Letter to my descendants 2024  
Talk, talk, talk. So much talk   

When I was in high school and in my first years of college (before your grandmother died), my parents would sit me down to have these meetings. We’d look at my painful report card and talk about strategies I was going to use to do better. I remember sitting in the living room feeling as though I wanted to itch my skin right off. I couldn’t wait to get up, to get away, to end the conversation, to say or do whatever it took to leave that room.   

I already felt bad. I knew I wasn’t doing the work. I couldn’t even explain why. 

When the two of you were in high school, we would sit down to have these meetings.  We’d look at your report cards or discuss a recent decision you’d made, and we’d talk about strategies you were going to use to do better.  I remember sitting at the dining room table feeling as though I wanted to itch my skin right off. You couldn’t wait to get up, to get away, to end the conversation, to say or do whatever it took to leave that room.  

I knew you felt bad and you were infinitely better students than I was. 

There were all manner of factors beyond our control. There were things in my life I couldn’t do anything about just as there were those things for you. Some came from the world — COVID — and some came from the private messes every family has.  

For me, somewhere late in college, it finally clicked in — just do the things you need to do to move forward. I stopped having semesters where I just checked out. I started caring or bringing enough energy to do the  things that I cared about as well as the things I didn’t necessarily care about but had to get done. Did these conversations help? Did the ideas, approaches, shame, pride, love, anger, all the emotions — did they change me and my behavior?  

Unclear.   

Did these conversations help either of you?  

Also unclear.   

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

What I’m trying to get at, children, is some advice, some kernel of knowledge that I might share with you about how people change, about how you might parent better than I did, about how to initiate conversations or interactions that help rather than hurt. Maybe these conversations are necessary, maybe they did help, maybe as bad as they made me feel in that moment, they helped shape me into the adult I am now.  Maybe our conversations will help you, did help you, and remain with you, one way or another.  Maybe they form a kind of script that plays in your head that you sometimes acknowledge and sometimes reject. I hope the positive elements stick with you and the cruddy parts fade. 

I say it with students all the time: I’m trying to create a classroom so that they figure things out with themselves as early as possible. There are things I wish I’d figured out when I was twenty-five instead of thirty, things I wish I’d figured out at sixteen rather than fifty-six. I feel the same thing as a parent: I know you’ll make mistakes, but I hope they’re new mistakes, not the dumb ones I’ve made. If some of what we’re saying ends up on a cassette that you play later in life, I’ll take it, but only if that recording offers you some solace, some peace, not pain or shame.      

Are these regrets?  On blue days, to be sure. If only I had ____, then I would have ____.  (Worked harder at guitar, I would have been a rock star!)  But I’m not sure that’s true.  While I do not and have never agreed with the idea that everything happens for a reason, I do believe that all of the experiences you have lead you to where you are right now. And these conversations mattered, they did.   

We live in an age where therapy is an accepted norm, where people are encouraged to talk to therapists, to physicians, an age where two things are widely accepted: one, if you talk to people, it helps, and, two, you can get to a root problem if you work hard enough at it. (There’s a third option, now, that involves prescriptions and chemicals, but that’s a harder conversation and beyond what I am trying to say here.)  

I remember talking to your Aunt J as we were both struggling with various things and she said, “Talk, talk, talk…so much talk.”  And I knew exactly what she meant: you feel blue or bad, and you’re supposed to talk it out, to work it out, to break it down, with a friend or a therapist.  Talking sometimes helps you get into the middle of an issue. And, in our verbal household where few things haven’t been said, talking is a great way to make sense of stuff.  But talking is just talking, and must end with next steps that you’ll actually follow through on.  

Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,
I take my place among you as much as among any,
The past is the push of you, me, all, precisely the same,
And what is yet untried and afterward is for you, me, all, precisely the same.

Maybe talking helps. Or maybe it helps sometimes. Being there does help. I don’t remember much of these discussions with my parents but I knew that they were there, as much as they could be, with their damaged selves. I wonder if you’ll remember the conversations you had with us, with our damaged selves.  But we were there, we were at the table, we were trying. We’re here. We’re still here. Whether it’s the Bananagram games that always seem to add badly, the walks that you still take with me to one library or another, or the moments you have with mom in the car having convinced her to drive you somewhere, we’re here.     

The second thing I would say about these moments when you are struggling, when things are going well, and you both seem to have this already: you’re not always going to think your way out of the issue. Thinking as talking, talking as thinking. I like this one podcast with a polarizing political figure who says this a lot: 

Thinking won’t get you out of trouble. Thinking is what got you into trouble.   

Talking won’t get you out of trouble. Talking is what got you into trouble.

It has taken me a long time to realize that I can’t think my way out of things, that I can’t talk my way out of things. I think you both get this already, but I’ll say it again.  You can talk about how you’re struggling with your statistics class or your ___, but you’re almost always better served sitting down and working at it for forty five minutes.  

Still, Thanksgiving break just ended and I loved talking with both of you. Most of the time those conversations happened by accident — I was reading and you came into the room.  Or we were waiting for a game to start. I’m not saying that talking isn’t the answer; maybe it’s about the accident of having the right timing. And I don’t know how to reconcile this emotion of how much I look forward to talking to both of you with the fear that it’s all just talk. It’s all just talk. What isn’t, though, is how  proud I am of both of you.  

Love, 

Dad    

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

As part of this assignment, we were asked to include section breaks from Walt Whitman’s poem, Song of Myself.  My first section break came from section three.  My second break came from section forty-three. My third break came from section thirty-two. Reading Whitman alongside Ta-Nehisi Coates as a kind of outline for this project was once again quite helpful.   

Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself.  Dover Publications, 2001.