Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [47]
It remained only to erect a second-story frame and rafters; to unfold the building’s wooden skin; and to snip tin and lay it down until it became a roof.
And from such unlikely makings, as if without anyone’s trying, sprang a greater structural unity surpassing the sum of its contributors.
There even seemed to be room in the community-building for me.
Eleven
The Dating Game
I followed Bill the neophyte one evening to a “hoeing,” which is another type of work bee that tended to draw younger, unmarried people. In the moonlight, it seemed as though the corn were talking. Amid the dark rustling leaves, a soft murmur of human voices could be heard. Dimly I spied my companion wrestling with a redroot almost as tall as he was. Out of the darkness came the question: “So do you still think I’m a weakling?”
I paused to collect my wits. “Why no!” I replied. “You’re forty percent muscle and sixty percent bone!” I was still trying to dispel his fears of inadequacy. Though Bill was a newcomer, he harbored hopes of spotting a prospective spouse tonight. I had come to observe that most misunderstood of human age-groups—the adolescent.
Fred, who was in earshot, asked, “What about the brain?” Fred was one of the erstwhile Amish boys.
“The brain is a muscle,” Bill quickly returned.
“I didn’t know that,” Fred replied warily.
“Thirty percent of that forty percent!” Bill proclaimed.
“Is that why,” I said, feigning puzzlement, “you have trouble standing up straight?”
Fred doubled over laughing.
I continued, “We’d better get back to the weeds. This is a strange one.” I gave Bill’s leg a gentle whack.
“Ow!” Bill shrieked.
The time for cookies and Kool-Aid arrived, and all the young men hovered outside the entrance to the host’s house, frantically combing their hair. When the door opened, they stumbled over each other getting through it. The fairer half were already assembled inside on the far wall, conversing with distressing abandon. The males stood bashfully at the door and looked at their feet, a great gulf of untraversed floor space yawning in front of them. Bill lifted his head for a look, but in this dim kerosene light he could more imagine than see his prospects.
In sailed the cookies on a tray. A general uproar ensued as the young men rushed forward, forgetting their manners entirely. They suddenly appeared much more intent on gulping grape Kool-Aid than on getting to know their future mates. Perhaps the tension had been too much. Or perhaps they were genuinely thirsty. In all of fifteen minutes they were out the door. Had I missed something? Why had boys only talked to boys, and girls to girls?
Someone later told me the young people had gotten to know one another well enough during their long winter days in the private Minimite grammar school. These frolics merely added a little evening spice. So much for Bill’s courtship hopes, however; he had attended a different school.
It was more than mildly amazing how little transpired across the gulf that separated the men from the women in that room. The boys seemed genuinely cowed by that shimmering collectivity of femininity, and the girls, for their part, were oblivious to the boys. Nor was heroic self-restraint evident among these sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-old pubescent guys. They simply seemed too embarrassed to know what to do, like the kids at my first seventh-grade dance—too unaware of what they were feeling to know where to begin. But even in the seventh grade, skintight jeans, halter tops, and muscle shirts were the rule, and visual stimuli kept hormones at a constant state of high alert. Now, of course, children of even younger age have access to e-mail, chat rooms, pagers, and phones that make sex as easy as the click of a mouse.
But maybe there is more to life during the fleeting years of adolescence than coupling like rabbits. And as far as I could tell, the scant awareness of the facts of life