(c) Thom, 2006

A young man came to our door the other night selling magazines. Tall and skinny at 21, he reminded me of myself at his age, right down to his gigantic white shoes. A side-step and we arrive at the portable writing desk of Herman Melville. He carried a motto in it: Be true to the dreams of your youth. Can any adult hear that and not pause for a moment? What were the dreams of your youth?

Kara loves a good story, and so she's always asking me to tell her some. She even helps me make them up on occasion. The ones she likes best are true: "Tell me a story from when you were a little boy!" she blurts--almost commands! L. and I both are forever trying to reach back into the past, and usually during those absolutely adult moments of living: loading the car with groceries; struggling to lift Caleb's car seat out of the Nissan; figuring out how to make dinner from fridge-flotsam; pulling knotty wet towels out of the washer and forcing them in again into the dryer. It helps to have a few favorites. When I fell out of the tree upside down. When my friend stabbed himself. When I was in the Nutcracker in school. The fates of favorite toys. My BB gun and the bigger boys. Sledding with my daddy. Yes, inevitably the grandparents come up. Parents, the borderland of our pre-pubescence. I wonder, what were their dreams of youth?

My mom and dad both grew up in the rural south. My mom's parents were entrepreneurs and loners, mostly owing to my grandfather's mercurial inventor's temperament. My dad's parents were a bit closer to the city, a collision of his mother's childhood of railroad-modernity and his father's intelligence and class-ambition. Both my mom and dad went to college, but neither of them had much of a clue about it. Their parents, the veterans and the new women working classes, were all verbs intransitive; full of GO and caring little where. Simply being alive was enough. Cast that against today's youth, panicking because they don't have it figured out by 21, staying adolescents forever. Today's youth know their Myers-Briggs by 14. My parents, like their peers, were just working or having babies, making home movies, taking Polaroid’s, shaking their heads at the junior-high kids behind them busy making up the sixties. What were their dreams?

My dad fell into computers by sheer accident. He majored in economics, and has since told me he would have enjoyed psychology. He's a bit of a behaviorist (though I tempt him with Jung just to be funny.) My mom is a musician, which is another way of saying she is open to being. She was rarely allowed the room to take out after any risky personal direction. And of course there is a temptation with being just to hold it all in. Either way, even today she keeps teenager's hours. She's just getting started at midnight, after the grown ups have long gone to bed. I'm a curious product of them both.

My dreams feel like they've been passed to me as much as I've come up with them whole-cloth. There are fingerprints. I look at my children and wonder what they will do with them. My daughter hums Mozart's Nacht Musik, her head awhirl in full-on color and polyphony--that's my mom. My son takes a hand off his bottle and traces the outline of my face, curious at the rim of my glasses. Then, seeing his own fingers, he holds them up curious and curled to give them study--that's my dad. The words, however, are mine.