Social Class and Adventurous Youth

Michael Chabon wrote some powerful essays in his recent collection, Manhood for Amateurs, that address the way we try to control and protect the experiences of our children today, compared to how freely and independently our parents allowed us to roam our neighborhoods.

This rings very true for me as I look at my experiences with my own kids and compare them with the routine excursions of my childhood.

But when I walk or drive around my own neighborhood, I do see the occasional individual or pack of kids roaming around, heading to the store, the library, or simply wandering along the irrigation canal in the vague direction of a park or open field. What's interesting is that these kids are almost exclusively young people of color, usually Latino or African.

I say Latino because I hear the kids speaking Spanish to each other and because many of them have a mestizo cast to their complexion and features that is familiar to me from growing up in southern New Mexico. I'd guess that they're probably Mexican American, but that would be assuming more than I know.

I say African, not African American, because there's a small cluster of Somalis living in my part of Boise, part of a slightly larger but still small enclave of refugees who were resettled here in the past decade. So while many of these kids have probably grown up here and speak English, they weren't born here and I don't know their citizenship status.

These two groups of kids seem to have two basic traits in common. First, relatively speaking, they're poorer than the largely middle class suburbanites that surround them. They come from one of several apartment complexes, a trailer park, or a few duplexes occupied by a large number of people. Second, I think that many of them come from families where the parents and other adults grew up in places other than the United States of the late 20th and early 21st century.

I suspect that this combination means that their families have both fewer resources (in terms of time or the money to pay other people for their time) at hand to constantly monitor their children and fewer psychological hangups about leaving their kids to fend for themselves during certain times of the day.

So perhaps these kids have the opportunity to explore and create their own adventures that Chabon argues is denied to middle class American kids in our current culture. And I wonder how that will shape their experiences and attitudes. Are they getting a chance to develop a part of their imaginations that will be stunted in my kids and their peers? Or are they just wandering bored, waiting for a chance to play video games or sign up for a youth sports league?

Now, I'm not arguing that being an adolescent member of an economically disadvantaged minority with the freedom to roam around is the same thing as being a middle class kid with that same freedom. It's not. The middle class white kid has fewer basic needs to worry about and certainly finds it easier to fit in to the surrounding society, particularly in a city as white as Boise.

But our neighborhood is a pretty safe place, and the local branch library is nice, and I see a lot of these kids in and around there. So I hope that they are getting a chance to enjoy some of their unstructured, unsupervised time and indulge in that freedom. Because the irony would be a little hard to bear otherwise.

I Have a Lot of Books

This became clear when I posted a list of the books that I own but haven't gotten around to reading all of yet. And I have many more books than that, not even counting the rpg books or the graphic novels. Probably 400 books or so including all the graphic novels and rpg books.

The funny thing is, I'm always finding new, interesting books in the library. The other funny thing is that I read almost nothing in the typical bestseller or literary fiction categories.

So I thought about it, and this is why I have so many books and haven't read a bunch of the ones I own (though I have read most of the books I own, probably 3/4 or so):

• I'm a fairly voracious and omnivorous reader. I'm guessing that I average about a book a week (I usually have one work of fiction and one or two nonfiction books going at any given time). I would say that half of what I read is nonfiction (divided amongst science, history, and miscellaneous cultural stuff ranging from theories of magic to linguistics). The remaining half is divided between science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries,in that order of preference. I'm just curious about a lot of things.
  
• If I enjoy a book a lot, I really like to own a copy of that book. If I check a book (fiction or nonfiction) out from the library three or more times to read all or part of it, then I try to acquire a copy of that book. And I like shopping for book bargains the way some people like to buy shoes. I love used books and have ever since I was a kid in Las Cruces, where places like Dave's Paperback Exchange were a little oasis of speculative fiction in a town filled with people whose imaginations didn't run in the same vein as my own. (One reason I don't yet own a copy of Clifford Geertz's Local Knowledge is that I haven't found a used copy for less than $5 and I don't feel like buying a beaten up copy for $10 or $20 for a new copy. I like the book but not that much.)
• In a similar fashion, I reread the best fiction books in my collection every few years and refer back to sections of the best nonfiction books every year or so. Right now I'm debating when I'll get around to rereading several Guy Gavriel Kay novels and whether I'll reread a couple Sheri Tepper novels first. Anyway, this type of behavior isn't conducive to getting rid of books once I acquire them and it can delay me from reading more recently acquired books.
  
• I have an odd schedule because I am a work-from-home freelancer. This means that there are stretches when I have more free time than most people because I don't have a paying job and the kids are in school. Even an extra free hour translates into a lot more reading time. But at the same time, I can't predict when I'll be free and when I'll get a contract to work on, so I sometimes get books intending to read them and then have little free time to read for the next couple months. Those books may then slip out of my awareness and gather dust on a shelf.
  
• Traits a and b sometimes combine to convince me to buy cheap books without really thinking through the purchase--I see something at a book sale that intrigues me and it looks like a great deal so I grab it. I'm thinking of just avoiding the big library book sale that occurs twice a year here in Boise, because while I have found a few nice books over the years, I probably don't get around to reading the majority of the stuff I acquire.
• I write speculative fiction and I never know what kind of resource/reference material might be useful, so I cast a wide net. I've got books on some fairly esoteric stuff because I came up with some unusual questions. Our library is good but not exhaustive by any means, so I have to buy some of these books if I want to explore their contents.
  

My goal with reading the stuff currently on my shelves is trying to figure out which of these books I can donate. The others I probably will read more than once.

I really need to figure out which of the guides to writing are worth keeping. Part of that involves actually doing the exercises that they suggest.

Anyway, my shelves and shelves of books are a pleasure for me for the most part, though it can be hard figuring out what to keep in the basement (where most of my shelves are) and what to keep upstairs for easier access. Every few months I get the urge to reorganize my books, which drives everyone else in the family a little crazy. Don't know why I have that impulse. I just do.