At 18 our convictions are hills we look down from; at 45 they are caves where we hide

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Oh, we’ve all heard it so many times it’s become trite. But one day you’re a snot nosed kid who knows nothing about anything and then one day you are a teenager and you know everything. 

By 14, I knew it all and my mother was an insufferable fool.  We were oil and water always and our differences were really apparent when I was 14 and she was 33. She was coming to grips with what was then middle aged and the “don’t trust anyone over 30” mindset.  I simply knew it all.  I did listen to my father.  He was an exceptionally intelligent man and a much better communicator than my mom.  Plus, I was a daddy’s girl.  I still had some respect for his opinions.

I had an opinion about simply everything.  Some of them were things I had heard elsewhere and simply parroted without any real consideration on my part.  For example, I was certain my father was correct in his stated opinion that only Communists drank sweetened tea.

We were living in North Carolina, a couple of heartbeats from the South Carolina border and finding unsweetened tea, which is what our family had always drunk being the damn Yankees that we were, was an impossible feat. And given how hot things were from about April through October, we drank astounding amounts of iced tea. 

Now I rebelled against everything my family stood for, and thus adopting our tea position was an aberration in my behavior.  But I swallowed the sweet tea drinking communist thing in its entirety. I may have even taken it literally.

With my friends, I pontificated at length about the weakness of character sweetening one’s tea revealed.  They, also teenagers, quickly formulated opinions that were in direct opposition to my own.  I recall a knock down drag out fight with my best friend about it that morphed into an attack on my character because I listened to my dad’s cassette of Patsy Cline any chance I had.

Nancy, a hard-core rock ‘n roller, her brother went to Woodstock after all, was not having Patsy Cline. 

We didn’t speak for a week.

But a funny thing happened on my way to middle age. I re-enrolled in college at 38 and began working on the degree I abandoned at 19 because I knew everything already and discovered I didn’t know shit. Suddenly all of my convictions were being examined and tested in the glaring light of the hard sciences and the social sciences.  I was appalled at what I found in the crevasses of my mind.

It was probably the greatest growth period of my life — those nearly 10 years it took me to complete my degree. But I began questioning everything.  I examined my beliefs and the way I was raised. 

Hoo boy. 

When the dust settled, I had a new set of convictions – much smaller than before – and an overriding, and perhaps overbearing, penchant for “Now, well it depends” welling up when asked a simple question. A degree in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and Appalachian studies while working in a teaching social work program will do that to you. In fact, it’s hard for me to develop a hardline conviction about much of anything these days. 

Am I hiding in a cave?  Perhaps. But I like it here.  I’ve made it cozy and the few principles I do have, I will defend but I won’t insist that you share them. I am not that interested in convincing you that I am right, and you are wrong because:1) I’m not sure what’s right for me is right for you and 2) I’ve learned over the years that convictions are not usually well thought out.  They tend to be knee jerk reactions to our experiences.  If our experiences change, as mine did, we find ourselves shedding them like outgrown snakeskin.

I’m sometimes criticized as wishy-washy.  I have no desire to defend myself against that label.  But I will say this: I still find sweetened tea to be an undrinkable libation and am surprised at its longevity.  I’m also still a Patsy Cline fan.

And for the record, I don’t want lemon in my tea either.  In my water, yes. In my tea, no  As they used to say in the wild west of the early days of the internet, your mileage may vary.