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June 2008

Suddenly I understood how disappointing it must have been for my father to have a son who was

Such a Poor Eater
by Jesse Young

         When my sister was born, a few years before me, my father was working on his Ph.D. dissertation and my mother was teaching high school, bringing home the bacon, so my father took on some of the childcare duties during the day. He was an ex-New Yorker, a young man during the Depression, and food was very important to him. When my parents bought our home in Southern California, he planted orange trees and tended them for the thrill of the harvest and the miracle of fresh-squeezed orange juice year-round. A daily glass of fresh orange juice was the foundation of his healthcare plan. Strawberries and bananas with sour cream was his comfort food and roast beef was what you ordered when you went out, but o.j. was purely good for you.
         He loved feeding my sister. Whether they went to the park or played in the sand, they ate together. The apocryphal story is that when she was a toddler she liked carrots and he liked feeding her so much that they just kept feeding and eating until she turned orange. My father had a kind of unconditional love for my sister who is a very special woman and part of that, I’m sure, was because she was a good eater and they had the bond of food when she was little.
         For me as a child, food was always a battleground. I spent many hours sitting at the dinner table long after everyone else had finished eating (and finished doing the dishes), trying to get out of eating something, usually a vegetable, but it could have been anything unfamiliar to me. My father was steadfast and stern and unyielding about my having to eat whatever it was that I was resisting. Sometimes he or my mother would bargain – “eat your lima beans and you can have dessert” – but usually I just had to wait them out. I became a master of the Brussels Sprouts in a Napkin Stuffed Under the Table trick. I practiced the prestidigitation techniques of Houdini on brocolli. I tried to create the illusion of less by maneuvering peas around the expanse of a plate. I wouldn’t give in unless I had to (or unless it was a really good dessert).
         When my older son was young and started to eat solid foods, he was a great eater. Brocolli puree was one of his favorites, but he would try just about anything with enthusiasm. Suddenly I understood what it had meant to my father to watch my sister eat and how disappointing it must have been for me to be such a poor eater. It must be some sort of genetically-coded thing, this very powerful feeling that dads get from seeing their children thrive. Eating is part of that reaching out and taking in of life.
         My older son still has an adventuresome palette, although I wish he would eat more because I think he is a bit too thin. My younger son is also a fine eater, but he always has had a preference for white-colored foods: bread, rice, milk, pasta without sauce, apples, things that can comfort him as well as fill him up. Both boys are bigger, stronger, taller and more handsome than I am, so they must have gotten enough food, and that is one of the things that being a dad is about. I learned one lesson from my own experience. I avoided battling, cajoling and imploring my sons to eat. I learned that a child might not eat a balanced meal but, in the course of a week, still get a reasonable, healthy sampling of the necessary food groups.
         And my sister, good eater that she was as a dutiful child, has become an excellent cook and savors a healthy appreciation for the foods of life. Honoring her bond with the ghost of our father, she also still chokes down her orange juice every day.

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April 2008

Sometimes I want what I don’t have or can’t afford, but those urges usually pass pretty quickly. I am not tortured by the lack of

Money
by Jesse Young

         “The best things in life are free, but you can give them to the birds and bees. I want money. That’s what I want.” Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford wrote it. My favorite version of this old song is by the Flying Lizards, but the Beatles covered it as well, and maybe the difference between those two musical groups explains some of my feelings about money.
         Not so much, really, for me. I mean money is not what I want. I don’t want to worry about it, stress about it, think about it that much. I’d rather have it than not have it. If I can come back next time with “old money,” I would like to try that, but basically I am comfortable with what I’ve earned and the decisions that I have made that have led to the lifestyle I can afford. Sometimes I want what I don’t have or cannot afford, like second homes in foreign countries or Porsches or vacations at five-star hotels, but those irrational urges usually pass pretty quickly for me. I don’t really need all that and I am not tortured by the lack of it.
         Somehow my older son got the gene that wants the most expensive stuff in life. Lamborghini. Gucci. Rolex. Ferragamo. Etro. Bel Air. Cannes. The French Laundry. These brands all mean something to him. I believe he will not be completely happy without attaining some level of affluence in his grown-up life. He’s a junior at UCLA and just today as I was driving him to the airport after spring break. We talked about what he might do with his life to earn the money to afford this lifestyle. Doctors and lawyers and businessmen were considered. Being a venture capitalist was the one that sounded the best. The others seem like a lot of work, a lot of hours. But money and the stuff, the expensive stuff it can buy, the style and fit of that stuff are more important to my son than they are to me and, of course, that is okay.
         There’s a Spanish proverb that goes something like, “Want whatever you wish, and then you have to pay for it.” I want comfort. I wouldn’t turn down luxury, but it doesn’t fill my soul with longing or drive me to do what is necessary to have those things.
         See, the Flying Lizards version of the song “Money (That's What I Want)” is sardonic. The vocalist sounds a bit peeved that she even has to tell us that she hasn’t got the money that she wants. They stuffed the piano with phone books and then pounded on the keys; they left it out of tune so that it sounds tinny and imperative at the same time. In the Beatles version, John and Paul are unapologetically proclaiming their orientation. They may be joking a bit, but they also mean it. Both versions are by consummate musicians giving it all they have; it’s just that one version is more comfortable with selling than the other.
         These are tough times out there – money-wise – for a lot of people. I hope you all have enough so you don’t have to worry about it too much. And I hope that my sons make enough to support themselves and their future families in the lifestyles to which they accustom themselves.

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March 2008

If I find the right attitude, it will be okay. It will be better than okay. It will be fun. It will be an adventure. I just wish I wasn’t so

Vacation-Challenged
by Jesse Young

         I’m vacation-challenged. I worry about taking time off from work, which involves advance planning (will the job survive without me running things?), battling the anxiety caused by committing funds, which may or may not be really disposable income (do I deserve to spend this money I’ve worked so hard for on something as frivolous as enjoying myself?), choosing the destination (what if I decide I want to see the wild flowers in Death Valley in the springtime but I’ve waited too long to book a room there? What if my girlfriend or my boys don’t find the desert as awe-inspiring as I do? Maybe they’d rather go to the beach?), and determining the level of comfort necessary to make the trip fun for all (should we stay at the 4-star hotel or camp out?). If we get to the hotel and the room isn’t ready or looks out into the parking lot instead of having a mountain view, is that going to spoil everything, and will I be to blame? Maybe we should just stay home and pull up the covers.
         The boys and I, however, have had many memorable vacations, including Death Valley in winter (where they were slightly bored but also awed), Club Med in Mexico, skiing, the beach, Disneyland. Some of them were harder than others to arrange and to plan, but they were all worth the trouble and the expense and the time off from work. I once made a cedar box like the ones they sell at the Lodge in Yosemite and filled it with stones and shells and scraps of paper that had the names of various places where I had been on vacations: Sienna, French Glen, Anza Borrego, Washington, D.C., Grand Teton National Park, etc. Vacations have enriched our lives.
         Soon it will be Easter vacation. We’re planning a trip to Southern California (Death Valley was completely booked). We’re going to drive, which eliminates the tragedy that used to be the romance of flying and, even with $4-a-gallon gas and trays of In-and-Out Burgers, it will be cheaper than flying. If I get the oil changed and some snacks for the road and some tunes for the CD player and find the right attitude, it will be okay. It will be better than okay. It will be fun. It will be an adventure. It will be an opportunity to talk and bond and share the basic experiences of life, to problem solve, to laugh, to expand our horizons. The good news is that, once I clear the hurdles, there is clear sailing for a while. I feel relieved and free, able to be excited about the trip. It’s time to relax and make it happen again.
         We’ll leave the comfort of our routines and venture forth. We’ll spend the kids’ inheritance on the here-and-now. We’ll take a break from all the ordinary worries and risk gaining a new perspective. We’ll have to decide where to eat and where to sleep and whether to complain about getting the table next to the kitchen door. We’ll take a break, take a vacation, and then we’ll come home and the world will be largely as we left it. Do you find that, when you get home, you often need a few days to recover from your vacation?

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February 2008

Here’s my advice about love and sex on

Valentine's Day
by Jesse Young

    For a guy (maybe especially a single guy, but I’ve had this experience as a married man, too) Valentine’s Day is about Love with a capital “L” … and about sex. Advertisers on every media direct us to buy our women, our potential Valentines, chocolates, flowers, lingerie and diamonds. They tell us with relentless, ominous optimism that these things given at the right moment during a candlelit dinner in that perfect French bistro with the corner table will lead to her seeing us as worthy of her love and (along with some Viagra, they also tell us) sex. As a single guy I need all the help and advice I can get, but I think the advertisements may be wrong.
    Of course, it isn’t that simple. Oh, my writing group guys and I always laugh about how simple men are. Give us a little food, an occasional attaboy and, praise God, some sex, and we are happy. You can probably leave out two of the three things above and still find a happy man. Women are more complicated. The flowers, wine, gifts, dinner and sentiment might be our ticket to paradise or to a new lesson in humility. Some combination of all the above, which worked in the past, might not be what is needed this time. You could buy the wrong size, color or flavor and reveal that you haven’t really been paying attention.
    My girlfriend told me (before she was my girlfriend) that she thought there was too much pressure surrounding Valentine’s Day. “What if you’re dating a guy and you’re just not sure? You like him, but is he Mr. Right or Mr. Right Now? There ought to be a card that says, 'I like how you are creative in the kitchen, but I can’t stand your tuneless humming,' instead of 'Will you be mine?' ” I agreed then, and I agree now.
    On the other hand, sometimes when this holiday for the celebration of love-with-the-possibility-of-sex comes around, there is a special person in your life, someone whom you are sure of, committed to whether they are committed to you to the same degree or not, and then it is particularly important to hit the right note. You want to shout out loud that your heart unequivocally belongs to her and your greatest wish is that she feel the same way back. Oh lucky man if that happens. Oh the pits of despair if you can’t hold a tune. You want to buy the biggest baddest diamondsilkchocolatetrufflerose and write poetry to make stones weep. My advice to myself and others is: Best to play it cool if you can. Play it simple. As the bumper sticker says, “Eschew Obfuscation” and skip the big gestures, take the lid off the pot. She’ll let you know what she wants when she knows and when she feels like it. And you better be paying attention when it happens.

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January 9, 2008

Back in September (see below), I wrote about birds of prey and words of prayer. Good news: The danse macabre is turning into a

Pas de Deux
By Jesse Young

         Sportsfans, the unthinkable has happened. In an unprecedented turn of events, the black-capped chickadee, his heart captured and held-fast in the talons of the Cooper’s hawk, was not torn apart. Somehow, in mid-air, mid-flight and mid-life, defying gravity and experience with acrobatic skills and courage that may lead to a new move being named after him (me) like the Mary-Lou-Retton flip, the chickadee turned to face his captor and persuaded her to take some pity and perhaps even find herself slightly interested. The danse macabre is turning into a pas de deux.
         Of course, love isn’t a sport, usually, and the metaphor breaks down – this woman isn’t predatory and her “catch” wasn’t intentional (she didn’t have her sights set on me). Records for this kind of thing generally aren’t kept but, if they were, it would be Love 1, Fear 0, for that round.
         I agree with Alfred, Lord Tennyson that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Hope is a good thing. Being afraid to put yourself out there, to take a risk, is limiting. You can’t win without trying and sometimes you lose. (Have I left out any platitudes? Funny how sports and love spawn clichés.) My soccer-playing son set his sights high, worked hard both on the pitch and in the classroom, and has achieved his goal of playing Division One soccer. Next year he will be playing soccer and studying at Columbia University. He had many excellent offers to choose from. Score 1, for Perseverance and making the best use of one’s natural abilities, 0 for Fear of Failure.

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December 12, 2007

I’m afraid to ask my sons if they have happy memories of Christmas past. What if they only have pictures that don’t include me? But I expect this Christmas will be the

Christmas that Stole the Grinch
By Jesse Young

    For most of my adult life I have, like many Americans, gritted my teeth and promised myself that this year, somehow, the holidays wouldn’t be something to be gotten through, something to have survived. Fear of disappointment, hatred of Toys-R-Us or any pressure shopping, anxiety about attending a party (or not getting invited to any) folded nicely into the general depression and malaise of the season. Bah. Humbug. Just let me make it through to January when dreary winter can comfortably be my excuse for this misery and when hiding in bed can be viewed as being in tune with Mother Nature.
    The years of anticipatory joy, when hope still sprang from the rooftops carrying Lionel train sets and Barbie dolls and enough candy to make Rudolph barf, when even a woolen scarf that could scratch the beard off Santa’s neck, given to you by some misguided aunt who was unclear on the concept of Los Angeles weather, made a fine present if it had a bow and paper to be torn off, are memories from long ago. Just the sight of all that shiny paper under the beautiful Christmas tree made the cookie baking and the carol singing and the house cleaning seem like the most exotic foreplay. “I know I’ve been good, but really, I don’t deserve all this.”
    Then the hollow years of going to the in-laws and feeling like a fish out of water, waiting for the Ramos Gin Fizzes to kick in. Then the years when my children were young and my own depression was drowned in the hope that I could provide them with the sort of happy family pictures that I remembered. Then divorce and therapy and new attempts to create holiday traditions that could take the place of standing around the piano singing carols slightly off-key. I’m afraid to ask my sons if they have happy memories of Christmas past. What if they only have pictures that don’t include me?
    This is a dark picture with only bits of light coming in at the edges, but then I remember that really what is important is not all those perfectly wrapped baubles or even the PS2 inside the box. We were there together. We opened and laughed at shirts we would never wear. We ate chocolates from Oregon for breakfast. Occasionally I got something right, and the boys were pleased. Santa came and went and “to all a good night” was really what we felt. We got out the Dylan Thomas and read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” We were invited to Christmas Eve dinners by kind and generous friends and sang carols with them. Suddenly, without noticing how it has happened, it seems like the whole holiday thing isn’t so scary after all. We are a family, living comfortably, with friends and food and warm beds, and we are secure in our love for one another. We even manage to do some small things for those less fortunate without feeling smug. We put up the lights, and it is home.
    This year we will all convene again, along with cousins, the grand matriarch, siblings and significant others, and we will eat and laugh and yes, probably shop, and maybe sing and definitely read Dylan Thomas and it will be remarkably similar to the great American Holiday that I used to dread so much. If you see me out on the street or standing in line at the post office, it should be with a bemused smile.

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November 21, 2007

I have two adult sons. I never thought that I’d consider

More Babies
by Jesse Young

        I have two strong, beautiful adult sons. My older son, a junior at UCLA, just turned 21; I remember the day he was born. It was a difficult labor for his mother, but her pain, the worry, the fear, the uncertainty of bringing another life into this troubled world – all these were banished by his beautiful face and vigorous crying. After sitting with him and holding him in the nursery, I stepped outside to try to take it all in. It had sprinkled during the night and the air was sweet and newly washed, just like my new son.
        I love babies.
        I like how they smile back at you and how the tops of their heads smell. I loved the feeling of my baby cradled against my shoulder as I walked him and rocked him and sang to him to try to get him to sleep. Sometimes I see a dad with an infant and I can still physically feel that weight, hear the sursurrus of breathing, the heartbeat synchronized to mine.
        Most of the women I know who are my age have “baby lust” – for grandchildren. I’m sure I will relish that experience when it comes, hopefully not for a while yet. To take a three-year-old out to the park or just into the backyard is to see the world anew. When they get chosen to play the flower in the school play, my heart will rise with them as they sprout and stand tall. But those first few months are so special, when they are helpless and completely dependent on you and so innocent and fresh and fine.
        All that said, I have two adult offspring and, if you had asked me any time in the last fifteen years if I wanted to have more babies, I would probably have said no without much hesitation. Baby lust doesn’t prevent me from remembering that my older son didn’t truly sleep through the night before he was three, that after working a long day I could come home to a multitude of household and/or marital disasters and still have to make dinner, do the dishes, run a couple loads of laundry and bathtime for the boys. Doing one’s job (in my case operating power tools) on three to six hours of sleep can be an adventure. Remembering what it feels like to have an adult conversation, much less having one, is a major accomplishment.
        I am proud of my children, and I feel good about caring and providing for them so far. But, until recently, I would have said that I have been there and I’d prefer to wait for the joys of grandparenting where I can send the little nippers home with their parents if they are cranky or sick or having the terrible twos.
        However, I’ve been dating a woman who hasn’t had children and would still like to, and so I’ve been thinking about babies again. Even if it happened tomorrow, I would be over 70 before this new child graduated from high school. Would it be fair to a child to have a parent who could be his grandparent? Could I make it through a week of sleepless nights? No, I think, stop. It’s unreasonable. It’s unnatural. Taking care of a baby is a job for a younger man. And then I realize how I wasn’t ready to have my first child despite birthing classes and reading books on fetal development and parenting. And yet it worked out. I remember how I fell in love with my sons the moment that they were born, even before they were born and that that love is unconditional and unending. And then I think, “What if it were a little girl?” and I smile.

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September 12, 2007

The Nature Channel
by Jesse Young

        The Nature Channel is outside my back door.
        Regal and majestic, sudden and brutal, the Cooper’s hawk swoops down in slow-motion, backlit by the sun so his fine feathered legs appear larger than life and, pow, he picks off the poor black-capped chickadee from her spot at the bird feeder. Too late, she sees the shadow and tries to fly away. Too late, I rise from my chair and yell out a warning. She is lunch. Life is like that.
        The first year my younger son tried out for the Olympic Development Program team, he was clearly the third-best player out on the pitch. Not just me, but other parents in the stands all said so. The two boys who were better went on to the state, regional and national programs. The system is based on the calendar year, and my son was born on Christmas Day and had not had his teenage growth spurt yet. So some of the boys out there, including the two better players, were quite a bit bigger, men among boys. The coach in charge was straightforward about his bias for bigger players. Still, my son showed so well and he wanted it so badly that, when he called the phone number to hear the list of boys who had made the team, he could not believe that he was not among those who had been chosen. He called the number four or five times that day, almost completely convinced each time that the terrible mistake would have been noticed and remedied, or that he had just misheard the recording.
        If he had been born a week later, my son would have made the team and gone on to the next levels of that system. He has stayed with his passion for the sport and worked hard and grown and achieved a great deal of success. Soon we will find out if he will get a chance to shine as a Division 1 college player. Life is like that.
        A year or so ago, my sister suggested I contact a tennis friend of hers. “She’s fun. She’s single. She plays tennis like you. You two should meet,” she said.
        I said, “She lives in Eugene, and I live in Berkeley.” But my sister is a persistent person.
        So I called her friend and we emailed a bit and then stopped for a while and then we started again -- short, usually not very personal emails about tennis matches or the things we had been doing. She had a boyfriend for a while, and then they broke up. I was dating a woman for a while and that ended. I almost went to meet her at a tennis camp last year, but then I didn’t. We got to know each other between the lines, in small ways, meeting at the bird feeder.
        As this summer approached, I wrote to ask her if she thought we should meet and she agreed. We made a plan for her to come down to visit me and to enter a tennis tournament up in Napa. She arrived and stayed at my house for three days, and we had lunch and dinner and we played tennis and won and lost and we went to a Fourth of July party and watched movies and it was all good and then it was time for her to leave to go back to her home in Oregon.
        At my advanced age I was surprised to find myself falling for this woman who is geographically unacceptable and a bit younger, whom I don’t know all that well and is different from the other women I have fallen for. The sudden, slow-motion, brutality of the moment, picked off my perch quite without warning. So, what to do? I imagine that the smart thing to do would have been to keep quiet and wait to see how the wind blows, one eye on the bird feeder and the other on the sky. There were signs that she was not on the same page. I ignored them. I did not want to believe them, so I declared myself. I told her I really liked her. It was just like being at lunch in high school, slow and brutal.
        I haven’t called her four or five times a day, but I can hear the recording just the same and my name isn’t on the list.

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July 25, 2007

Self-Sufficiency
by Jesse Young

     We want our children to succeed, to be happy, to thrive, to achieve their dreams. I have always encouraged my boys to identify their wants and needs and make them manifest. But have I also done too much? Has my generation made things too easy for our children? My father always was quoting Aristotle: “Moderation in all things.” As a principle it suited him and it directed much of his parenting style: minimal interference. He would never have driven two hours each way on Saturday and again on Sunday to watch me play a game, and he certainly wouldn’t have washed my uniform and helped me find my gear.
    I remember that he did buy me a fine baseball glove when I was eleven years old and only grumbled a bit about its cost. We played catch in the driveway sometime, and he gave me a few pointers and suggested that he had played the game in his youth, stickball on the streets of the Bronx with a Buick as first base. But more often than not, his style was hands off. He let his children proceed and succeed at their own pace. I have not followed this system and, now that one son is in college and one is about to be a senior in high school, I wonder if I have taught them all they need to know. Maybe a bit more of here’s the laundry soap, here’s the pink shirt that used to be white, and a little less of here’s your uniform clean and neatly folded with your socks on top.
    We learn from modeling as much as we do from instruction. Maybe laundry isn’t as important as listening or empathy or looking people straight in the eyes. Maybe when the white t-shirts are gray, it won’t matter or maybe that will be the time when learning to launder becomes important. Before that day I will continue to encourage my boys to learn how to operate the dials and remember to put the clothes in the dryer before the mold starts to grow.

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July 11, 2007

Mirror Time
by Jesse Young

    I’m looking at myself in the mirror, checking out the sunburn on my frontside from yesterday’s hour in the sun. It is a bit mottled – the zebra pattern of pink and white can only be from fat folds shielding some parts while I was sitting in a chair by the pool reading in the Las Vegas sun. I didn’t always have fat folds on my belly. It is very disconcerting.
    I’m in Las Vegas because my son is a very good soccer player and his team won the Northern California State Cup and is playing here in the Western U.S. Regional Championships. Las Vegas in the middle of the summer. Yesterday hit 104 degrees, and today is supposed to be hotter. It’s dry heat, but still damn hot, hence the sitting by the pool and the mottling.
    I’m a proud dad, a proud soccer dad. I hope my son’s team will win and play well, but the old joke about first prize is a week in Philadelphia and second prize is two weeks in Philadelphia? Well, winning here means they would play in Frisco, Texas, in a few weeks.   Scrape the grease off the skillet, I’m done.
    I’m not the only one in town with pink skin on their chests. Las Vegas seems to bring out the cleavage in people and quite a few other tourists have under-applied their SPF-50.
    Without sounding too pathetic, can I admit that I am lonely here in my giant room with its king-sized bed and only me to fill it? Everywhere I go – in the casinos, walking out on the Strip, eating in the restaurants – people seem to be coupled up. They stroll by, holding hands, smiling, laughing, necks craning to see the Eiffel Tower, and I think, “Well, where is my beautiful wife?” (Thank you, David Byrne.)
    Looking in the mirror doesn’t help. I may not be hideous, but no woman is going to spin her head around like Linda Blair to check out my ass. But, I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone, whining just a bit about how everyone else seems happy and all this cleavage is out there but none for me, and my friend, bless her heart, reminded me that coupleness isn’t all fun and games, even in Las Vegas. They could just as easily have gone back to their pink palatial rooms and had some wicked fight about the guy turning his head to check out someone else’s cleavage, argued about Engelbert and Humperdink or some other excess that this place seems to bring out of people, and tossed and turned through their night.
    Anyway, I felt a lot better after that. Now I can go back out there and cheer on my son and his team and sleep anywhere I want on that vast ocean of a bed. And I vow to be more careful with my sunscreen applications. I don’t want to scare anyone.

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June 27, 2007

Ripe Fruit
by Jesse Young

    A friend and I went to a Cooking for Singles event a few weeks ago. We are divorced men, still searching for the women of our dreams who will put up with us, and this seemed like a painless way to expand our horizons. Fifteen men and fifteen women met and mingled over wine and food. As part of the preliminary talk, the chef asked the group rhetorically, I thought, “How do you know if a lemon is ripe?” By weight, by color, by firmness were all answers that were given, but later I got to thinking that the same question applies to potential partners and that the difficulties of interpreting what is inside the skin are similarly vexing.
    This past Easter my son and I decided to have some friends over for Easter dinner. We made the plan late, and we weren’t sure how many were coming until the day before, so the menu was also a bit unsettled. We ended up with a honey-baked ham, green beans with almonds and rosemary potatoes, and a guest brought some hors d’oevres and another some wine and, at the last minute, I decided to make my (from the Chez Panisse Café cookbook) beet, avocado, grapefruit and arugula salad with mustard vinaigrette. I had everything but the avocadoes and a few things still to do before the guests arrived, so I decided to send my son to the store to buy a couple of avocadoes to finish off the salad. Well, the ones he came home with were lovely dark green, avocado green, rocks that would be ready to eat in a week or so if left out in a pretty bowl in a warm place, so we had the salad without them and it was a big hit anyway.
    Now, he doesn’t eat avocadoes and had never had to buy one before, so how would he know how to pick one that is firm, but slightly yielding to the touch? Someone has to tell you. Then you have to try it yourself and probably experience a failure or two.
    Of course, the analogy only works so far; women and relationships are not fruit, they are much more complex and subtle and the result of picking a bad one is much worse than eliminating an ingredient from an Easter dinner salad. Still, I may have to take my son out to practice at the grocery store, poking and prodding the produce -- I hope you’re not going to be buying avocadoes right after us -- checking the expiration dates on the dairy products, learning the color codes of the bag ties on the bread isle and maybe, just maybe, he can give me some advice on women.

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May 30, 2007

Joining the Club
by Jesse Young

    My son, tall and handsome, drives long and straight. I had already found the trees to the right of the fairway.   As I was shouldering my bag, I noticed that it felt lighter than usual.
    I have been playing golf for about 25 years, and my clubs are old, maybe older than I am. Let me just say that I have wooden woods, and my irons are Taiwanese imitation Ping-like items that pre-date the invention of graphite. Still, even though I don’t play often anymore, they are familiar and the bag felt light. I made a quick survey: driver, 3-wood, 5-wood, 3, 5, 7, 9, P and SW, and my putter. Now the 8-iron flew out of my own hands at the practice range and snapped like a twig a year ago, but where were the 4 and 6 irons? And then I remembered seeing them in my son’s room at some point in the preceding months.
    You see, my 17-year-old, soccer-playing, bigger-than-I-am, thighs-like-tree-trunks, steely blue-eyed son still gets scared of things that go bump in the night and, when he crawls into his bed at our house, after he has checked the closets and looked in all the rooms, he tucks in with his (or as it turns out, my) trusty 4-iron by his side. We live in a small house, where my bedroom is only a few feet away from his. We live in a very safe community with very few violent crimes. He is rational and smart and a gifted athlete, and yet he sleeps with golf clubs.
    It is late at night, and I have been in bed for some time, not sleeping the sleep of the just and pure. I am aware that my son has gone to bed and has turned out the lights. A loud thump brings me back to consciousness. I hear my son stirring in his room and I get up to check on him. We meet in the living room in our boxer shorts.
    “What was that noise?”
    “It looks like your backpack tipped off the coffee table. Go back to bed. It’s a long day tomorrow.” He eyes the bag suspiciously, this time with his own fairway metal in his hand.

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I Am Jesse Young
by Jesse Young

I’m the dad of two fine young men, one in college at the University of California at Los Angeles and one still in high school. Some 96 percent of fathers work (I’m one of them; I’m a general contractor) and some 80 percent think that being a dad is the best, most important thing they have done in their lives (I’m one of them, too).
I’m a divorced dad with shared custody. My sons have given me permission to be frank about what I see, so I’m going to write about the struggles and joys of being a single parent, about my sons and our relationship. I’ll also write about the struggles and joys of dating as a divorced man with children.

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