For my seventy-fifth birthday, my younger sister presented me with one of the best birthday gifts I’ve ever received. She’d spent hours going through a stack of 8-millimeter home movies that had been filmed by our father in the late 1940s. The scenes she included starred me in all my glory, the little girl my dad dubbed “Sarah Bernhardt.” Hmm . . . Was I already a Drama Queen? I didn’t think so, but what the hell did I know? In the trailer of sorts, I was in a blow-up swimming pool with three other kids around my age. There I was, holding onto the side of the pool, splashing away at breakneck speed; the others were quick to follow my lead. A natural leader, eh?
I’m not proud of the next little scene. The other kids and I had moved to the sandbox in our backyard, where each of us held a wooden spoon, all the better to dig with. I can only surmise what motivated me to spin around a couple of times like I was playing “Pin the tail on the donkey” and whack my supposed friend in the head. And the look on my face, a hint of a smirk that said, “Wow, that was fun.”
Many people don’t have the benefit of home movies that capture them as kids. Their memories may be murky, spotty, just images here and there. But I was thrilled to see myself in action. I was a little girl with tons of energy, leadership qualities (well, that may be a stretch), and a bit of a devilish streak. Looking at the film was one of those magic moments when I felt a strong connection to the universe and my place in it. Everything fell into place. I vowed to cherish all that I was and all that I’d become.
In 1964, the director Michael Apted helped make “Seven Up!,” the first of a series of documentaries that would visit the same group of a dozen or so Britons every seven years, starting at age seven; Apted envisioned the project—which was updated most recently in 2019, with “63 Up”—as a socioeconomic inquiry about these “kids who have it all,” and these other kids who “have nothing.”
But things didn’t always go as anticipated. Some of the kids who “had it all” didn’t rise to some manufactured heights; others who supposedly had nothing were happy, self-fulfilled, and solid members of the middle class.
The nature (innate, genetic) versus nurture (the environment and all that it includes) controversy has been one of fascination and disagreement since Plato, who argued that humans are born with innate ideas and knowledge, and Aristotle, who proposed that the mind is a “blank slate” at birth, with knowledge gained through experience.
Today, the understanding is that both nature and nurture interact to make us the kind of people we are. The idea that these two forces conflict has been replaced by a more cordial interpretation that recognizes the importance of both.
So, what memories do you hold of your younger self? How do those hold up against the woman you’ve become?