As I continue to clean this place out, discarding whatever can be discarded in preparation -- for what? -- I don't know. Let's just say it is a time to get rid of whatever doesn't really matter.
Today, I came across this, an ancient photo album of my parents, with photos from the 40s and 50s. Pandora's Box.
That's me and my sister Kathy in a tiny backyard blow-up pool. Must have been in our backyard in Royal Oak.
That's me with my first girlfriend, Susie. As far as I know, neither of us ever told the other a lie, which means our relationship was unique, and superior to my adult relationships with women.
Here's my parents in the center of a gathering of the executives and their wives at the company where my father worked in Bay City in the 60s.
***
Every now and again, not too often. I wonder what my parents would think of the man I've become. The basic outlines of my trajectory were well-established by the time they passed, of course, including the primary fact that I have six children, but they knew nothing of the chaos of my last eight years.
As far as they understood it, my later years were settled -- married to a lovely woman, happy to be raising a second family, proud of how well my first three have turned out, professionally and financially secure, a homeowner with a solid career and plenty of options going forward.
By living 2.5 years longer, my Mom got to glimpse a bit more of what was to come than my Dad. He never knew about 9/11, or the dot.com collapse, or my appointment to the faculty at Stanford. He never got to meet my youngest child.
But as far as my Mom knew, all was more or less fine in my realm, and that's as it should be. After all of their hard work raising a son like me, I hope the last thing either of my parents had to be concerned about on their way out of this place was my sorry state of affairs.
Another way to look at it is that they missed the best, which always was to come. The past eight years, though filled with chaos, have finally allowed me to emerge as the writer I have always been (even though very few people seem to yet know about that!)
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, documents that to be an expert at anything, you have to have devoted at least 10,000 hours (or 30 years at the rate of one hour a day; 15 years at the rate of two hours a day, etc.), but that once you do so, it is inevitable that you will become an expert.
Thus, I hereby declare myself an expert! I figure I have devoted somewhere around 30,000 hours to honing my craft, so this is about as good as I am likely to get.
Still, neither of my parents ever contemplated that they had birthed a writer. Even as I went away to college, that role had never crossed their minds or their lips in discussions with me about what I might become.
I think of this now and again, not regarding myself at all, but about my own precious children. All that my parents ever hoped for me, I believe, was to be myself, however tortured and complicated that might turn out to be. I actually think they loved me for who I was (and still am) and that they thought I was special somehow.
That's how I have tried to love my kids, all six. Oh, I've had dreams and visions of who they might become, but the older three have already long exceeded any of what I might have imagined for them; and the younger three are well on their way of doing the same.
Mainly, if you asked me my parenting philosophy, I do not want to get in their way. It's a different era than when I was young, and my parents did get in my way, now and then, though I suspect not as much as they got in my sisters' way to being who they needed to be. Such was the nature of the gender double-standard when we were young.
With what time I may have left, short or long, all I wish to be is an enabler of my children's dreams. Not my dreams. Their dreams. And I hope they will always know how proud I am of them as they evolve into exactly the people they decide to become.
-30-
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