Kids grown and on their own,
a parent can’t help but look back and wonder. What just happened? Why did I
have kids, anyhow?
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| Flagstaff AZ |
The Biblical mandate to
“multiply and replenish the earth” has been fulfilled to planet-destroying
excess. Few of us need extra hands on the farm. Birth control is available and acceptable. Was my desire to replicate the sacred DNA merely
selfish? My kids were planned, but I hadn’t wondered why at the time--it’s what
people did, survival of the species.
One obvious answer: ready-made
friends. Taught and loved well, they might love and respect you no matter how
weird you seem to everyone else. And with a properly installed work ethic, you
get a free place to stay when you’re too poor to go anywhere or do anything on
your “personal time off.” (Formerly known as “paid vacation.”)
That was part of it, I guessed,
as I drove north again to sleep on the dank couch in the dilapidated trailer
shared by sons two and three. Beyond their little trailer park, raggedy pine
forested hills, new places to hike. Like a camping vacation, but slightly less
filthy. Music, laughter, philosophy, gizmos, theirs was an amusing world. They
slept on bunk beds in the one little bedroom, among instruments and amplifiers
and scattered clean and dirty clothes. Greasy kitchen, a bit rank.
“You guys live like animals,”
I’d gripe, “No woman would want to spend five minutes in this stink-hole!” “True,
that,” they’d agree, “If we start cleaning you’ll know we found true love.”
Maybe after a few years of nihilistic hedonism they’d be ready to start a
family. Or not. “Hey, whatever,” I often told ‘em, “if you’re not sure whether
to make a baby--don’t.”
Son Three had recently made
the difficult decision to
quit college, halfway through a four year academic
scholarship, sentencing him to several years’ immediate, possibly permanent,
poverty. To his credit he quit in an orderly fashion, between semesters, unlike
Son Two who had simply stopped going one day, unannounced.
My wife and I had
relentlessly insisted they go to college. Our early struggles with poverty, and
my perpetual whining about idiot employers, should have been reason enough. Again
I was unsurprised but perturbed. Sure, the ‘American Dream’ has always been
rigged for the rich, but couldn’t people rebel more comfortably with “an
education”?
He and I went hiking the next
day, on a drizzly afternoon. North of the trailers, west of the cement-block
warehouses, a NO TRESPASSING sign marked the rocky trail up past the railroad
tracks. (We generally ignored such signs, “They don’t mean us” we’d joke.) Scattered
trash, side trails to camp spots of the homeless. The trash humans were regularly
picked up and disposed of, to keep the Owners’ property values safe.
We huddled under trees above
the tracks, to rest and wait for the rain to slow. Trains thundered past while
we discussed life and the future. He wanted to work and live and travel and see
where it went, to live in poverty rather than spend another minute in a
classroom. (I knew that feeling.) He decided this after many hours of meditation,
he said.
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| Flagstaff AZ |
Meditation?
During childhood bedtime
enforcement, he had often complained, “I’m not sleepy!” “Pretend to
sleep," we’d tell him, “make up some dreams.” The little insomniac dove
into deeper and deeper states of relaxation, sometimes for hours before falling
asleep, he now informed me. The grinding boredom of a moronic “No Child Gets
Ahead" school system led him to discover he could reach that deep state
almost at will. One day, during his last year of high school, a hippie teacher
taught his English class how to meditate--so
that’s what I’ve been doing! he realized. Now he used it as a tool: to help
figure out who he is and what he wants. And to relax and escape during his new
dishwashing-at-the-old-folks-home workaday world.
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| Flagstaff Arizona |
His words brought to mind the
helpful and hopeful meditations of my young quasi-hippie years. Tense and uneasy
by nature, I’d forgotten I owned such a critical skill. Thank you son!
Beyond procreation, here was
a reason to have babies: to remind us of important stuff we forget over years
of drudgery, improve on it even. Or if they earnestly attempt to do right and
follow their bliss, remind us to keep trying no matter how many times we have
failed. What radiant beings!--and we are radiant still, just weaker and
wrinkled.
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| Flagstaff Arizona |
What fierce affection grips
us for these creatures who come out from between our legs! What fiery
heartache, thinking of all they must endure in a lifetime, no matter how
“successful.” But hope also: my son, wiser and braver than I, might be alright,
happy even. Wasn’t that the goal, happiness, or at least bemused melancholia?
So I decided to be proud of
my college dropout, for taking the time to listen to himself, and for standing
up for that self, in defiance of the culture and his parents. No matter where
his road went now, he owned it. That took guts at 20, or at any age.
After the rain we meandered through
the low rent neighborhoods on the other side of the tracks, back to the trailer.
Then we grilled some cheese sandwiches.
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| Flagstaff Arizona |
%$#@!
“The
world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a
living mystery: our birth, our death, our being in the moment – these are
mysteries. They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of
self-exploration, empowerment and hope for the human enterprise. And our
culture has killed that, taken it away from us, made us consumers of shoddy
products and shoddier ideals. We have to get away from that; and the way to get
away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of the body...exploring
the mind as a tool for personal and social transformation. The hour is late;
the clock is ticking; we will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball. We
are the inheritors of millions and millions of years of successfully lived
lives and successful adaptations to changing conditions in the natural world.
"Now the
challenge passes to us, the living, that the yet-to-be-born may have a place to
put their feet and a sky to walk under;... caring for, empowering, and building
a future that honours the past, honours the planet and honours the power of the
human imagination. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming
itself and the planet, as the human imagination. Let’s not sell it straight.
Let’s not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies. Let’s not give our control over
to the least among us. Rather, claim your place in the sun and go forward into
the light. The tools are there; the path is known; you simply have to turn your
back on a culture that has gone sterile and dead, and get with the program of a
living world and a re-empowerment of the imagination.”
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| Near Perkinsville, Arizona |
%$#@!
In the dining-room, the door firmly closed,
Babbitt walked to his son, put both hands on his shoulders. “You’re more or
less right. They all talk too much. Now what do you plan to do, old man?”
“Gosh, dad, are you really going to be
human?”
“Well, I— Remember one time you called us
‘the Babbitt men’ and said we ought to stick together? I want to. I don’t
pretend to think this isn’t serious. The way the cards are stacked against a
young fellow to-day, I can’t say I approve of early marriages. But you couldn’t
have married a better girl than Eunice; and way I figure it, Littlefield is
darn lucky to get a Babbitt for a son-in-law! But what do you plan to do?
Course you could go right ahead with the U., and when you’d finished—”
“Dad, I can’t stand it any more. Maybe it’s
all right for some fellows. Maybe I’ll want to go back some day. But me, I want
to get into mechanics. I think I’d get to be a good inventor. There’s a fellow
that would give me twenty dollars a week in a factory right now.”
“Well—” Babbitt crossed the floor, slowly,
ponderously, seeming a little old. “I’ve always wanted you to have a college
degree.” He meditatively stamped across the floor again. “But I’ve never—Now,
for heaven’s sake, don’t repeat this to your mother, or she’d remove what
little hair I’ve got left, but practically, I’ve never done a single thing I’ve
wanted to in my whole life! I don’t know ’s I’ve accomplished anything except
just get along. I figure out I’ve made about a quarter of an inch out of a
possible hundred rods. Well, maybe you’ll carry things on further. I don’t
know. But I do get a kind of sneaking pleasure out of the fact that you knew
what you wanted to do and did it. Well, those folks in there will try to bully
you, and tame you down. Tell ’em to go to the devil! I’ll back you. Take your
factory job, if you want to. Don’t be scared of the family. No, nor all of
Zenith. Nor of yourself, the way I’ve been. Go ahead, old man! The world is
yours!”
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| Perkinsville bridge, Arizona |
