583: It’ll Make Sense When You’re Older

Chana Joffe-Walt

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Chana Joffe-Walt sitting in for Ira Glass this week. In today's show, we've got stories of people at a moment of understanding something they could not have grasped before when they were younger-- stories from childhood, 10 years old, all the way up through old age, 79.

So let's start at the beginning. I should say that the entire premise of this show, the idea that there are certain things that do not make sense when you're young, it is flat out offensive to the people at the beginning of our story.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I'm sitting with a half dozen sixth graders at a table in their middle school. And a small guy with glasses and a comic book name Bernard Arthur keeps shaking his head.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Bernard just feels like that stuff you think I'm not ready for? I am. Let's talk.

At least three kids at the table raise a finger and politely say, "um, I'd like to add to that." They've all got examples of questions they asked recently that were met with some version of, you'll understand later. A brief selection, why do you smoke? Why did she commit suicide? Why do I have to go to school?

What does it mean to hit puberty? Who is puberty? And why would you hit her?

How do you say butt hole in Spanish? It's a pretty broad range, right?

A girl named Samantha Boome says sometimes you don't even have to ask a question to be shut down with the "you'll understand later," even if it's not those exact words. Like the other night, she came into the kitchen. And her mom and grandpa were talking in loud voices, maybe they were fighting.

Chana Joffe-Walt

She's saying, you'll learn when you get older.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I think to kids, this phrase can feel both dismissive and like we, the adults, are abdicating our responsibility, giving up on even trying. Like Jasper Pena says, when he asks what seems like a pretty simple question, sometimes grown-ups say--

Chana Joffe-Walt

She wants an actual person. These kids want answers. Well, today on our show, we have answers. Or rather, we have people arriving at the answers themselves, with or without the help of others. People looking ahead in time for clues of what's to come, and looking back at the remarkable facts that they somehow missed. We're going to travel from childhood on up, stopping at all the points where people do understand, finally. We've got Sasheer Zamata from Saturday Night Live. Stay with us.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Act One, Adolescence. When the biggest thing that does not make sense is often just the immediate future and how you're going to get through it. Here's Hillary Frank.

Hillary Frank

There's this kid in my town. We'll call him Ben. A few years ago, Ben was starting high school, and he turned 15. He asked his parents if he could throw a party. They said yes, but if we see any alcohol, we're shutting it down. Ben's like, fine.

The day of the party he takes a walk with his five closest guy friends. They're sort of his planning committee. They tell him they're going to text invites to, like, 30 people. Mostly, they're other geeky guy friends. Also, their friends tell him, we're going to invite some popular girls.

Hillary Frank

They all go back to Ben's house. And the popular girls, they're actually the first to show up.

Hillary Frank

Four or five more girls asked for Ben's address. Of course, these kids are not calling their rides. They're texting his address to all their friends.

So the party slowly starts growing. And then a bunch of older kids show up. Then Ben hears banging outside on his garage door. Suddenly, there's a bunch of upperclassman everywhere.

Hillary Frank

This thing that was happening to Ben, it's straight out of every memorable teen party movie. His little birthday celebration was crashed. But what was happening here is different from those movies in one key way, a way that seems to be specific to my town and towns nearby.

Upperclassman conspire to target freshman parties, freshman like Ben. And at these parties, the parents are home. The older kids, though, they are not deterred by parents. Parents can be yelling at them to get off their lawn, and the kids will pretend to go, but really they are sneaking in around back. And once they get in, they tell the younger kids, this is our party now.

This is so common in my town that parents are calling it parasiting. They try to deal with it themselves. They try not to call the cops. They don't want their kids to be humiliated, but it can get overwhelming.

One mom I talked to got a call from a friend while this was going on at her house. The friend warned her, they'll find a way around you. You can't stop them.

Hillary Frank

The party has more than doubled in size. There are now 70 kids at Ben's house. His mom's on the lawn, calling out kids by name and threatening to tell their parents that they were here. His dad is getting into it with some kid who's trying to push his way inside the house.

Ben looks around. He's surrounded by strangers-- older strangers. They're chugging beer. They're on their phones explaining to their friends the best method of breaking into the house. Ben's standing right next to them as they're doing this. Someone turns up the music, and a corner of the basement suddenly becomes a dance floor. The toilet is full of beer cans.

Hillary Frank

After about an hour, kids started calling their friends telling them to not bother coming in. This party was lame. And as quickly as they came, they left.

Hillary Frank

For the rest of Ben's freshman year, he was terrified of older kids. He'd go to parties, but he hated when they'd get blown up. He hated when the older kids would take their control away.

But Ben grew up. He's a senior now. And he says--

Hillary Frank

He started getting those texts saying there's a party happening at so-and-so's and house. Let's blow it up. He started getting invited more and more till eventually the text would just be an address, nothing else. But he'd know what it meant.

[YELLING]

This sound comes from a video that Ben sent me that one of his friends shot at a party.

Hillary Frank

That's one of the things Ben told me he loves about crashing freshman parties. You never know who's going to show up. It's like nobody's invited, so everybody's invited.

Also, it's super convenient. There's always a party because you don't have to wait for your friend's parents to go out of town. And Ben says it's thrilling, what it takes to get into the house -- the Black Ops -- getting intel from your friends inside about which entryways are guarded and which are clear.

Hillary Frank

Ben spent two hours at my house sitting on my couch answering my questions. It all seemed to be getting a little too real for him. He was struggling to make sense of the boy he'd been and the man he'd become. By the end, he was lying down, rubbing his head.

Hillary Frank

Ben started philosophizing, talking about all the ways you change so quickly during those years in high school. He told me there are three phases when it comes to blowing up parties. Phase one is when you get blown up. You're an innocent, naive little freshman. Phase two, you're doing the blowing up. And it is deliciously sadistic. Phase three, you're kind of over it.

Hillary Frank

Ben's got a few months left in his senior year. He's more choosy about parties these days, but he says he'll still go because he's got to do this while he still can. In the fall, he'll start college. And he's pretty sure the parties there will be more sophisticated. And by that, I mean he won't have to break and enter. He'll walk through the front door like a real grown-up.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Hillary Frank is host of the wonderful parenting podcast The Longest Shortest Time. It's on the Earwolf network. longestshortesttime.com.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Act Two, Grown.

Sasheer Zamata is a comedian. She's on Saturday Night Live. She does a lot of her own stand-up. And like a lot of comics, Sasheer uses the stage to rehash real things that happened to her and try to make sense of them.

But recently, Sasheer felt like there was more to figure out about the stuff she was saying on stage. A warning-- the thing that kicked this off for her involves a nasty word, a racial slur. And there is no way for her to tell what happened without saying it a bunch of times. Sasheer's story about this starts with her on stage.

I've been telling a joke for a couple of years now. And it always gets a laugh. But when it happened, it was really scary. And it must have really shook me up because I did something I rarely do when I'm upset. I called my mom. And she actually found it funny.

[LAUGHTER]

Up until that point, I hadn't really thought about the fact that my mom got called the n-word all the time when she was younger. But my mom would often drop little tidbits of information like that. And like most kids, I ignored them because she's my mom. And her life before being my mom didn't really concern me. But I did notice some of her patterns when I was a kid.

The conversation stopped there because she never went into those memories. And I also never asked about them. I just assumed that my mom said things like that because she was old-school or close-minded. But I'm getting older. And I'm thinking about race more. I'm talking about it more in my act. And I thought, I should talk to my mom about this stuff. Why does she hate white people?

Until a few months ago, I knew very little about what she went through. I knew that in the '60s, my mom became one of the first black students to integrate a white junior high school in Forrest City, Arkansas. It was a big deal. She was part of history. And that's something I figured she'd be proud of.

Sasheer Zamata

When she says "we," she means her and her siblings. It was her mom who had the choice. I didn't know it was an option for families, that they got to choose whether they'd desegregate schools. I just thought some law was passed, and everyone agreed to go for it. But my grandmother basically forced my mom and several of her siblings to join the civil rights movement as pre-teens and go to a school where they weren't wanted.

Sasheer Zamata

Seems like not talking about this particular subject is a tradition in our family. When I asked my mom why she never talked to me about this, she said she didn't want me to inherit her feelings about white people and she wanted me to come to my own conclusions. But the more questions I asked, especially about school, the more I felt like she didn't want to talk about it because it's still really painful to her.

Sasheer Zamata

When I learned about the civil rights movement in school, I got a pretty truncated version of it. I remember learning about the Little Rock Nine. And I saw that famous picture of them entering Central High School surrounded by US soldiers. And then desegregation happened. And now we get to use the same bathrooms. That's pretty much all I got.

I didn't know about what those kids went through on a day-to-day basis. But my mother, on the other hand, did. The school she eventually went to was just a little over an hour away from Little Rock. And she was paying very close attention to what was going on there.

Sasheer Zamata

That's Daisy Bates, the head of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP at the time.

Sasheer Zamata

To be clear, the Little Rock Nine were as viciously persecuted as any black students at the time. They were spat on, verbally and physically abused, attacked with fire and acid. But my mom still envied them because in her mind, those kids had access to the one thing that would have made her own situation more bearable. They had the ear of a caring adult.

Sasheer Zamata

What her mother was teaching her was the same thing her country was teaching her, that her blackness was less valuable.

Sasheer Zamata

Of all the stuff we talked about, this is the part that made me the most sad. She feels the way she does about white people because white people were so terrible to her. And I get that. But there's something else going on. She's mad at her mom for putting her in that situation, forcing her to go to a place where white people could treat her that way.

Where I went to school, where I live, the job I have-- all those things are a direct result of desegregation. My life would have been totally different otherwise. And listening back to the recording of our conversation, I couldn't believe how many times I asked her if she was proud of her contribution.

Sasheer Zamata

It would be so easy for my mom to just say yes, even one time. People who weren't even in the civil rights movement claim that they were a part of the civil rights movement. I get that this was a hard period in her life. But I figured she could at least see how it benefited me.

I went to school with all sorts of kids. And kids did give me trouble. But it wasn't the white kids.

Sasheer Zamata

My mom and I have never had the closest relationship. She and my dad split up when I was nine. And at some point, I started to focus a lot of my anger over their divorce onto her. She was always very strict with me. So we fought a lot.

Eventually, I went away to college and the tension eased up a bit. But that's mostly because we talked less. Now that I've gotten older and sat through my fair share of therapy, I've been trying to let some of that resentment go. And I'm trying to think of my mother more as a whole person.

[LAUGHTER]

Sasheer Zamata

Even though we still don't agree on most things, at least we're talking. That's new. I like it.

She told me that they dated for three months, and then she dumped him because of her mom. Her uncle saw her out one night with him.

Sasheer Zamata

I get that. It's never easy to figure out what conversations to have with your mother.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Sasheer Zamata, you can see her on television on Saturday Night Live.

Coming up, I use my platform as a radio show host to ask a question I have been wanting to ask for years-- from WBEZ Chicago, when our program continues.

Chana Joffe-Walt

It's This American Life. I'm Chana Joffe-Walt sitting in for Ira Glass. Our show today is about things that make more sense when you're older. We've arrived at middle age, when a person begins to wonder, will this make sense when I'm older? Any of it? The choices I'm making, the work I'm doing, the place I live, how I'm spending my time, and how I'm not spending my time. That's one I think about a lot.

There's a letter in my desk at work. It's a little over the top, but it gets its point across. My four-year-old wrote it with the assistance of his babysitter. It reads, "Dear mommy, I don't want you to go away again. Love, Jacob."

So am I doing this right, making the right choices? And I'm going to regret these choices in 20 years in my 50s? I think a sort of classic way people try to answer this question is to find someone in their 50s who's living it and ask them. I've got one right nearby, same line of work.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Ira agreed to talk to me before he got on a plane last week. So here we are. Act Three: Middle Age. And we're talking about the choices Ira's made. Ira describes his 30s this way.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Ira Glass is the host of this show, just not this week.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Act Four: Old Age. So we begin when you're little. And there are things you do not know. You can't understand. And then you grow up, and you get it.

We fall in love. This is love. Or someone tells you what "hooker" means. I remember that vividly. Stuff eventually makes sense.

This last story, it's about what happens after that, long after that. It's about a man named Carl Duzen. Carl was diagnosed with Alzheimer's a year and a half ago at age 79. So after decades of adulthood, it is suddenly appropriate for a 40-year-old doctor to ask him questions like, can you tell me who the president is? Or, do you remember your name?

When Carl goes to the doctor, he always goes with his wife Susan. He always hates going. And he always knows his name.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Carl starts looking around for something. Goes in the kitchen. He seems to be lost. And then goes upstairs. Eventually, he comes down with a wooden box. Inside, it's felted with drafting tools.

Chana Joffe-Walt

To be clear, not necessarily to draw a clock, but to figure out why he couldn't draw a clock.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Carl has drawn a very precise circle, split it into twelfths, and scrawled the words "superposition of three types" in tiny letters in the corner of the page. He explains, with Susan's help, there are three layers of information here. There's the hours that are represented from 1 through 12, even though there are 24 hours in a day.

Chana Joffe-Walt

But Carl adds, after that layer is the second hand, which is now measuring 1 through 60 seconds.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Carl sat with his tools and his paper and his physicist's desire to decompose the problem before him. And he took apart each element of the clock until it made sense to him, the three layers, the fact that the eye goes to the larger minute hand first and your brain has to override that to focus on the smaller hour hand, which is actually more important even though it's smaller and not the first thing you see.

And then you're supposed to move to the longer minute hand. But don't be tricked because the second hand is also longer but it's skinnier. And by the end of all this, I just feel like, what the hell, clock? I can't believe this is the system we have for telling time. It's insane. It's a miracle anyone can ever just glance at their wrist and capture information, something Carl works very hard at.

Chana Joffe-Walt

A dementia diagnosis is being told you are now no longer going to understand things as you get older. For the first time in your life, the chronological forward march of knowledge will begin to reverse itself. But Carl is understanding things he never knew before. And this is the case with lots of people with dementia.

Through meeting Carl and other people, I talked to a woman who forgot how to make coffee. And then she broke down the steps involved so she could do it again. A guy who re-learned to use his cell phone. That's something Carl has also done.

Carl knows way more about a clock than most of us only because he forgot how to draw one. You learn what you need to know when you need to know it. Carl tells me proudly now that he understands the superposition of three types, he can use that to read a watch again. Susan raises her eyebrows skeptically at this, but says nothing.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Carl's wearing a watch, but it's small. And he doesn't seem to know how to deal with the fact that it's covered by part of his sleeve. Susan pulls out her gold watch, which has a much larger face.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Carl stops talking and is staring intensely at the watch. Susan looks very nervous. We are all leaning in. Later, I will realize that here is where I stopped breathing. Carl spends a while on that hour hand and then starts counting by fives in a whisper around the face of the watch.

Chana Joffe-Walt

There are a lot of things that make sense when you're older, as in a grown-up. And then there are things that make sense when you're actually getting old, when you start to make sense of losing things. That is what I'm sure most of us cannot fully grasp until we get there ourselves, to know-- to really know-- there is no path back.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Our program was produced today by Zoe Chace with Sean Cole, Neil Drumming, Stephanie Foo, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Brian Reed. Our editor is Joel Lovell. Julie Snyder is our editorial consultant. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Production help from [INAUDIBLE] Smith. Seth Lind is our operations director. Emily Condon is our production manager. Elise Bergerson is our business operations manager. Elna Baker scouts stories for our show. Kimberly Henderson is our office coordinator. Research help from Christopher Swetala. Music help from Damian Graef and Rob Geddis.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. And to my boss, Ira Glass, who graciously let me sit in as host this week--

Chana Joffe-Walt

I'm Chana Joffe-Walt. Ira will be back next week with more stories of This American Life.