The “Havin’ Stuff” Handicap

The first kid I ever knew who “had stuff” was a guy I’ll call “Andy” (because that was his name) who had a lot of stuff, probably from the day he was born until he died. (I am assuming he is dead. Unless there was an outright miracle, he almost certainly is.) Andy’s father owned the local rural telephone company and, by the standards of the day and place, Andy’s family was rich. Even better, Andy was an only child. Our neighborhood was mostly 1950’s middle class white, but it was the “new” end of town and there was some diversity in the houses that were being built and Andy’s family lived in one of the more upscale homes in the area.

I knew Andy was “rich” because he always had stuff that nobody else in the neighborhood might ever get to see if he didn’t have it. To the point that, for a few days after the Xmas holidays the other kids in the neighborhood would sneak a hike through Andy’s alley to check out what his parents had made him throw out to make room for the toy store they’d emptied under the tree that December. To you that might sound like some serious low-life scavenging, but to us it was just good sense. For example, one winter I salvaged a non-functional go-cart from Andy’s Xmas trash. For a while, I managed to hide that cart in the weeds of an empty lot across the street and I’d drag that thing up the neighborhood hill and coast down it, over and over, until I could barely stand. I don’t remember what became of it, but I suspect my father found it and made me take the cart back where it would have either been picked up by the garbage collectors or snagged by another kid who might have made it run again. At that time, my father so effectively squashed my budding interest in all things mechanical that fixing the motor wasn’t even a consideration for me.

Andy was two or three years older than me and when he was in high school he not only had a car, but it was a British sports car (MG, Triumph, Austin-Healey, etc.) and it was brand new. He treated that car as carefully as he had the go-cart. One of the last times I hung out with Andy, he drove the car on to the practice football field, burned a few donuts in an end-zone, and tried to sneak off through a path that led from the field, past the tennis courts, along a very steep ledge that, eventually, led to the maintenance building’s parking lot. The path along the tennis courts turned out to be seriously compromised by a previously undiscovered drainage path under the courts. Andy discovered the erosion by dropping his car’s front end several feet into the collapsed path. We abandoned ship and ran for it. Andy called his dad. I did everything but calling my father and put as much distance between me and Andy as possible. Being a rich kid, there were no apparent repercussions from the public property destruction, but his father took away the sports car . . . and replaced it with a sedan or something that might be harder for Andy to squeeze on to the football field.

A decade later, visiting my parents for some holiday, I ran into Andy at the local bowling alley. He was still a rich kid, still crashing cars his father bought for him, and still “trying to find myself.” A few years later, Andy piled one of those cars into an immobile object and discovered that he was a stoppable force. At least his friends and relatives discovered that Andy was stopped, because he spent the rest of his life in a coma.

Andy is a relatively extreme example of someone who suffered the “havin’ stuff handicap,” but I have known a lot of kids who grew up with plenty and ended up with not much of a life. These days, I think I’m seeing a lot more kids who are being handicapped with stuff than those who are expected to figure some stuff out for themselves. I admit that I’m old and, maybe, I’m even wrong. However, the expectation that a 10-year-old “needs” an iPhone and unlimited phone and browser and texting time seems excessive to me. The fact that so many parents “gift” their teens with a car that is more expensive than anything I’d consider buying for myself seems irresponsible. Kids have always bawled “I wanna [something or other]” and parents have always either been able to afford to buy off the squalling brat or knock the snot out of it until it shuts up and waddles back to the assembly line to keep cranking out widgets of crawls back into the chimney and finishes the job. Today, parents seem to be inclined toward always buying off the noise-maker and I’m not convinced that is the right approach based on 60-some-years of observing outcomes.

My spouse often says “discipline is a kindness” and she is not talking about corporal punishment or standing a kid in a corner without supper. She means that instilling some sort of self-discipline in a kid is the same kind of parenting task as teaching reading and writing and other life-skills. In our small, mostly-middle class, white and privileged village, I have seen an astonishing number of kids (people under 50) who went out into the world, post-high school, failed miserably and returned to their parents’ basements to live out the rest of their days. All of these kids grew up expecting their parents to provide them with anything their shriveled little hearts desired: cars, cell phones, computers, musical instruments (yeah, I'm jealous), exotic vacation trips, private lessons and tutors, and everything that caught their attention on television or YouTube. Those expectations were relatively easy to meet when the kid was 0-18. Post-high school and college failure, those quasi-adult expectations were economically impossible for the parents to provide as they aged and their incomes declined and the kids had to settle for pretending to be music “producers,” video game “influencers,” authors without a book or publication in sight, or just underachievers waiting either for inspiration or to be recognized for their unrecognized genius. Odds are good-to-infinite that they will be disappointed for the rest of their lives and once you fall that far behind your contemporaries you are unlikely to ever catch up.

And who are they consistently falling behind? The kids who didn’t get immediate gratification from “I wanna” and had to make do with what they could make, find, or earn from their own efforts are more often than not the ones actually changing the world, starting businesses and industries, creating video games and applications and selling them to Apple or Microsoft for a few billion $, kids who are actually working musicians or artists or writers and making a living from it, and, probably, screwing up their own kids by responding to “I wanna” with stuff.

A Better Story Than A Pretty Good One

As good a movie as “Catch Me If You Can” was, the real story is far, far better. Being a parent is one of those things that our fractured, disloyal, unappreciative, corrupt, and uneducated society either devalues or corrupts out of superstition. The real story of Frank Abagnale's father and his relationship with his father to the moment of his parents’ divorce is amazing. The real story of how Abagnale became the criminal that he was well-punished for being is incredibly funny, sad, and amazing. His recommendations for how you protect yourself from cybercrime are insightful and valuable and I am going to stop using my debit card for ANYTHING once my nitwit credit union figures out how to quit screwing up their website.

Always Visitors, Rarely Visited

When my wife and I were young, we lived in a variety of hell-holes from Dallas and Hereford, Texas to mid-sized and small towns in Nebraska. When none of our family or friends visited us in those places, it was no surprise. We didn’t want to be there, so why should anyone else want to visit? However, when we moved to Omaha in the early 1980’s that should have changed. But it didn’t.

Omaha had more recreational resources than any of the places we’d lived previously and dramatically more than where our friends and family lived. Still, we did the visiting and no one came to visit us . . . ever. We moved to southern California and had three visitors in ten years. Part of the SoCal problem was that our $1600/month apartment was tiny and we had no room for anyone other than us. We moved to Colorado and my brother visited a few times and our daughter, once, but we were pretty much left on our own there, too. As always, we travelled to visit my family. Next, we moved to Minnesota which is a world more interesting than Kansas, Missouri, or Texas, but we’ve pretty much been left alone here, too. Even our daughter’s family, who live less than 10 miles from us, rarely make the trip to our place. Instead, as always, if we want to see the kids and grandkids we travel to see them. I’m not sure what that means, but I think it means my wife and I are hermits. Maybe not by intention, but certainly by lifestyle.

When my parents were alive, we'd make the miserable pilgrimage to western Kansas, often fighting out way through blizzards during the holidays. After we'd been "home" for an hour or two, my parents would settle back into their normal life, as if the effort we'd made to visit were inconsequential and expected. After a few years of that, my wife decided to quit travelling to Kansas. I should have wised up sooner, but I didn't. I guess I wanted my kids to know where I'd come from and had wild hopes that my parents would want to get to know my children. We were always from different planets and that was never going to be likely, though. We're not much for visiting these days. Travel, yes, but travelling to see family or friends, not so much. And, as always, no one travels to see us. Even as old fucks, we're expected to go to them, whoever "they" are.

So, in the fall of 2014 Robbye and I are moving to Red Wing, Minnesota, where we know no one and would be starting life over at 66 and 64. It could be intimidating, but it is only a little because we’re not giving up much. We’ll be leaving the city, but that’s no real sacrifice. I’ve had all of the urban noise and traffic I need for a lifetime. We’ll be moving about 40 miles further away from the kids, but since we see them once or twice a month that’s no big obstacle. Their visits to us are so infrequent that we won’t notice any change in that area. The grandkids won’t be staying overnight or on weekends during school months, but they don’t do that much now, anyway. Most of the good friends we once had in the Cities have left or drifted away. It's not unusual for us to go for a month without seeing anyone but strangers in stores. With that in mind, we might as well be where the cost of living is lower, somewhere quiet, less pointlessly busy.

I am curious as to why we’ve always been visitors and rarely visited. Maybe we’re not good hosts? Maybe our home is not comfortable. When I worked at the school, we had a fair number of parties during the summer and, sometimes, people came. Often, they did not. More often than not, I’d have enough food prepared for the party that we’d be eating on the leftovers for a week afterwards. I never thought much about it at the time, but in retrospect it seems to be part of the story of our lives.
I’m writing all of this, of course, in the fall of 2014 and I expect to be long dead when Google “publishes” this addition to my blog. Of course, I might live longer than two more years but it seems unlikely at this moment. Google might not be messing with Blogger in 2016, so maybe no one will ever read it. Maybe people will be so involved in basic survival in 2016 due to climate change, revolution, or societal collapse that even if Google still pukes out scheduled blog entries it will be unnoticed. No problem there. I’m used to it by now.