The Best Years of Your Life--A Father's Words

Though my father died nearly 27 years ago, I can still hear his (sometimes sharp) baritone voice giving commands, offering advice or making pronouncements about life. One of his most-frequently uttered statements was, "You better enjoy your life now; these are the best years of your life." I think he started saying this to me when I was about 13; by the time I left home for college at 18 he must have said it to me 100 times. Now, nearly 40 years after this advice, I must say that I think my dad was wrong. Those weren't the best years of my life. But, I think what he really was saying was the time about which he was speaking (teenage years) contained the best years of his life. Thus, one generation's advice and solemn observations about life might be completely irrelevant to the next generation (I am finding that to be true, to be sure!); it tells you more about their struggles and grapplings to understand life and fulfill their responsibiities than of the way that the current generation ought to act. This essay probes why the teenage years might have been best for my father, and why they weren't the best for me...

I. Dear Old (Wrong) Dad

Though my father grew up in penurious circumstances in the Great Depression in the hardscrabble existence of upstate New York, between Utica and Watertown, I think his hardest days were after he enlisted in the army in 1944. He was from the "Greatest Generation," though he died much too early (1981) to have been able to try on that epithet for size. He was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, but kept on fighting until discharge after May 1945. Then, with his life savings of $58, he enrolled at St. Lawrence Univ. in Canton, NY. Along with his fellow GIs, who married young and began having families, Dad married in 1948, and he and my mom had four boys between 1950-1960. By the time he began to discover himself, then, he had a mortgage in a CT suburb of NYC, four ravenously hungry boys to feed, and a safe and very secure job that he gradually couldn't stand.

Job changes in the early 1960s didn't satisfy, and a move to CA to head up the burgeoning west coast operation of this NY company only postponed the inevitable departure from the secure "mother" company. For the remainder of his short life he scrambled to try to put into place his dream--an income tax program for the new thing called the computer. He envisioned that some day everyone would have a computer, and that everyone would want the program he was writing to do their taxes. Thus, as it turned out, my dad was 30 years ahead of his time, and he died three years before Apple delivered the first personal computer. The vision was so clear in his mind, even if he had difficulty communicating it completely to those around him.

He was an artist, a creative genius, wanting to come out of himself, but because of his responsibilities and the tenor of the times, couldn't completely do so. When he gave me the advice, on he which this essay is based, he was between 40 and 45 years old, the time when he most wanted to break out of the mold of the "big company" and discover himself and his own creative life. Thus, even though he loved his family, he really couldn't enjoy the days of family life. For this reason, I believe he returned in his mind to his youth, his relatively free-flowing and wild youth (after the farm chores were done), and thought of them as the best years of his life. When he saw us living our "carefree" teen years, he naturally told us that these were our best years. But, ironically enough, because he had lived in a relatively carefree way (and saw the potential dangers of them), he decided that his four boys wouldn't be quite so carefree. Thus, our youth and teen years was full of activities, from school and church and sports and student government to paper routes and lawn-mowing, to name a few. I remember thinking that if these are the best years of my life, I might not want to see what the future held...

My Life

We were raised strictly by my parents to be ambitious, disciplined and even driven boys. But as I now reach the age at which my father died (if I make it to Christmas 2008, I will have surpassed him in longevity), I realize that my teenage years weren't my best--not by a long shot. The reason? I was confused. I was confused intellectually/spiritually; I was confused sexually; I was hyper-limited in my perspective on life. My spiritual confusion arose because of a wholesale adoption of Evangelical Protestantism early in 1969, a move that never really "fit" me but took me 30 years fully to discard. My sexual confusion came from the dual "don't touch" sources of Evangelicalism (as a young "leader" I needed to set an example of complete dedication to God) and Radical Feminism (I wanted to be "progressive," and the first generation of feminists had a "don't touch" attitude also--unless you wanted to be labeled a potential rapist). My blindness in understanding is illustrated, I recall, when I was sitting around with friends listening to Richard Nixon's brief speech announcing that he would step down from the Presidency in August 1974. I had no idea what was going on, no real sense of the venomous political world that had been particularly noxious in the previous few years. Certainly, I was young, and young people don't have perspective on the world, but I felt I was absolutely lost in the world. Perhaps that is why I hung on so vehemently to my Evangelicalism--at least it claimed to give me sure answers.

Conclusion

I have discovered, however, that life has opened for me as I get older. In most ways I much prefer being 56 to being 46 or 36 or even 26. I have a sense of confidence and understanding that I simply didn't have previously. Though I, like everyone my age, faces health challenges and diminution of certain powers, I think what I have compensates for what I don't have. My life is very good now, thanks in part to my dad and his life. So, dad, I disagree with your assessment. Funny, I think he would be proud of me for disagreeing with him.

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