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The Discomfort of Growing Up in Middle America
Have you ever wondered why some people seem perpetually caught between who they are and who they're expected to be? Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" captured this universal struggle through Charlie Brown's perpetual failures and Snoopy's imaginative escapes, reaching over 150 million newspaper readers at its peak. The comic strip wasn't just entertainment-it was a personal gospel for many, teaching about disillusionment, etiquette, and the human condition through its koan-like scenarios. Much like Schulz himself, who maintained childlike scruples throughout his life while creating art that spoke to millions, we all navigate the tension between our authentic selves and societal expectations. This tension forms the backbone of a deeply personal exploration of American middle-class life, family dynamics, and the painful process of becoming oneself in a world that often demands conformity.
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The House That Built Me
There'd been a fierce storm in St. Louis when I returned to my mother's house after her death, the kind that tears branches from trees and floods basements. I claimed the liquor shelf with Viking entitlement - methodically boxing up dusty bottles of Drambuie and ancient vermouth - and stripped family photos from every surface, each one a time capsule of frozen smiles and forgotten occasions. My brothers and I needed to sell it quickly to capitalize on its location in the coveted Catholic school district, where young families still competed fiercely for homes near Mary Queen of Peace.
Interviewing realtors revealed three distinct personalities that seemed to embody different aspects of the St. Louis real estate market. First came a disappointed Century 21 agent suggesting $340,000-$360,000, her sensible shoes squeaking across the hardwood floors as she pointed out every flaw. Then there was Pat, an elegant woman who proposed $350,000 and admired all my mother's favorite details - the built-in bookshelves, the garden window in the kitchen, the intricate crown molding she'd preserved through decades of updates. Finally, there was Mike, a pretty blonde my age who burst in wearing excellent jeans and radiating confidence. Mike excited me with her husky voice and flirtatious energy, promising she could get $380,000-$385,000 and start a bidding war. She claimed to understand my desire, my hunger, speaking about the market with an intensity that matched my own complicated emotions.
I grew up in Webster Groves - a middle-class suburb my mother called "just right," with its tree-lined streets and mix of Victorian homes and postwar bungalows. She valued character over achievement, repeatedly stressing that "able" people owed society their talents, a philosophy that shaped our family's civic engagement. The America of my childhood featured relatively equitable income distribution and modest middle-class comforts: station wagons in driveways, Wednesday night church suppers, summer evenings at the municipal pool. As my family later dispersed to the coasts seeking opportunity, the country similarly fled the economic center, creating vast wealth disparities that would have troubled my mother deeply.
The home represented more than just a structure - it embodied my mother's fervent belief that "the home is the foundation of true happiness in America." She'd cultivated every corner: the perennial garden with its reliable succession of blooms, the kitchen where she taught us to bake, the window seats where we'd curl up with books on rainy afternoons. Years after her death, during Hurricane Katrina, I found myself living comfortably in Manhattan, conflicted about charity appeals and enraged at the government's failures, wondering what she would have done. The house had been our anchor through decades of change, our true north in times of uncertainty, and now it was just another property to be sold, its memories carefully packed away in boxes marked "Keep" and "Donate."
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The Generation Gap: When Families Fracture
In May 1970, shortly after the Kent State killings, my father and brother Tom began fighting-not about Vietnam, which they both opposed, but about Tom's summer job. My father had pulled strings to get Tom a position at Sverdrup & Parcel, a major engineering firm in St. Louis. Despite encouraging Tom to study architecture at college, Tom had deliberately chosen distant Rice University where he was drifting toward film studies instead. The conservative, military-influenced culture at Sverdrup was completely at odds with Tom's bell-bottomed, lefty sensibilities.
Their argument escalated dramatically one night. Tom burst into our shared bedroom, sarcastically shouting "You'll get over it!" while packing his bags. My mother followed, sobbing and begging him to stop. I lay still, pretending to sleep, as Tom stormed out of the house. The next morning, everything felt dreamlike and unmentionable. When I questioned my mother about whether Tom would attend my upcoming class play, she broke down and confirmed they'd had a terrible fight and Tom had left, his whereabouts unknown.
I was unaware this was part of a nationwide epidemic of late adolescents rejecting their parents' values amid the widening generation gap. The conflict between my father's traditional expectations and Tom's countercultural aspirations mirrored what was happening across America. Parents who had survived the Depression and World War II couldn't understand why their children would reject security and established paths. Meanwhile, young people saw their parents' lives as conformist traps.
This fracture in my family left wounds that would take years to heal. Tom eventually returned, but something fundamental had changed in our household-an acknowledgment that the world was changing faster than anyone could control.
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Guilt and Identity: The Charlie Brown Complex
Like Charlie Brown, I felt guilty about everything-a classmate's death, a frog I'd killed, shunning my mother's hugs, neglecting the washcloths at the bottom of the stack, preferring certain marbles over others, and ignoring board games and stuffed animals. I slept with my stuffed animals on a strict rotation, except for the realistic Mr. Bear whose otherness made him difficult to anthropomorphize.
This overwhelming sense of responsibility extended to everything in my life. In Miss Niblack's class, Chris Toczko and I were the last two standing in the Homonym Spelldown when she called out "liar." Toczko trembled through "L-I-E-R" and was told it wasn't a word. With triumphant certainty, I stepped forward: "L-Y-R-E! Lyre. It's a stringed instrument." I hadn't noticed Toczko was having a meltdown. We ended up in the principal's office where Mr. Barnett's unabridged dictionary revealed "lier" did exist: "one that lies (as in ambush)." We were declared co-winners. Months later, Toczko ran into the street and was killed by a car. His death filled me with guilt.
Charles Schulz, creator of "Peanuts," was born in 1922 in St. Paul, the only child of German and Norwegian parents. Though often portrayed as a Charlie Brown-like figure who suffered childhood traumas, Schulz's true story was more complex. The Army transformed him from a "nothing person" to a staff sergeant in charge of a machine-gun squadron. After the war, he lived with his father, joined a Christian youth group, and developed his skill drawing children.
Schulz maintained childlike scruples throughout his life-avoiding adult vices, holding grudges, and refusing to draw caricatures out of fairness. But Schulz wasn't an artist because he suffered; he suffered because he was an artist, choosing creativity over comfort for fifty years. His true alter ego wasn't the failure-prone Charlie Brown but the protean, confident Snoopy-a character who could reimagine himself at will, transcending limitations through imagination.
Our brains work like cartoonists-simplifying faces to their essential emotional messages while filtering out particulars. As Scott McCloud argues in "Understanding Comics," we see others in detail but imagine ourselves cartoonishly, which explains why the simplest cartoon faces are the most beloved. They lack the "Otherly particulars" that remind us of our separateness.
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Fellowship and Belonging: Finding Your Tribe
We gathered Sundays at five-thirty for Fellowship at First Congregational Church. We built trust through blindfolded walks, made environmental collages, performed emotional skits, sang Cat Stevens songs, and wrote friendship haikus. Fellowship kids had grown up together through Sunday school, sharing embarrassing childhood moments that created cousin-like bonds.
But ninth grade brought trouble as cooler newcomers joined-girls with exotic names, guys with beards and long hair, a blonde who practiced Neil Young songs. When they all signed up for the October retreat, I felt anxious but determined to go. The retreat became a turning point when three members were caught smoking marijuana. The group confronted them in an intense session where everyone took turns addressing the offenders while parents waited outside. The offenders alternated between apologies and challenging us about forgiveness.
We ultimately gave them a second chance, with our leader instructing us to tell our parents what happened. When my parents returned from Europe looking fit and cosmopolitan, I delayed confession repeatedly. Finally at Sunday dinner, I awkwardly told them about kids who "smuiked duip" at the retreat. To my shock, they barely reacted.
The group's hidden theoretician was George Benson, whose book "Then Joy Breaks Through" argued that Christianity needed to reclaim Jesus's radicalism through honesty, confrontation and struggle. This philosophy shaped our Fellowship experience-creating a space where teenagers could be authentic with each other, challenge assumptions, and grow together through difficult conversations.
What the CBS documentary "16 in Webster Groves" missed about our town was its fundamental value: apolitical niceness. First Congregational Church, though largely Republican in membership, consistently chose liberal pastors-including a socialist who wore a beret in the 1930s and a WWII veteran who preached pacifism throughout the war. This created a unique environment where teenagers could explore identity and values in ways that transcended the typical conformity of suburban life.
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Nighttime Adventures and Double Lives
Kortenhof, the lawyer's son with a crocodile smile, convinced us to attempt putting a car tire atop our high school's forty-foot flagpole. Six of us gathered with stepladders, ropes, and radials, climbing to the roof via downspout. When our efforts failed, we returned multiple nights to remove evidence of our attempt, replacing the broken padlock with our own.
My nighttime adventures led to confrontation with my parents when they caught me returning at dawn. My father warned my mother: "Don't ask the question if you can't stand to hear the answer." This sensation of being "Caught" was familiar-like when my mother burst in while I was enjoying music she considered "awful rock music," though it was merely the syrupy Moody Blues.
My adolescence was marked by maintaining dual identities-the "official fifty-year-old boy" my parents approved of and the "unofficial adolescent." I'd safety-pin my undershirts to hide them beneath my collar and change out of embarrassing polyester shirts in school bathrooms. After years of social death in junior high, I found salvation in tenth grade through Levi's corduroys and the Fellowship clique.
Our flagpole adventure evolved into forming a group called U.N.C.L.E., sending ransom notes to the principal demanding recognition. When Mr. Knight ignored us, we escalated by flying a homemade pirate flag. Eventually, we renamed ourselves DIOTI (an anagram of "idiot" and Spanish wordplay on "uncle two"). By year's end, our group had expanded to nine members planning more ambitious pranks.
One night, we successfully disabled the school bells, collecting twenty-five clappers and hiding them with Easter candy. I'd also planted poetic clues throughout the building, hoping to enchant the school for Mr. Knight. Our prank succeeded brilliantly-the next morning, the bells didn't ring, creating a beautiful absence "like the poetry I wanted to learn to write," and Mr. Knight himself followed my trail of clues. These nighttime adventures weren't just teenage rebellion-they were creative expressions of identity in a world that often felt constraining.
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Language and Literature: Finding Your Voice
When confronted by police during our nighttime mission, my friend quickly improvised a cover story about tying shut a classmate's front door, explaining away our suspicious tools and ropes. Despite our flimsy excuse, the officer let us go-it was 1976 and we were white teenagers, not drunk. Days later, we tried again with a better alibi about observing "NGC 6346," a bogus star.
I felt guilty about abusing astronomy, which reflected my complicated relationship with science-my father encouraged scientific pursuits while I preferred theatrics. This tension between parental expectations and personal inclinations shaped many of my choices.
High school German proved easy but uncool, with its focus on grammar and memorizing adjective endings. My parents, assuming I'd become a scientist, consulted my medical-student brother Bob about which language I should study. His unequivocal answer: German. Though I initially approached it as merely a practical skill, language would eventually become my pathway to self-understanding.
At Swarthmore, I resisted the flamboyant German professor Weber but adored drill instructor Frau Plaxton with her "beautifully chiseled Nordic looks" and patient manner. In Munich during my junior year abroad, I immersed myself in German literature, particularly Goethe's poetry. For the first time, I felt genuinely moved by a language's marriage of sound and sense-the numinous interplay of verbs like streben, schweben, weben. I recited passages from Faust on hilltops and recognized my own emotions in its lines.
Back at college, I took a seminar with George Avery, a Greek-American professor whose yellowed, annotation-filled paperbacks testified to his headlong love for literature. Unlike my other polished professors, Avery approached texts with missionary zeal. When we discussed Kafka's The Trial, Avery challenged us: "Kafka's about your life! He had problems with sex, women, jobs, parents-he was writing fiction to make sense of life's mess."
When Avery suggested Josef K. might actually be guilty, I felt outraged. But rereading the first chapter, I realized I'd never truly read it at all. I'd been so convinced of K.'s innocence that I missed what Kafka was clearly saying in every sentence. K. wasn't an innocent victim but a "creepy, arrogant, selfish, abusive shmuck" refusing to examine his own life. This revelation changed how I understood literature-not as something separate from life, but as a tool for making sense of it.
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Family Patterns and Personal Growth
My father never told jokes or played silly games. Like Charlie Brown, "you almost never see him laugh." He threw balls awkwardly, as "things he wanted to get rid of," and his only recreations were golf and bridge, which he claimed to be useless and unlucky at. Born to harsh nineteenth-century Scandinavian parents in Minnesota, he lost his charismatic older brother to a drowning accident and saw his parents and niece die in separate car accidents.
Though socially invisible in high school, he shocked everyone by becoming valedictorian over the popular Romelle Erickson. His father dictated his career path at university registration: "He's going to be a civil engineer." Though he spent his life restless, considering medicine or partnerships, he ultimately followed his father's directive for fifty years. After his death, I found only one personal keepsake from his childhood: a bundle of valentines from classmates and his best friend Walter Anderson-but nothing from his parents.
Returning home for Christmas during college, I found my parents suddenly aged. Our Webster Groves house looked tired, my father questioned my literary efforts ("Where is the story? This is all ideas"), and my mother was physically and emotionally wrecked from knee operations and ulcerative colitis. She obsessively fretted about my father's upcoming retirement, repeatedly telling anyone who would listen that retirement was wrong for "able, vital people who can still contribute to society."
For the first time, I began seeing my family as actual people rather than mere relations-a perspective gained through my immersion in German literature. That night, after dreams about rejection, I had a nightmare where a sweet German shepherd verbally attacked me as a "frivolous, cynical, attention-seeking 'fag'" before literally attacking my throat. I woke and wrote "So, eines morgens wurde er verhaftet" (One morning, he was arrested)-the opening line of Kafka's The Trial.
My mother's emotional state deteriorated as she obsessed over feeling "deceived" by my brother Tom and his girlfriend's cohabitation. During Christmas dinner, she repeatedly apologized for not making the traditional cranberry sorbet, each time receiving our assurances that the regular cranberry sauce was sufficient. I was beginning to recognize the patterns that had shaped our family for generations-patterns I would need to understand if I wanted to break free of them.
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Finding Connection in a Disconnected World
After my mother died in summer 1999, I went birdwatching for the first time on Hat Island near Everett, Washington. I spotted eagles, kingfishers, Bonaparte's gulls, goldfinches, and my first northern flicker-its careening beauty reminding me of a former girlfriend I still fondly remembered from a distance.
By then I'd met a vegetarian Californian writer, "a fool for animals" with no interest in pregnancy, marriage, or moving to New York. Her indifference to children spared me from constantly checking my watch regarding reproductive decisions. The person who wanted kids was me.
The last day with my mother, she repeatedly asked if the Californian was the woman I'd end up with, if we'd marry, if she wanted children. Mom hoped for a glimpse of how my life would continue after she was gone. She'd always loved being part of things, and having strong opinions was her way of not feeling left out.
Returning to New York after South Texas left me hollow and restless like an addict in withdrawal. I couldn't focus on work or make myself comprehensible to friends. Each night I studied bird books and dreamed vividly of birds. Two kestrels appeared outside my kitchen window, bloodying their beaks on fresh-killed mice, their dislocation mirroring my own.
At a lecture, Al Gore's surprisingly humorous but deeply disturbing presentation on global warming filled me with teenage-like dread about climate catastrophes. Back home, I rationalized my concerns away-I lived in an energy-efficient Manhattan apartment, didn't own a car, and my tenth-floor Upper East Side location would likely stay dry even in worst-case flooding scenarios. Most importantly, not having kids freed me from caring about future generations. Yet I couldn't stop worrying about the billions of birds facing extinction from climate change. This was my real problem-feeling inconveniently obliged to care about the world's future in the present.
My relationship with birds began innocently-an encounter on Hat Island, sharing binoculars with friends on Cape Cod. But I wasn't properly introduced until a warm spring Saturday when serious birders took me walking in Central Park. Starting at Belvedere Castle, we spotted a veery-a bird shaped like a robin but light-breasted with russet tones-on the mulchy ground behind the weather station. In that moment, I felt a connection to something larger than myself, something that transcended my personal concerns and linked me to the natural world in a way I hadn't experienced before.
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The Courage to Face Ourselves
In the eighties, my wife and I lived on our own little planet, thrillingly absorbed in each other with just one friend. When my German instructor suggested our isolation would last two years at most, I was offended by his condescension. We made our aloneness work for six years, but when our domestic atmosphere began to overheat, we fled to a Spanish village where we knew nobody.
Like the habit-bound peoples in Jared Diamond's Collapse who respond to ecosystem degradation by increasing demands on it, we burned through our remaining reserves in seven months of isolation. Back in Queens, we couldn't stand being together, reacting to minor breakfast fights by lying facedown in separate rooms for hours. I was consuming a bottle of Maalox weekly.
What makes Kafka's work so powerful is that he visibly had an "other side"-helping me finally understand his three dimensions: that a man could simultaneously be a sympathetic victim, a lascivious bore, and crucially "a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process."
Our relationship intensified during spring break when we borrowed an apartment from her friend Chloe. Even in the empty apartment, we closed Chloe's bedroom door behind us-"to fall into bed in front of an open door was to invite a malevolent stranger to loom up in it while their attention was otherwise engaged; this happened in every teen horror movie ever made."
Later, after our intimate encounter, we went out for cigarettes. Upon returning, we discovered someone had been in the apartment-the door was unlocked and the tonic water nearly empty. Terrified, we armed ourselves with steak knives and searched the apartment. When I pushed on the bedroom door, someone pushed back. I held the door closed while she escaped, then made my own dash to safety. Outside, we began to rationalize our fear-perhaps it was just Chloe's clothes swinging on hangers, or something wrong with the lock. The world was becoming rational again as we prepared to "put the Unconscious in its place."
But that's the challenge we all face-acknowledging the parts of ourselves we'd rather not see, the unconscious motivations that drive our behaviors, the patterns we inherit from our families. The courage to face these aspects of ourselves is what ultimately allows us to grow beyond them, to create lives that are authentic rather than merely reactive. Like the house in Webster Groves that once anchored my family, we must sometimes let go of what we thought defined us in order to discover who we might become.
