The Age of Innocence, Shoplifting, and The Bear

"Coastal" by Mark Doty and the Audacity of Childhood

Abigail Breslin as Olive in Little Miss Sunshine

I used to carry a set of my parents’ spare car keys around the Mall of New Hampshire and jingle them casually but conspicuously when walking by a pack of cute (or any) boys. I was 13 or 14 but looked younger and wanted to look old enough to drive. If you see a small girl shaking keys at you at the mall, now you know why.

I’d usually be with my best friend, Christopher, who often shoplifted. We were in Filene’s one day when he walked out wearing an expensive down coat. I thought he was trying it on until he yanked at the tag, slipped it into the pocket of one of the other coats, and started walking through Men’s, past Cosmetics, and then out into the Mall. I followed at some distance. When he stopped near the water fountain, I kept walking. I didn’t dangle any keys and I didn’t look back. Later, he tried to give me the coat. 

From there, Christopher just kept escalating the risk, and later I’d understand why.  It turned out that stealing things was like a placeholder risk that was standing in temporarily for the big-ticket one that loomed. When he called me from his East Boston apartment the year after high school to tell me he was gay, I said something like Yeah…I mean…I…Didn’t we know that?  

His being gay was something even we had elided, which also makes sense in hindsight. It was precarious for Christopher in rural early 80s New Hampshire. His nice house with a pool and fancy kitchen came with a new French Canadian stepfather, Roland, a round and grave contractor who wore flannel and slacks. He’d married Christopher’s mother fresh off her bad divorce. She and Christopher had moved out of their studio apartment in Lawrence and over the border to New Hampshire into a house Roland had built himself.

There were more trees and fewer sirens, but no downtown or stores or independent way to get around. The country high school had a thriving agricultural program, including cows you could see outside the classroom windows. It was an uneasy habitat for both of us, but especially Christopher with his pressed Levi’s and pastel alligator shirts and stolen jackets. We loved the B-52s, Bronski Beat, Joy Division, and Seventeen magazine.

I plunked all the change I had into my dorm’s payphone and listened about his new life and apartment near the airport until I ran out of quarters and dimes. I had to say a quick goodbye to this new, more embodied and comfortable version of my friend. 

I took placeholder risks back then, too. I’d figure out where the edges of things were, and then bend or go around those edges to accommodate what I wanted to do. Could I kiss a new boy if my friends were around? Could I hitchhike if it was daytime? Could I trust the older, sweet-talking fireman? Looking back, the answers are all no, girl. No. I was a poor calculator of risks, because I was more innocent and ignorant than I imagined myself to be. When I get wistful about childhood– usually my own kids’, but my own, too–there’s always a chaser of gratitude that the ignorance of my teens and early 20s didn’t cost me more.

***

I’m a sucker for stories where the protagonist has a shaky relationship with the passage of time, especially crossing over from innocence to something else. Not just the coming of age that happens around 13, but all the comings of age that come for us after that. 

I think of the adults in Little Miss Sunshine who get their existential second wind from their kid, Olive’s, impossible dream. Or the scene in Adaptation when Meryl Streep’s character says “I want to be a baby again. I want to be new.” I think of poems we’ve discussed in these essays, like Atwood’s You Begin and Bishop’s In the Waiting Room and Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays. I think of Updike’s story Pigeon Feathers, and Joyce’s Araby.

I think of the episode of Pen15 when the besties envision aloud their sad and separate futures as adults, but then just can’t abide it. So they amend that vision into a commendably and sustainably realistic version of the middle school best-friend future fantasy (“We’ll probably get divorced around the same time/Yeah, because they got in the way of us…” and “We’ll probably have kids a couple years apart/Yeah because I’m gonna have issues and you’re gonna have to help me with that…”) 

I think of the episode “Napkins” in The Bear this season with Tina and Mikey talking about Tina’s middle-age job search:

T: And I was thinking it would be real easy for me to get really angry at these kids.

M: Like “Fuck them kids. They don’t know shit.”

T: They haven’t been through nothing, they don’t know real stress (sighs) but I’m also like…“I would give anything to be one of them motherfuckers.”

M: Ah, dude. So fucking true. I’m jealous as fuck.

In Mark Doty’s poem, Coastal, the speaker encounters a child’s faith in the world to repair itself, and in her own power and obligation to fix a broken loon. In the poem is an adult-child interaction where the child is not asking advice and the adult is not giving it. Instead, we see the audacity of innocence as a powerful force even against more powerful and inevitable things. She’s the more evolved one, and we all see it.

COASTAL

Cold April and the neighbor girl
—our plumber’s daughter—
comes up the wet street

from the harbor carrying,
in a nest she’s made
of her pink parka,

a loon. It’s so sick,
she says when I ask.
Foolish kid,

does she think she can keep
this emissary of air?
Is it trust or illness

that allows the head
—sleek tulip—to bow
on its bent stem

across her arm?
Look at the steady,
quiet eye. She is carrying

the bird back from indifference,
from the coast
of whatever rearrangement

the elements intend,
and the loon allows her.
She is going to call

the Center for Coastal Studies,
and will swaddle the bird
in her petal-bright coat

until they come.
She cradles the wild form.
Stubborn girl.

- Mark Doty

Doty, Mark. 2008. Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. 

It’s pretty amazing and challenging to look at this poem–and this idea–with teenagers. I taught a class called Childhood and Memory in Literature once.  Just once. Because it only half-worked—the reading part was great, but the writing part less so. I learned that asking a teenager to write about their childhood relies on something most teens don’t have quite yet: the critical distance and insight that come only with time and experience. It’s like standing too close to a big painting.

But in literature and stories, writers can give characters that time and critical distance. So reading stories about characters reckoning with childhood–its pain, luminosity,  grandiosity and (for the lucky) its faith in goodness–well, that was really something. That was so good.

The speaker in Coastal beholds this kind of faith manifest in this little girl. When students and I would read and discuss this poem, they’d sometimes feel sorry for the speaker, and wonder if he’s jealous of the girl’s innocence and her belief in goodness and in her own power. The kids saw a gulf between the child and the speaker, whose adult vision is sharp but whose chances at guilelessness are nil. To boot, the guy doesn’t have just “plain adult” eyes (direct quote!)  but the eyes of a poet, which some of the students saw as a heavy burden and others saw as a way to be more childlike and “in wonderment”. The students said: 

• Being a poet. Isn’t that like having the eyes of a child? 

• Yeah- but with the word skills of an adult

• Shouldn’t all adults be cynical? Or heartbroken, with just multiple heartbreaks…

• I love Pink parka, and sleek tulip and Look at the steady, quiet eye…

• Such a sweet way to put it…

• It’s tough, though. Imagine all the shit you’ve seen as a full adult but with like superhuman observational skills…

The speaker knows that the natural world is and might always be indifferent to pink-parka’d girls. But as one student insisted, he also knows that the Center for Coastal Studies probably won’t be. That’s something, isn’t it? Our speaker can’t be a child, but he can look very clearly and carefully at the way she does her looking. He can observe this girl, who’s foolish, then stubborn, and then worth writing a poem about.  He can get some of her shine, proximal and refracted.

Here it is again:

COASTAL

Cold April and the neighbor girl
—our plumber’s daughter—
comes up the wet street

from the harbor carrying,
in a nest she’s made
of her pink parka,

a loon. It’s so sick,
she says when I ask.
Foolish kid,

does she think she can keep
this emissary of air?
Is it trust or illness

that allows the head
—sleek tulip—to bow
on its bent stem

across her arm?
Look at the steady,
quiet eye. She is carrying

the bird back from indifference,
from the coast
of whatever rearrangement

the elements intend,
and the loon allows her.
She is going to call

the Center for Coastal Studies,
and will swaddle the bird
in her petal-bright coat

until they come.
She cradles the wild form.
Stubborn girl.

- Mark Doty

Doty, Mark. 2008. Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems.