So we got our Nov/Dec issue of Tikkun to bed yesterday and the first thing I want to do on this blog is personal. I wanted to write something about my son, Rowan, getting to 21 years old over a week ago, Sept 29, but what to write? It would take thought. I didn’t have time in the deadline madness. Here are two representative pictures, from preschool and from last week, when his band, A World Familiar, played their first real gig, at the Knitting Factory in Los Angeles on Saturday.

Ro daycare_4Ro knittingfactory 2

Some kind of resemblance between the two photos, don’t you think? Or maybe more with the next one. These two are very representative of Rowan: the ecstasy and the sociability.

Ro knittingfactory 1Ro knittingfactory 3 heads together

Rowan never had much success with tasks in which he wasn’t engaged with passion, and the passion usually involved connection with other people. So all through grade school he loved classes in which he loved the teacher.

He threw himself into games with friends, and then into video games, also often with friends (it can be much more social than you may think). We were reluctant to have them [edit: the video games not the friends!] in the house and at some young age (nine? earlier?) he was so insistent we asked him to write us an essay explaining why we should let him have video games at home. Essays were not his favorite thing, to say the least. But he wrote us such a convincing one we let the video beast into the house. It was strictly controlled, in terms of time and violence, and there were many complaints about how his friends could play the games more than he could. Maybe the struggle with his parents stoked the passion. Now he is studying the theory and creation of video games at the cinema school at the University of Southern California!

One of the best things that happened to Rowan was meeting two half brothers in second grade, Brennan Mulligan and Griffin Johnson. They drew Ro into Dungeons and Dragons and then into Wayfinder, which is like playing D&D with dozens of other kids, in costume, all over the woods and fields of someone’s farm or rural college campus. The community that they all experienced there as teens was stunning: so full of love, fun, and serious application to same; so accepting of anyone’s difference; so much what life should be.

Brenn and Griff, and Miranda who was our next door neighbor when Ro was small, and two other friends, called him from Manhattan on his birthday: the best present he could have had. Brennan completed film school already and is dedicated to making movies, meanwhile bartending, and Griff is at the New School and just got a grant from the Clinton Global Initiative to create a website that maps all the street trees in New York City and logs when they were last watered and fertilized so community groups can coordinate efforts to take care of them. Miranda is a dancer and at college too but I’ve lost track of her latest news.

The last thing I want to say is about how any of this relates to this blog’s theme of “spiritual progressives.” The answer is, in Rowan’s case, not in so many words. I got into a Unitarian Universalist congregation first in an attempt to find him like-minded friends, before Wayfinder took off. It became a surprise passion of mine but not, after the first year or so when he was sometimes the one to drag us to church, of his. Politically, Rowan is pretty much of his parents’ way of thinking but not drawn to any kind of activism. It was surprising to see in the latest video that his roommate Eric Stirpe and he put out for their friends and the world that he wanted to include a plug for a campaign against cruelty to animals.

This is what I want to say: Rowan follows his passions and makes friends, is drawn into community. Did I ever want more for myself or for him? To me, this is what life is about. Not making a lot of money, not being famous, not playing it safe. Any parent today is nuts not to be frightened of the flux our kids are thrown into, the consumerist ideology of buy-this-to-be-happy, the readily available drugs, the romanticization of violence and cynicization (I know it’s not a word) of sex. Debi and I thought we would protect our child up to a point, but because we knew we could not do so for long, we mainly worked at helping him to develop his own inner sense of direction. That meant trusting him, engaging with him, respecting him and asking for his respect for us in turn. I really didn’t expect it to work so well. As much as I trust the future to anyone, I trust it to people like him: he will do what needs to be done as he sees it, with an emotional maturity I never had at his age. Maybe it was nothing to do with Debi and me at all, and all to do with him, or his peers, or the culture. It’s all a mystery, but I am grateful.

Rowan and Debi

Rowan and Debi


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