Janis Ian Documentary: We Remember Being 17

The PBS Masters’ Series will be shown in June

“At 17” is a song filled with adolescent angst that still hits me when I remember the pain. I was not a hometown beauty queen…as most of us weren’t. That lyric and those whose names were never called when choosing sides for basketball make me think about all the ways we had of publicly shaming each other. Do they still go on?

Thank God I’m 70 and not 17. But for some reason, those slights still linger in the heart. I bet you remember whose birthday party you weren’t invited to, or what sport you were really bad at, or the dorky clothes you had to wear, or whatever your angst was about.

The song’s lyrics sound so knowing and old for a singer-songwriter who wasn’t yet 25. But maybe that’s a hallmark of youth — to sound wise and cynical before one could be either. Janis Ian looks older at 22 in her smoky, serious way than she does as an elfin white-haired oldster, laughing as she holds her guitar.

She and I are almost the same age. She was precocious, a teenager hanging out with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, who themselves were in their early 20s — and that seems so impossibly long ago.

I watched the documentary on the AARP series invitations that give members sneak previews. Sneak previews are important at this age, because you may not see the full movie — either memory or other events or whether we are here or not get in the way.

There is something deep about the memories of childhood and adolescence.

I can’t explain what it is. Yesterday my 5-year-old grandchild and I unwrapped the cellophane from Barbie accessories that I had ordered. At Target or other stores, it’s almost impossible to just buy some shoes or some dresses or small items that fit in a Barbie-doll-sized backpack. The retailers try and sell you a big package of dolls and manufactured experiences.

I love that my granddaughter loves my Barbies, and I clearly remember fitting the shoes on those tiny angled feet and stretching out the doll’s arms and legs so I could pull on the cinched waist sundress or other out-of-style-now outfit.

My mother had made me Barbie clothes, too, of patterns and leftover material. The leftover materials are from blouses or dresses I remember that were long since outgrown, and discarded. It’s like pulling out my jar of buttons and remembering the blue buttons with an embossed design that went to a blue overcoat I wore in grade school, or pearl buttons that belonged to a blouse.

Maybe other people look at old photos.

I feel an embossed button and remember my small fingers playing with them, a tactile memory.

That is part of the miracle, too, that we were these children and then adolescents and then striving adults and we hold all those memories and are the same person and someone else entirely. It reminds me of the times I was an interim administrator in nursing homes, and people with memory loss would wander into my office. The home was small enough that I knew individuals in that rural place. “Where’s my husband?” one woman would always ask, and I would always reply “He’s out checking on the herd,” and she would nod and go away, satisfied.

So here is to those of us who were not hometown beauty queens, or basketball stars, or even if we were, we were not something else. And here’s to checking on the herd, that bittersweet satisfaction that comes from a long-lived life, and being all those things, and more. Whether they are factual or not, they are true.

Sharon Johnson is a grandmother who walks by the river.