Unsolicited Advice

Seven of my nine grandchildren have reached adulthood, but none have sought my advice on the large, shaggy subject of how to conduct their life journeys. Which is good, because I might be hard-pressed to offer more than a cliché like “do what makes you happy.” As a person in my ninth decade with physical and mental processes more or less intact despite some recklessness in the past, I could put myself forward as an exemplar of living well, but that would be disingenuous. Better, I think, to offer my life as a cautionary tale.

Growing up I lacked the qualities inherent in good athletes. I couldn’t run fast or jump high. I was on my high school’s baseball and basketball teams, but lack of quick reflexes meant that my backside was almost always glued to the bench. I was a good student when I applied myself, but in a small school in a rural community the only people who really cared about my academic performance, or even noticed it, were my parents and teachers. The boys with popular standing and all that went with it, like desirable girlfriends and privileged treatment by teachers—or what was perceived as such—were athletes.

I eventually quit those sports teams and cast my lot with kids who smoked and drank and slouched around the school corridors with derisive sneers not only for athletes, but anyone the teachers considered models of good behavior. As might be expected, there were consequences—stern lectures, trips to the principal’s office, even a brief suspension. A rebellious attitude trailed me to the church-affiliated college my parents insisted upon, where campus rules forbade smoking, the use of profanity, and other transgressive activities. But a set of railroad tracks bordered the campus not far from my dorm, and along with a handful of like-minded boys—there were never girls—I would make my way down a weedy bank to stand or sit on the tracks with cigarette in hand, sharing fantasies about being almost anywhere but a small, strait-laced college in an insignificant Midwestern town. On nights when winter raked the hilltop campus with frigid winds, we might bundle up and make the twenty-minute trek downtown and sit in a cafe drinking Cokes and 7-ups while puffing away on our Winstons and Marlboros and telling the kind of off-color jokes that would elicit frowns of reproof from more upstanding students.

A friend among those errant young men planned to drop out at the end of the semester and go to California, where an uncle would hire him to work in his construction business. He invited me to come with him, but I had no money, and my parents refused to give me any for such a foolish venture. Still, when the semester drew to a merciful end I flatly refused to go back. An unsightly standoff ensued until I relented to the point of enrolling in a small college within commuting distance of our farm. My loathing of the second institution was only marginally less than that of the first, and at the end of the semester I told my parents that I had my fill of higher education. My father threatened and my mother cajoled but in the end they gave me enough money to buy the car I would need to get a job. I could have stayed home and worked on the farm, but my brother and I had long made known our aversion to the rural life, and whatever remnants remained of our father’s fantasy of buying or renting more land and farming in partnership with his sons blew away in the dusty, summer winds.

The job I found in a nearby town turned out to be hot, sweaty, backbreaking labor at a grain elevator, far too redolent of tedious farm work, and at the end of the summer I decided to use money I’d saved to make the long-dreamed of journey to California. My father forbade it, but an accrual of rebellious feelings bubbled to the surface and I swallowed hard and defied this parent who had always demanded obedience and deference to his superior knowledge and judgment about matters of life. My brother, regarded as the more mature and trustworthy son, would make the trip with me and then fly back to start his third year of college. So we went, with a glow of exhilaration that expanded to a conflagration when the car strained over the last mountain range and we saw the city of Los Angeles, a vast sea of buildings and streets that seemed to promise everything I’d groped for, like a blind person suddenly blessed by the miracle of sight.

I spent two years sampling the fruits of that Garden of Eden, which unfortunately had the effect of the Genesis apple, casting me out of paradise into a hellish landscape and then back to where I’d started, the Prodigal Son come home to endure stares of disapprobation—or what I imagined as such—from adults who had known me well enough to conclude years before that I would never amount to much. The following two years I drifted in currents that carried me into ever-murkier waters, toward a future where everything I’d imagined—money, fast cars, fun-loving females—began to look like a chimera. I was finally forced to admit that my parents and teachers had been right. To fully escape the kind of tedium that had animated dreams of escape from the farm, I needed to get a college degree.

Once on the campus—a large state university this time—I stumbled a couple of times, but finished with a flourish, landing my final year in a place I’d never imagined seeing my name, the Dean’s list. I also met and married my first wife at that university, and when she became pregnant I quit smoking. I wish I could cite a high-minded display of backbone on my part, but in fact I was pushed to cut down and finally go cold turkey out of a sense of guilt engendered by her citing of articles she’d read about respiratory illnesses and other maladies suffered by children of smokers. Would I harm that innocent being after it slipped from the sanctuary of her womb just to give myself a few fleeting moments of pleasure? What kind of parent would do such a heartless thing?

With impending parenthood came a kind of enforced maturity. I graduated with a degree in English, which was regarded in some quarters as worthless for anything other than a teaching career, and I couldn’t see myself in a classroom, facing kids who, like myself at their age, had only a cursory interest in learning and thus made life miserable for those hired to penetrate layers of egotism with a few grains of knowledge. I applied for a job with a daily newspaper and was almost immediately hired, a fact that led to the unwarranted assumption that my qualifications—which were essentially non-existent, beyond that piece of parchment with my name on it—had bowled over my interviewer. In fact, I was asked to start work the very next day because one of the staff reporters had abruptly quit and even a warm body was apparently preferable to an extended search for a replacement.

Reporters were assigned to desks throughout the open newsroom, with editors clustered together at one end. There was the city editor’s desk, the managing editor’s desk, the horseshoe of desks occupied by the copy editors, and a desk called the state desk, where an editor handled copy from correspondents in small towns outside the metropolitan area. Many of these people smoked. Some reporters also smoked, but they were scattered through the newsroom; the concentration of editors’ desks was usually enveloped in a thin, blue haze. When I walked to the city editor’s desk to impale my typewritten copy on his spike, I breathed that smoke and longed, just one more time, to light a cigarette, bring it to my lips, and take a long, gratifying puff.

I didn’t, which might qualify as an act of courage although it was really fear that kept me from heading to the newspaper’s lunchroom and thrusting some change into a cigarette vending machine. Fear of my wife’s reaction if I kissed her and she caught the telltale scent. Fear of how my self-image, dog-eared at the best of times, would go out of focus and even disintegrate into scraps of self-loathing. And chewing gum. When the urge for the blossom of cigarette smoke in my brain became intense, I unwrapped a stick from the package of Spearmint or Dentyne I carried in my pocket at all times. I don’t remember how I heard of this aid to escaping the grip of addiction, but it was a piece of unsolicited advice that I have valued ever since. Even if I got so sick of chewing gum that I have avoided it for the rest of my life.

The air we breathe is filled with exhortations to be positive, to avert our eyes from the tawdry failures among our fellow human beings and emulate the paragons of accomplishment, whether that be the accumulation of fame and money, or scaling creative heights, or taking an altruistic path for the sake of humanity and the future of our planet. I heard those exhortations when I was young, but they couldn’t overcome an aversion to unsolicited advice or penetrate a deafness to the wisdom of an adult world I perceived as irredeemably hypocritical. No. I learned what dirt tasted like when I lay face down in it. I learned what freedom meant when it was snatched away. I learned that I didn’t want to be the foul-smelling man sprawled on the sidewalk, anesthetized by the contents of the empty bottle beside him. I learned—slowly, to be sure—that I didn’t want to live like a great-uncle who sat all day in a chair tethered to an oxygen tank, wheezing for breath and wishing for just one more cigarette before he died.