Gay - Little victories: perfect rules for imperfect living

This was not long ago: I was back home, in Massachusetts, in the house I grew up in, sitting in the same kitchen Id sat in my entire childhood and adolescence, eatingI have no idea what I was eating. Probably peanut butter. Random refrigerator finds dipped in peanut butter. It was very late, close to two in the morning. My mother was asleep. My father was asleep. Id just come from work, if you could call it work, because I had been about fifteen minutes away, covering the World Series as a sports columnist, which is about as stupid lucky a job as you can have, the kind of job that makes you think one day a stern-faced man with a clipboard is going to show up and say, There was a terrible mistake. This isnt your job. Youre supposed to be managing a karaoke bar for dogs. In the morning I had to fly back to New York City, and I knew that upon waking, I would bicker with my dad about what time we needed to leave the house. This was always a comical argument, our version of Abbott and Costello. With no traffic, you can get from our house to the airport in a half hour. I believe leaving ninety minutes in advance is reasonable. My father preferred to leave in 1987.

In the darkness the kitchen looked so small. Let me be the ten thousandth person to point out that the house you grew up in does not resemble the house you visit as an adult. Its scale is lost, its proportions change, and the artifacts of your childhood have been rearranged or have vanished altogether. That woolly couch, the one with the painful buttons on the backwhere did that couch go? New discoveries reveal exotic, previously unknown details about your parents. There is truffle oil in the cabinet. Truffle oil. When did Mom and Dad start liking truffle oil? Its like finding a koala bear pawing around in the garage.

I went upstairs to my room, which hadnt been my room for more than two decades, and really was never fully mine, because for most of my childhood I shared it with my brother and a series of uncooperative cats. Privacy existed only in my thoughts. I knew this room to be the room where I became myself, or had fantasies of future selves that would never happen. This is the room where I wanted to be Larry Bird. Where I wanted to be Prince. Where I wanted to be Sting. (Yes, I wanted to be Sting. Ill come down and fight you right now.) It was the room where homework was done, or homework was not done, where girls were called and the fathers of girls were hung up on. This was the room where I found out a kid I knew from school, a teammate, had been killed in a car accident, the first moment I truly felt impermanent. This was the room where I learned Id gotten rejected by a college. This was the room where I got rejected by another college. Then another college. I got rejected by a lot of colleges.

Things improved. I left this room and snuck into a school (thank you, sleepy admissions officer at the University of WisconsinMadison!) and found a job and experienced love and heartbreak and finally met the woman I would marry, Bessie. Id gotten sick with cancer and recovered to the point that Id forgotten it happened. Id been blessed to get work that let me fly around the world and meet people Id never dreamed of meeting and a handful of schnooks I hoped never to meet again. Id been dispatched to Super Bowls, Summer and Winter Olympics, World Cups, and the snooty-pants golf Masters. If youre not impressed by any of that, I once saw a photograph of a bird on top of a mouse on top of a cat on top of a dog.

I sat awake in that room and all of that backstory rushed over me. I had been so happy and so unhappy here. But in the moment I mostly felt fortunate, to have lived here, in this house, in this town, with this family and these parents, and tried to think of all the things that had influenced me along the way. Sometimes its easier just to believe that lifes path is chance, a fluke of randomness, and yet its not really random, not when you think about what you are and what you wanted to be and all the miles in between. And I thought about all the people who had imparted advice to megood advice, bad advice, in and outside my family. Id had plenty of mentorsmentors I sought, ones I didnt. Good bosses, jerk bosses. Great coaches, ambivalent coaches. You think you are on your own, but you really are not. Nobody figures it out alone.

I have my own children now. As I write this, my son, Jesse, is two years old; my daughter, Josie, is a happy, hungry newborn. The first thing they teach you about parenting is that its a surrender of control. Okay: the first thing they teach you is to take that diaper immediately out of your house and bury it in a nine-foot hole as fast as possible. But the second thing they teach you is about the surrender of control. And this gives parenting a kind of breathless feeling, frightening and exhilarating, especially if you are someone who thrives on schedule, arrangement, and punctuality. A child does not adhere to any kind of preexisting arrangement. Abandoning this expectation can be the greatest liberation of your life.

Like nothing else, parenthood makes you realize, sharply, that you are now in the position of the advice giver. You are the role model, the example, whether you are ready or worthy or not. It goes without saying that the best example is the example quietly set, but this is not always convenient, or realistic, as we are all prone to lapses and embarrassing behavior and tantrums of our own, especially between 4:00 and 6:30 P.M. on the expresswaydont tell me that eighteen-wheeler full of chickens has run out of gas. We are not always our best selves. And yet here we are, at the wheel, assigned with the task of shaping a real-life human or humans. And with the slightly nauseating rush of that assignment comes an appreciation for all the advice youve ever received before, especially from your own parents. Like you, they werent perfect. But they probably did the best they could.

I didnt know it at the timenone of us didbut a few months after this visit, my father would become very sick. Our lives would change; all our energy was dedicated to improving whatever time he had left. A high school science teacher, my father was full of wonderment about how the world workedhe was the kind of person who could spend an hour explaining the Northern Lights, or the inner workings of a toaster oven. Suddenly his world shrank. For the coming year, life would not be about the big play, the grand gesture, or long-term plans. The focus would be on creating smaller, perfect moments that brought us all temporary relief and happiness.