The American Dream: A cliche? Part 6

American Dream: A Cliché? Part 6

Nature, Nurture,  Culture, Future !

No Dear Reader, I am not planning to write some  terrible  poetry.  I am just writing some words that rhyme and are also relevant for raising children.  There are other words that are also relevant that don’t rhyme with the above. Like luck, genes, resources, talent ,  discipline  and so on.

You may have noticed that the children arrive in this world  as little munchkins completely helpless and unable to survive by themselves. At that stage, parental responsibilities mainly involve primary care, like feeding ,  diapering,  cleaning up, wiping off spittle and barf,  and making sure that various  self-destructive activities are prevented successfully.  The babies  also need lots of cuddling and loving, but they are so cute anyways that most parents  voluntarily exceed  this requirement.  

While primary care  involves a lot of time and energy, what comes later is much more challenging.

You need to guide the child patiently so he can bloom into a successful and happy adult. Human beings have been trying to find a formula for this for thousands of years.  Religious manuscripts, ancient texts,  modern books , tons of psychologists’ opinions  and other assorted gobbledygook are all available to you in case you want some help with this as a parent.  I will tell you what.  Nothing works  as it is supposed to when you are raising children. A kid that behaves like a horny monkey in his teenage years suddenly settles down and becomes a scientist. Then again, a goal-oriented stable kid gets into drugs in his twenties and messes up his life. The pitfalls are numerous. There are major surprises, massive failures, and sometimes totally unexpected successes!

I present you  two cases,  a son with a tough father, and a daughter with a devoted  mother.

Ryan Clifford

Norman  Clifford was talking to his wife. They were both in their late forties.  It was a beautiful day in late spring in Lawrence, Kansas.  About five rose bushes in their garden were in full bloom.  Magnolias did not freeze their buds this year, so there were two small magnolia trees in bloom. Summer flowers have been planted and have started blooming slowly. The air is fresh, the temperature a cool 65 degrees Fahrenheit .  Their grown son,  Ryan, is going to college in Seattle, Washington, far away. His classes just ended and he just came back home to spend the summer with mom and dad. 

“One more year”, Norman said . “By this time next year, he is going to graduate and it will be all worth it”.

“You better believe it” Susan , his wife, said “our savings are seriously diminished, for sending him to a private college. If we sent him to University of Kansas, it would have cost about a quarter of this. “

But he was getting a high quality education in Washington, which would lead to better jobs and perhaps a scholarship  if he wanted to get a law degree or even a Ph.D.

The problem, right now, though is that nice young man hasn’t been too friendly for the last two days. In fact, he has spent most of his time in his bedroom. He is writing.  Science fiction.  He is obsessed with Sci-fi.

Susan said to her husband, “ Did you read Ryan’s recent piece? You know, specially,  Ryan  brings in all those Greek mythological characters and puts avatars of them in the future worlds. That’s some crazy sci-fi. Maybe we are looking at a future Bradbury or Ursula Le Guin”

Norman laughed   “I am proud of him too. He is a good kid”.

They were happy parents, waiting for the month of May next year, when their son will graduate from college and start a new life on his own. Maybe he will try to go for his Ph.D. if he gets a scholarship. Maybe he will find a job in a bank or the government. Either way, they are happy with the outcome. So far.

Ryan kept on writing that  summer. He sent stories to friends and other writers who loved them. Finally, he decided to do something drastic, that will change his life.  And his parents’ lives.

Sometime around July, a month before college started, Ryan told his parents that he only wanted to write. No college, no more distractions, he just wanted to be a full-time writer.

His parents were devastated. Specially Norm,  who was very much a pragmatist. He tried to explain to his son the idea of a sunk cost. Three years of college tuition and other expenses have already been paid. Now Ryan wants to give it all up. If he grits his teeth and finishes just  one more year of college, he will have a Bachelor’s degree from a well-known  private college, and he will never be unemployed. All options will remain open for him, even if he prefers to write fiction for a while.

But Ryan would not budge.  Sci-fi was his destiny and it was calling him. It was now or never.  

Norman Clifford  was a portly man, short and stout. We played squash once  a week for a while. Squash is a game that requires quick movement and flexibility of limbs. Norman didn’t have that. But  He had masterful control over his shots.  At that time, I was crazy fit physically, buff and flexible and all, but I could not control my shots that well. So, we were pretty even on the squash court. But he often hurt himself playing – sprain an ankle, or  have a muscle spasm and we needed to take a long pause in the middle of our game.  But after a few minutes, he will return to our game, push through the pain and most of the time kicked my butt with his beautiful ball control.  I admired his tenacity. 

He brought in Ryan to the gym that summer. Ryan was short too like his dad, but he lifted heavy weights regularly, and looked like it too. We tried to play cutthroat squash , but it was a hilarious disaster. Three bodies running forward, backward and sideways  in the small squash court, chasing  a ball that bounces from wall to wall, and we all were swinging  our long rackets! Many accidents were bound to happen!  I hit Ryan on his buttocks  with the squash ball, Ryan hit his dad on his elbow with his racket,  and Norman ran backwards and bumped into me sending me sprawling on the floor. We all had bruises and welts after that game. Never again, we decided!! Three was indeed a crowd!

I did not hang out with Ryan much. I saw him on the university campus a few times and assumed he was a college student in our college.  He had an easy smile, and sparkling eyes. He told me a little bit about  his obsession with sci-fi  and gave me a printout of one his short stories. I found his story very  intriguing , but  the whole plot was about a novel universe many years in the future and a little story could not really do justice to  the grand scale of his imagination. I felt he needed to write novels if he wanted to succeed.  Later on I heard he is doing exactly that.

You know, kids can cause a lot of pain – they can get into drugs, crime and all that. But this kid, Ryan,  did not do any of that. He just wanted to write, and be famous. He was a good kid.

His parents gave him a chance.  Well, kind of. They did not kick him out, he was allowed to stay in the house and  work as their unpaid servant, housekeeper and cook.  There was  always a seething resentment in  his dad’s mind  about Ryan spending all his money and  not getting his degree.

Ryan kept on writing, he was tenacious too, like his dad.  And he cooked breakfast and dinner for his parents everyday, cleaned the house from top to bottom and mowed the lawn and took care of the flowers. Every day,  he would usually walk about two kilometers to the university library to do his research and write on the library’s computer.

Every one of his friends and relatives and all the amateur writers he knew mostly loved his fiction.  About two years later his manuscript was finally finished and he sent his novel to several publishers,

This did not go well!

No one showed much interest!

 I lost touch with Ryan right around this point

As often happens with budding writers, Ryan put in a lot of effort on his manuscript. I saw him walking to the library often (he only chauffeured the family car, could not use it for himself). He would read mostly mythology and physics and astronomy in the library and use the library computer to write. He was young , good-looking, cultured and well-read. But let’s face it, not having any cash whatsoever is not  conducive to having a nice girlfriend or future wife.

 Imagine that you say to an American girl    “ Would you pick me up in your car and take me to dinner at your expense and  then take me to a movie later? And kind of repeat this for the next fifteen times, because I am broke ?”

He did not get many dates. I guess he did not meet a special professional woman who would fall  in love with his good looks, his toned physique  and his love of Sci-fi ,  and bear his children and support him in his writing career. 

 When I met him last about fifteen years ago, he was  forty plus  years old, still single , graying a little bit, but still in very good shape. He told me he was not writing much any more.  A total of three novels he had written over the years could not be published. He did publish a few short stories in Sci-fi mags, but the spotlight that he wanted with a book from a reputable publishing house is unlikely to come about any time soon.

But he had  found a new purpose in life.  He told me all four of his grandparents are still alive, but very old and ailing. Since he is the only person with free time, he lives with them during most of the year. His own parents are also getting old as well, so he helps out at the house for the rest of the time. Old age living in USA is hard. Apart from medical problems, everyday living, driving, cleaning, cooking, and  everything else  needs assistance which is usually too expensive if  done by hired help. So Ryan will serve this important family need  as a caretaker for old relatives for years to come.  As far as Sci-fi is concerned, it is pretty much over at this point.

I don’t feel bad for Ryan, he chose his own destiny – a lifetime of penury and forced celibacy which could all be avoided if he so wished – all to follow his dreams.  Even at forty-plus years of age, he could go back and finish college and then get a decent job. But now  he was a beaten man. His failure hung heavy on his mind.

Well, what else could the parents have done? When Ryan started writing first, his parents could have acted a little different.  What about setting up a little studio for Ryan and giving him an old car and a secondhand computer  and asking him to do only a part of the housework?  So that he could write in peace for days instead of driving his mom to the supermarket, mowing the lawn and cooking and getting dinner ready , and then walking two kilometers to the library to write? Yes,  Norm had enough money to provide  all this, and  both parents were healthy for at least fifteen years after Ryan started writing. So   they did not need   to drive him so hard.

  I realize that a lot of people have survived and succeeded in very adverse conditions.   Did Professor Clifford do the right thing? Maybe he could have spoiled Ryan a little bit. He was their only child.  

Ruby Basu

In the early nineties, I went to India after my divorce, a free spirit at last. On the way back, I met a Parsi family, the man worked in Columbia , Missouri  as a physician. He had three beautiful daughters , the oldest was about thirty. I was barely forty years old.  A few weekends later, I went to visit my good friend  Raju  in Columbia, about three hours drive from Lawrence, Kansas.  Of course the goal was to visit the Parsi doc and his family. Well, it turned out that two of the older daughters were in serious relationships, and while the  third one was  flirty , she was barely nineteen years old.  So that was that.

Raju took me to a Bengali party and that’s where I met Munmun Basu, Ruby’s mom.  She was a professor at the University of Missouri, and I was at University of Kansas. We drove to each other’s place several times during the following three months

Given my reputation, the rumor in the Indian circle was that Munmun and I were fornicating like rabbits!

To the rumor mongers I say “Bite me”!

Before any intimacy occurs (including the activity mentioned above),  mature adults usually talk to each other about the possibility of a relationship. Over the course of a few visits, Munmun revealed her long list of requirements to be satisfied before she gets involved with anyone. She did not actually give me a list, but I am putting together a list for your convenience.  Although she liked me, she demanded that I must

1. Be totally committed to her from now on
2. Keep the relationship an absolute secret, in fact deny in front of everyone that we have a relationship until she gets divorced from her husband in  India. We can  not  even go out and be seen together in restaurants or movies or parks.
3. Wait for me for at least eight years ! She will wait for six years until she gets tenure  at her job, which will give her job security. Then she will take a leave of absence , go to India for two years, file for divorce and get her share of the couple’s ancestral property in India
4. Get my rewards at the end!! Soon after she gets divorced , she  will get married , about eight years from now.  Ruby will then join either Princeton, or Yale or Harvard as an undergrad. This will cost  Munmun  most of   her retirement funds as well as the aforementioned funds from her share of their  ancestral property. Thus she will essentially be left with zero savings in her mid-forties!

I was freaking shocked at this.   I tried to explain to her that America has a lot of excellent educational institutions besides the  top ten. It is not worthwhile to go to  any of  the top ten schools as an undergrad with your own money unless your family is loaded . If you search carefully , you will find a good college not in the top ten that will cost about a fifth of Yale or Princeton and provide a great undergrad education in your daughter’s field of choice.

 Only Post-graduate degrees from top ten schools are highly valued , but they are mostly financed by scholarships.  And with a good academic record from a good college not in the top ten, it is perfectly possible to get a scholarship in one of the top ten schools for a Ph.D.  In fact, several  of my ex-students have done just that .

“My baby comes first.  She is going to Princeton University”. She kept on saying softly.

“You realize you are severely restricting your chances  of  finding a partner now or in the future”? I wanted to know.

She nodded and wiped her eyes.

We did remain friends, talking over the phone occasionally for many years.

How was Ruby when she was eleven  years old? Well, she was bright, but ignorant about the real world, precocious and highly opinionated.  A budding feminist, she thought all men are pigs, trying to grab women’s    body parts, and all older middle aged men and women are stupid, period.

Since she was not my child, I could not yell at her, which is exactly what I wanted to do.  I let her dream about how she and her nubile  friends would change the world in the next ten years or ten minutes with their infinite wisdom,   and kept our conversations at a minimum.

Years later,  Ruby did get admitted to Princeton and by the time she graduated, Munmun was left with virtually no money besides her monthly salary.  Ruby  majored in Environmental Studies. Seriously, I mean, when you are draining your mom’s lifetime savings, you should be studying a mainstream subject like Geology, Chemistry, Political Science or Economics so that there are ample employment opportunities for you after you graduate. You can specialize in environmental studies at a later stage! But as  I said, she is not my daughter!

There were three budding internet magazines, all high quality, that just started when she graduated – Wired, Slate and Chalkboard. She started working for Chalkboard.com as a junior reporter.  The salary was low, and she had to live in the New York City area, where rents are sky-high.

After she started working at chalkboard.com, she started vigorously pursuing her environmental agenda. I do not know much about what happened  for about ten years. About three years ago, she published a book on the big river in India.

The book is fun to read. It is based on her personal  and family experience, some legends about the river, some discussion about the religious role of the river in people’s lives, and her travel experiences at many selected points of this huge river that stretches from the Himalayas to all the way through Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal. There are  many interesting facts about environmental impacts on the river, about the government’s recent cleanup and other anti-pollution programs. But the book is not literary fiction, nor is it  a product of original scholastic research.  It is a wonderful  piece of  environmental journalism with a fascinating personal narrative. 

The book sells on Amazon for about six dollars (450 RS.). It took her more than ten years to write the book, requiring a lot of trips to India and a lot of trips inside India.  She stayed with relatives and friends and some contacts from her environmental groups. But  it still cost a lot of money  that she could not afford on her own. Her mother generously helped out whenever she needed it. I will let you do the math about how much royalty she would get from the book over her lifetime. I would guess her lifetime royalty from the book will cover about half of the cost of all of her numerous trips to India and Bangladesh. Ultimately, therefore,  it is a fantastic labor of love that will get her major recognition in the environmental circles.  

Ruby is past forty now, a well-known environmentalist and a preacher of sustainable approaches to resource utilization. People in her circle love her work.  If I told you her real name you probably would have heard of it, if you are familiar with this field.  But you may not know one interesting thing about social activists. They don’t earn enough money!  Which would not be a problem if they  lived in a small town in America and lived a simple life. But “activists” are active! –they go to places, they  organize rallies, they visit big cities in USA and sometimes abroad, they try to visit remote places in the world to develop their agenda!  If they are scions of a wealthy family, then  that’s not a problem. Father’s stocks and bonds are cashed in every year to meet  any shortfall in expenses.

But our Ruby, she is still a reporter for Chalkboard.com. Because of her activities, she prefers to live in New York City area. After paying her rent in NYC, there is barely enough left over for  her other regular expenses. But  If she goes  to a conference in California 4000 km away, she will need to pay for airfare, hotel and her meals. Most of the time, she does not have that. There are huge charity events hosted by the environmental groups in posh hotels.  Even if you are an invited speaker, you have to  own a stash of high-fashion clothes  – each of these outfits with accessories and shoes cost about  at least five hundred dollars.  Even if an environmental group pays for your airfare to a rally in Europe, you will still need money for your expenses once you are there. And if you take a trip to the Amazon Rain Forest to organize  some new initiative, its going to cost many thousands of dollars. Even if your non-profit organization covers part of the  expenses , you will still need to come up with a chunk of cash from your own pocket.

 Ruby does not have this money. She is honest as  a rock, so she will  not sell herself to a multi-national corporation, those that  are always standing in the wings to help you out if you put in a good word for their activities that are allegedly harmful

So who pays for all these? You guessed it. Her mom , now approaching seventy, still teaching in Missouri,  keeps on helping her out every month with a part of  her monthly salary. She is a single mom with a good job whose only daughter  graduated from college fifteen years ago. She should now be very,  very comfortable, thinking about retirement and some  major travel . But apart from occasional trips back to India, she can’t do much of anything else. And she does  not even think of retirement. I guess she will work until she can’t any more. But she is very proud of Ruby, and rightly so.

Lifelong nurturing? Heck yeah! Does Ruby acknowledge her mom’s lifelong sacrifices? I don’t have firsthand knowledge about this, but from what I heard is that she remains the same opinionated, egocentric person that she was when she was eleven years old.  She  thinks her mom’s academic and professional achievements are trivial. In her book, in the page for Acknowledgements, her mother’s name is mentioned along with a hundred other people’s names – nothing special!

Years ago, when Ruby had just started working, I had a phone conversation with her mom.

“You know, Ruby started working, but she still needs help. I  have to help her strategically, otherwise she would be offended. She is a very proud person. ” She told me.

“Huh? Strategic help? How is that?”  I was confused.

“Like, if she mentions a rally in Europe coming up in a couple of months, I give her a big birthday gift or Christmas gift of $3000 or so in cash.  I buy her tickets to India every year.  If she travels inside India , I sometimes pitch in with a hotel room or first class train fare. Sometimes I send money to my relatives and then they give her gifts with that money to meet her other travel  expenses”.  And she has been doing this every year for ever.

I also do not think that her mom’s professional   accomplishments are extraordinary. Nevertheless, her mom  remains an extraordinary person in my eye.