
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, February 28, 1994                   TAG: 9403010012
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

POOR BIRD, AT THAT AWKWARD AGE BEFORE SPRING

AMONG the birds that visit my feeders is one rufous-sided towhee. He doesn't come every day. But when he's there, he scratches morosely along the ground, surrounded by clouds of noisy chickadees, raucous grosbeaks and furiously busy sparrows.

He attracts my sympathy. When the weather warms, there'll be plenty of other towhees to keep him company. But, for now, how must he feel?

I suppose anyone who's survived adolescence knows. For, is there any lonelier or more miserable age?

This is blatant anthropopathism, I know. Whatever that towhee "feels," he doesn't feel lonely. But when I watch him - without peers, without pals, surrounded by cheerful cliques - I see a scruffed 15-year-old, wishing he could just shrivel up and disappear.

All through high school, I felt completely, abjectly left out. I thought myself the ugliest, least likable student in my school. I mourned my lack of popularity, my lack of skill, my lack of potential. In desperation, I envied classmates who moved through life with aplomb, beauty, prowess, grace and ease.

I was completely satisfied, too, that my assessment of myself and of my classmates was accurate. Nothing anyone could say to me could dissuade me from my miserable convictions, either.

Well, high-school graduation was 25 years ago. But from time to time, I still see classmates. Now when we meet, we meet as adults with jobs and families and, most importantly, with measurable confidence. We chat. We laugh about the past.

The greatest revelation of my life has been that every one of my high-school classmates - every single one of them - suffered the same torment as I. We each assumed our personal misery was unique and total, while everyone around us glided through life trailing smiles and success. We each assumed ourselves to be one of a lonely kind.

If we'd just known it, though, we all scratched around together, each of us a towhee amidst hordes of chickadees, sparrows and grosbeaks.

I wouldn't repeat the years of my adolescence for any promised reward, even if, through some miracle, I could do so with the knowledge and confidence of my current age. I believe the air of adolescence is so charged with anxiety that even a 43-year-old, cast back into that miasma, would find herself again looking into her mirror and wailing, "Oh, no one will ever love me! How could they?"

Even the most successful, the most famous, the most beautiful adult will tell an interviewer, "I was an awkward teen-ager. Fat and ugly, nothing but legs and teeth, never popular, shy. I wasn't like the others around me at all."

The truth is, though, we were, each of us, exactly like the others. Every single one of us was shy and awkward, all legs and teeth, anxious and forsaken and miserable with self-conscious envy. All of us, lone towhees in the brush.

\ Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.

by CNB