community crisis center. Subspecialization in child psychiatry followed, at a state-funded hospital for severely disturbed children of the Bronx, and then quieter training in psychoanalysis.
Without my noticing I had become middle-30s, and the country had lost any passion for social justice that I could connect with, not counting the rattling days of Watergate. I was becoming an expert or, at least, salaried for my work, no longer a volunteer novice, more obviously a tourist on summer vacations now to Guatemala and to Peru and to Turkey.
Certainly my passions became more personal, for my wife and then my sons, who are now 11 and 7, perfect ages for Little League baseball and soccer. Being a parent seems much more fun work than any state of being I can name. Yes, there are also wonderful moments of reading novels and writing professional articles, teaching young doctors and listening to patients, plays, and opera; but moment for moment, give me my boys to play with for a few more years before they go off to Yale and never come home again.
Maybe then, in my 50s, the country and I will be ready for social passions, and my wife and I will be ready again for voyages to worlds other than the house, school, job, carpools, mortgage payments, and weekend vacations. May we all live that long to regain our adolescent Yale epiphanies for which I can wax so nostalgic.  |
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