Relief trucks on way

We've officially reached that moment in summer when I stop believing that fall will ever come, or snow, or cool weather, and it will be hot, gray and grim until forever. This would be depressing except that my inner response seems to be, oh well, better keep working, then - which is kind of a relief, to just give up on the idea of reaching for the stars, or blissfully idyllic autumn runs, or homegrown ripe apples, and just put my head down and do what needs to be done.

So it's kind of hard to believe that the high tomorrow is supposed to be 75. I hope it doesn't lead to a sense of wild imbalance or unsustainable hope.

One thing that has been a backdoor relief for some of us - for me, mostly - is that the crackling dry city combined with all these fires has led to a complete and total moratorium on home fireworks (and a near-moratorium on commercial displays). Silas got weepy about it - "I just don't want to have a fourth of July without fireworks," he said, sobbing, and my heart broke a little, because we *could* have dragged ourselves downtown, in the traffic on a work night, to the lacrosse game at Mile High Stadium, where there would be fireworks, except that we cruelly opted for sensible. Meeeean, is what we are. Especially since I felt nothing but triumph in my heart about getting to opt out of the "highly illegal vs. but it's so fun" debate this year.

Anyhow. It kind of comes back to something I've been thinking about a lot this summer - I wrote about it on the Get Born blog, but imperfectly - this disconnect between what we want for our kids and what they themselves want. One of the commenters on that post made the excellent point that one of hard things about parenting is finding out that "children are people--real, flawed, normal people." When they're beautiful babies who have everything yet to learn, it's easy to think they can be anything; then they start growing up and it turns out that they actually have no desire to chase the gold ring, or the brass ring, or however the saying goes. Silas is never going to be an aggressive competitor, the one who gets down the mountain the fastest, or who stays at the gym the longest, or who cranks out the most perfect score on the most important test - and this should not be a surprise, since neither are his parents. He's going to be someone who gets pretty close, since he is smart, and he does have kind of a talent for throwing a ball - and he'll like being that close, and maybe even feel that he's entitled to be there, since he's smart, everyone says so - but then when it comes to consolidating his gains and closing in for the gold, he'll abstain, and go off to play his iPod touch instead. Just like me, only for me it's a good book and an afternoon spent puttering around the yard.

The difference seems to be that I feel like my lack of ambition is a calculated choice, and is furthermore sustainable, as in it's paid for by a job. Whereas one could argue that I and all the other parents who urge their kids to improve their freestyle stroke or practice reading for one hour a day or work on their endurance are deeply insecure about their children's ability to become functioning adults.

Or maybe it's that we want our kids to become a certain kind of functioning adult - I would be so very depressed if Si chose to support his video game lifestyle by becoming the manager of a Chick Fil-A, for example, even though the salary he'd most likely pull down is not much different from M's salary as a professor.

I ought to point out that I would also be disappointed if he chose to support his video game lifestyle by becoming an investment banker. It would be a different kind of disappointment, however. One mixed with pride and bafflement (you do what, again, son? invest in...banks?)

I get confused, though, about how much of that choice is my business. I assume, I think, that Silas would find that managing a Chick Fil-A as depressing as I do, and I am trying to steer him toward a path that avoids it. But what if he would actually like managing a fast food joint? (shudder) It's no berth on a major league baseball team, sure, but I think we need to agree that there's going to be some kind of Plan B for that dream. What if his satisfactory Plan B is different from my idea of a satisfactory Plan B? What then? How do I parent that? I have no earthly idea.

If anything, I feel like I'm steering him toward the investment banker option. He's good at math, and I know enough about schoolish things to encourage him in this pursuit and encourage him in improving his math scores and math savvy - mostly by taking advantage of various school and community math-burnishing options. But where do these lead? What if they lead toward investment banking? I don't even know. I just cheer on the sidelines and push him in the community-sanctioned directions and I'm not even sure what the community is sanctioning.

You know what I mean? Parenting is the blind leading the blind, man. And then getting crabby when the follower doesn't end up where we wanted him to go.

Dog Ambition

Said an expert about the border collie, Chaser, whose owner taught her to recognize, nose, paw or fetch 1,022 different objects: "It is not necessarily Chaser or Rico who is exceptional; it is the attention lavished on them."

In other words, around the world there are millions of border collies languishing in undeveloped desperation, just waiting for their owners to get with the program and start spending four to five hours a day training them.

....Now? NOW? ....How about now?

Dilettante

During the 20 or so years of my adult life, I have been accustomed to thinking of myself as an expert. Generally there has been very little evidence to support this stance, although I have made ambitious beginnings in a wide range of subjects. I believe my self-assessment comes in large part from periodically rubbing academic or professional elbows with people who either were at the time or who later became, through dint of perseverance and attention, experts.


For example, during high school I devoted myself almost exclusively to music and British literature. To this day I experience an agony of inarticulate familiarity when I listen to the radio: "Hey!" I'll cry to family members, "I've played this piece! We must have worked on this exact section about thirty times--it's really hard to play in tune!" What I won't be able to recall, however, is the name of the piece or who composed it. Likewise, I have a solid grounding in the classics of English literature, although after 20 years my actual knowledge of the contents of these classics has become very dim (Macbeth is about...a man who murders someone? With the help of his wife? Who gets blood on her hands and has a hard time washing it off? Out, out, damned spot!)


Or...during one very focused semester in college I read every historic document pertaining to the pre-20th century Ojibwa, or at least all the documents that had been published and then purchased by the Columbia University library system. I can't even remember what these documents are, just what they looked like and where, generally, they were found within the library.


Or...for several summers in my twenties I could name every bird that bred between 6,500 and 9,000 feet in the Colorado mountains, and identify them by song or call. I could also identify most of the plants.


Therefore, it has come as a rather rude surprise to reach age forty (or thereabouts) and be most accurately defined as a dilettante. I engage in most pursuits "sporadically, superficially, or frivolously;" I lack real commitment or knowledge of most subjects (and the subjects to which I am committed to are somewhat stunning in their triviality--the catalogs of which sidewalks in the neighborhood are most likely to be icy two weeks after a big snow; the state of my children's teeth; the proper usage of a comma according to the AP Style Guide).


Meanwhile, while I have restlessly skipped from subject to subject, my former peers have doggedly persisted in acquiring the depth and breadth of knowledge I have always admired, often imitated, and never really achieved. Former classmates whom I used to (shamefully) consider lacking in ability, or application, or the sheer imaginative passion necessary to really dive into a subject and make it one's own have become, shockingly, experts. In my current job, as the editor of academic manuscripts for a technical journal, this fact makes itself known to me on a daily basis. My email inbox is filled with messages from men and women whose grasp of the technical requirements of separating gangue rock from valuable ore, or designing an underground ventilation system that is both efficient and effective, or quickly suppressing a spot fire on a conveyor belt system, is vastly superior to mine--and (here's the rub, because I can't say I lie awake nights regretting my inability to match the proper teeter bed hydroseparator to the specific rock type found in a particular seam) the larger physical, chemical, economic, geologic and even political context for any and all of these specialized endeavors. If you had asked me at age 22 if I had any interest in becoming a civil engineer I would have thrown back my head and laughed. Yet if you'd asked if I wanted to gain a thorough knowledge of the structural, social, scientific implications of building a bridge--and, further, to develop an acquaintance with all of the varied people involved in such a project, and an understanding of the specific political climate surrounding the endeavor--well, I would have said yes. Definitely yes, just as soon as I finish trying (and failing) to teach myself Navajo.



Here's the thing, though: do I care? Most of the time, not too awfully much, although that's usually the low-grade exhaustion talking (sure I'm bummed that I never got around to writing the Definitive Guide to Native American Linguistic Evolution--but hey, who's up for a nap?)


Sometimes, though, I grow melancholic. I'll read the obituary of someone who made it his well-appreciated but completely unpaid business to drive all over the state and catalog every single Paleoindian site in the Rocky Mountains, and I'll think that sounds so cooool. I'll read an article about someone who devoted ten years to discovering and eating the root crops of the world, or became the state's unofficial expert on bats, or who wrote a book on a subject I briefly took a shine to and read two or three books about, and I'll get mopey for days, thinking that should have been me.


Whom do you envy? ask career counseling experts. It's a swift way to figure out what you want in life, or what you think is missing.


Well. What "whom do you envy?" doesn't help you answer is the next question, which is, "what are you going to do about it?"



I really don't know. For now, nothing. Embrace my inner dilettante, I suppose, while trying to stay the course on the project I started about nine and a half years ago, which is raising two kids with a reasonable amount of stability and attention. And dream of a day when I can, and hopefully will, hop into my car and call in sick whenever I hear of a great new...something, somewhere in the state.