Coming of Age

After indulging myself by reading two coming of age novels in one week, one set in Western Australia and the other in the land of Palestine in 1946, I am adrift in a sea of definitions.

Rites, rituals, elaborate ceremonies and frightening journeys mark the act of separation from childhood. Testing of one's mettle may be required. The experience, often traumatic, at times spiritual, thrusts the individual out of one accustomed place into a larger stage.

In Japan The Coming of Age festival, Seijin no hi, is celebrated on the second Monday of January. If you turned twenty in that year you are one of the celebrants. It is also the year you may vote, drink and smoke—legally.

Did I have a significant coming of age experience? Did I even know that I entered the passageway leaving childhood? Was my entry a slide on a barely perceptible slope and my arrival unheralded by pomp and circumstance? Did I realize that doors close and memory is not an entryway?

No solitary wilderness experience, no confirmation, no sleepless vigils, no organized initiation--

I didn't know the first time I traveled the subway by myself I took a step —in the process of my coming of age. We lived in the Bronx and the IND line and the bus provided a magic carpet away from 176th Street and my apartment building.

My mother’s words, before my first ride unaccompanied by an adult, "Don't use the bathroom in the subway and stay away from the edge."

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We loved walking through the entire train by opening up the door of a subway car and moving on to the next car while the train was moving. It wasn't dangerous and there were handrails. Low-level risk. Being a New Yorker meant knowing that skill.


The bathrooms in the subway either smelled of disinfectant or needed disinfectant. I met my first bag lady in the 42nd Street bathroom. She was washing out some stockings in a sink and standing barefoot on the tile floor.

"My son's meeting me for dinner," she explained, "and I didn’t have time to go home. You mind if I wash my feet out in the sink? I stand a lot."

I watched her try and lift her foot to the sink and give up.

"You know," she said, "rich women get pedicures. I got one once."

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A cement gully separated my apartment building from the adjacent tenement. Instead of a long grassy plain at the end of the slope, a three-foot flat area abruptly stopped at a fence. When it snowed the gully became our Olympic track. You sat on something slippery and set off down the slope. The trick—jump off before hitting the fence. For several years I watched the older kids and then the year I turned twelve I knew that I couldn’t wait any longer. Annie, my best friend, went down twice before I sat down on a square of corrugated cardboard and stared down the gully. At the end my timing was off and I landed facedown on the ice and grit.

Both my mother and doctor reminded me not to pick at the scabs because I’d have scars. “You did it,” said Annie, “even if your landing hurt.” What hurt was the doctor removing the grit from all the scratches and gashes.

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My seventh grade home economics teacher insisted we say a prayer before we ate our home cooked dishes. That was the year I decided that I was an agnostic and therefore I couldn’t say a prayer. Miss Gannon, sister of a priest and a believer in discipline and compliance, called my mother in to school.

“Not only is she disrespectful, but she also smirks.”

I held to my belief in a refusal to say a prayer. My mother asked if my standing politely was acceptable. Miss Gannon, stood her ground. “If she doesn’t participate she doesn’t cook.” For the rest of the year I cleaned the kitchen when everyone else cooked and I never tasted the Welsh Rabbit that made everyone sick.

It didn’t matter that by the eighth grade God was back in my good graces. That year I stood my ground. A step.

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This coming of age doesn’t happen quickly even if there is a prepared ceremony. Every change requires a coming of age.

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Sometimes the journey is a magical or somber, or hilarious, or a collection of myths.