Happy Valentine’s Day

—02.14.2000—

In my dispatch from 1/28/2000 I ended on kind of an ominous note, saying that I though our interconnectedness would do us in. Perhaps it’s not interconnectedness itself that will do us in, but I do wonder if we can all stand being so close to one another. Are we any good at it? Hopefully we’ll improve. Happy Valentine’s Day.

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I find I’m having trouble filling my time. The other day I read a book called the The Ostrich Position about sex education in Britain written in the early eighties by a woman named Carol Lee. She wrote about how we as a culture have stuck our heads into the sand when it comes to giving kids honest information about sex and sexuality from which they can make their own informed decisions. She also wrote about advocating for mutual respect between educators and kids, and for education being a quest for understanding instead of “training.” I really enjoyed it and thought she made a number of good points.

In one of the most interesting, the author quoted a woman relating the experience of “playing doctor” with the boy next door when she was about eight or nine. She regarded those experiences as really enjoyable and innocent, an important part of the foundation of her childhood. I tried to put myself in the position of a parent. What would I do if I came across my kid playing doctor with the neighbors? Would I encourage, discourage or take a neutral role? The book argues that we prepare children (or attempt to) for their development as intellectual beings but do virtually nothing to prepare them for their role as sexual beings. What’s more we often actively discourage them from developing along those lines. Why is that? Why do some parents enroll their children in head start programs at the age of three in hopes of giving them an edge on getting into the best university but do nothing to ensure they get into the best relationships?

I think about how sex was dealt with when my friends and I were growing up. One friend of mine told me that when he was aabout sixteen his mom found a red smear on the front of his underwear. He’d been painting sets for a school play and had gone to the bathroom with painted-stained hands. When those briefs made the rounds through the laundry room, his mom thought she spotted lipstick. He remembers being really confused when she confronted him through a sideways barrage of hysterical yelling. The message he heard was “Don’t even think about oral sex!”

I imagine a lot of us were sent off to college with same, brief, “Be sure to use condoms,” admonition. What can you do though? The parents of my friends, like my own, grew up in the post-war years. I imagine healthy guidelines and honest conversations around sex were even rare then. Again, what we forget takes us generations to relearn.

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Being here alone on Gugh has its odd moments. Yesterday morning I awoke and looked out of the window to see Gugh being invaded. Twenty or thirty sets of senior citizens wrapped in outdoor gear stood on the other side of the bar waiting and wading into the receding tide, trying to get the most of their package holiday. In the cove, the first yacht of the season had moored and its French occupants were heading for the beach six or seven deep in their struggling dinghy.

I was just leaving to head over to St. Agnes in my waterproofs and wellies when an inquisitive visitor stopped me. “Where are you from and where are you sailing to?”