My father and I crashed against similar rocks, and constantly. During my college years, for instance, he was unwavering I choose a major that’d prepare me for a “professional” field, your basic medicine, law, finance, or his trade, commercial real estate. Whenever I’d declare my aspirations for a journalism career, he’d dismiss it out of hand, typecasting reporters as little more than low-paid scandal chasers from 1947’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” rather than the swashbuckling Woodward & Bernstein I pined to emulate. “You’d better live in reality,” he’d say.
As a self-made guy, it was as if he was resentful, possibly even envious, of the cushy, upper, middle-class life he’d choreographed for me when he’d subsisted on leftovers and everyday deprivations. It was head-tripping, let me tell you.
The inevitability I never foresaw as a helmet-bowled little kid regularly excused from the grownups table loomed heavy by the millennium. I was still in my thirties as my folks reached the twilight of their existences, with no zero guarantees old age would keep them around to see my young daughters mature. There were cancerous nodes and cardiac stents, slip-and-falls and mysterious ailments. Tragedy had cued up this drip-drip demise from the second of my accidental birth to people in middle age.
Shockingly, or maybe not for red-meat-eating, Greatest Generation alums, my mom made it to eighty-eight before the cigarette brand Benson & Hedges killed off a loyal customer; my walker-catheter/dependent dad nearly made the one-hundred-year club. Neither, though, enjoyed much quality of life from their eighties on. iPads, Facebook, streaming TV: they had little use for any 21st Century technology. They preferred simpler pleasures disconnected from computer chips. Like a glass of sherry, photo-album reverie, or PBS “Masterpiece Theater.”
Some days, it’s all a fever dream, this being raised by a couple who’d spent their adolescents wishing the worst for Adolph Hitler while the one facet I couldn’t wait to die was annoying disco.
About the Author
Chip Jacobs is an acclaimed author and journalist. His forthcoming novel, Later Days, the sequel to his Los Angeles Times bestselling Arroyo, was published on September 18 by Rare Bird Books. His other books include the international bestselling social history, Smogtown (with William J. Kelly), and Strange As It Seems, an Indie Book of the Year finalist in biography. His prize-winning reporting has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, CNN, the New York Times, and elsewhere. The USC graduate lives in the L.A. area. For more info, visit chipjacobs.com.
