“Dad, you keep telling me to be thinking about what I want to do when I grow up. And I keep telling you I haven’t a clue. And I have no idea what’s involved in all the professions out there to choose from.”
Dad lowered his paper enough to peer at me over the top of it. We were at the breakfast table, just the two of us, the others having already scampered. “I wouldn’t expect you to. You’ve got some time to figure that out. I just want you to start thinking about what sort of thing would appeal to you, and what wouldn’t. What about teaching? Of course, there are vast differences even in that one profession. Being a college professor would be much different from being a high-school gym teacher, which would be different from running a preschool—even though they all involve teaching and working with and instructing young people. Or take a creative profession. Like being an architect. Or a fashion designer. Designing houses or buildings isn’t comparable to designing dresses or, say, costumes for movies, but both are creative activities.
Then, there’re all those other things to spend your days doing: professions like being a car mechanic, dentist, computer programmer, script writer, aircraft pilot. No one expects you to understand the minutia of any of those jobs, but you probably know enough already by just thinking about them if any of them excites you or turns you off. I just want you to start thinking about this. Start to evaluate possibilities. Start to eliminate some. There’s a side benefit in doing this: you’ll start to learn who you are.”
That was my dad. He liked to talk, to be on stage, to motivate whomever he was talking to, an individual or a crowd. I didn’t. I wasn’t like my dad in many ways, and maybe that was why I loved him so much. Why he loved me, I had no idea. I wasn’t very lovable. I was sort of a blah. He was a lot of things I wasn’t, and I admired him for all of them. Funny, but I thought more about the things he was that I wasn’t than the things where we were alike. Maybe that’s something people do, not think about things they like about themselves, but just the opposite. For instance, lots of adults have told me how cute I am. Aunts, uncles, cousins—the older, female ones, especially—sometimes even strangers I’ve met. Adults, I mean. Kids don’t tell other kids they think they’re cute. Well, even adult men usually don’t unless there is something funny about them.
Nope, not men, but women? Yeah. “You’re very cute,” always said with a smile. Yet when I looked in the mirror, I never see cute. I see all the defects, all the things I wish weren’t there. Perhaps this wasn’t unique with me. I’d guess a lot of people, kids especially, look at what they think is wrong with themselves and ignore the rest. Or maybe it’s just the ones like me who aren’t chock full of self-confidence who do that. I may have hit on something there. Maybe kids who are self-confident don’t see their flaws; that could be one of the reasons they’re confident. Isn’t that part of the Peter Principle or Murphy’s Law or Occam’s Razor or something?
Chicken-and-the-egg sort of stuff, certainly.
“You told me that before,” I replied, referring to thinking about something I had no basis to think about.
He chuckled. “Maybe I did, Artie. Maybe I did. I do go on a little.”
“Yeah, and I have been thinking. It’s hard because I don’t actually know how most people in those jobs spend their days, or what problems they run into, or how much money they make, or anything else. But I did think of something I might like to do.”
“Oh? What is it?”
I had his full attention. That was just one of the many things I loved about him. He was an important man with a big job, but I was the one he concentrated on when he was with me, and anything else came later. I don’t know how many dads are like that.
“I think I might like to write,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t shoot me down. It didn’t take much to deflate me.
He lowered the paper farther this time, all the way down to the table. “That’s one of those jobs like teaching. There’re all kinds of writing. You’d have a wide scope, choosing writing, which is a very good thing. Have you thought about what you’d like to write? Short stories and/or novels, or being a reporter or columnist for a newspaper or magazine, writing against a deadline, or technical writing for a company, writing for financial appeals, writing patent applications, writing movie scripts or proposals, writing ads for an agency—as I say, there’re all kinds of writers. The field would be wide open for you. And with your intelligence, that’s something you could be good at.”
As I said, he likes to talk. I rarely said much at all. But when it was just the two of us, I was much more verbal. “Just writing. I think I’d like to write. Put words down on a screen.”
“Okay. Well, why don’t you begin, actually write, see how you like it?”
“What should I write?”
He laughed. “That’s entirely up to you, Artie. I can’t choose that for you. But it’s not hard. Pick something you want to write about and start. The starting is usually the hardest part. There is one rule you should know, though. Well, not a rule. More a suggestion, or a guideline. It’s this: write what you know.”
I had to think about that. What did I know? Answer: not much! Not to write about, anyway. What 14-year-old kid does? What did I have to write about? Nothing! I finished my breakfast and went back upstairs and flopped down on my bed. Why did I want to write? I didn’t have much to say, and if I had nothing to say, why did I want to write? Made no sense.
But I thought about it and realized, finally, that there was one thing I did know something about, and it might be fun to write about it: me. I knew more about that subject than anyone in the world. But could I write about it? Write about it in a way anyone else would be interested in reading it?
I’d never know if I didn’t try. I didn’t even know if I’d like doing it. But hadn’t Dad said just do it and see if you like it? That certainly would be the way to find out.
So, what kind of a format should I use? I could write a journal. But I’d done that in the 6th grade and very quickly it had become boring. Exceptionally boring. Maybe that was because most kids don’t live very exciting lives at that age, and writing about them proved that. Or maybe because I was a terrible writer. So, I’d abandoned that journal as soon as the teacher let us. I knew one thing: I didn’t want to go down that path again.
So, if not a journal, what? More thought, and I decided what I wanted to write were my thoughts and perceptions and opinions. A 14-year-old’s slant on life. How I saw and reacted to things going on around me, as well as the mishmash in my head. If doing this wasn’t fun, or the writing itself ended up insipid and dull and boring as my journal, well, then I’d have learned something. Learned that maybe I wasn’t a writer, or that I didn’t want to be one. Maybe think about becoming a nuclear scientist instead.
But why think negatively about this? Maybe I would like it. In any case, it was worth a try.
I had another idea, too, that might make the seas I would have to sail less rough. (Hey, see? Already a literary giant.) I do have one asset that I might be able to exploit. I have a vivid imagination. I’ve thought up all sorts of weird things, not really stories because they aren’t structured that way, but, well, maybe calling them imaginative events or incidents would describe them. Just random thoughts, really, where I let my mind go where it would. I could maybe write like a . . . well, a blog, enlivening it with some of these thoughts.
Hmmmm. This wouldn’t be a journal. That talks about what’s happening with little introspection or personal insights. A blog can contain your thoughts more than covering events. Or I could include events but color them with how I feel about them.
Or maybe I could just go ahead and write without all this pigeonholing. Just write what I’m thinking. Just begin. And if it becomes what’s happening around me that I’m reacting to more than what’s in my head, or both, I can just let it happen. No rules. Hey, I liked the sound of that.
-- -- -- --
A Work of Art
Not a journal
First Entry
I have a brother. His name is Toby—Tobias, really, but you have a good chance of being socked in the jaw if you call him that—and he is more than a brother: he’s my twin. We’re Artie and Toby Hodges. He always told everyone that I got the looks and he got everything else. Though I think he meant it as a joke when he first said it—or maybe not; he might be right. Or more than might be. Not right about my looks, but about everything else. He’s more athletic than I am and smarter and has a livelier, more outgoing personality. A ton more self-confidence. A lot more friends. Does this make me jealous or envious? Envious seems similar to jealous except not exactly on the nose. No. Toby having what he has doesn’t bother me at all. I’m happy enough being me. I don’t mind him being more outgoing because that isn’t me, isn’t who I am, and I’m comfortable the way I am. I’m content being a more private individual. I have no desire to be the central spark in the wildfire crowd that always is burning brightly around him.
Do Toby and I get along? Yeah, for the most part. He tends to overshadow me both at school and at home, but I don’t mind. Living in a shadow isn’t all that bad when you love the one casting it. Less is asked of you or expected of you that way. In some ways, and at rare times now, we are as close as I expect people who aren’t twins think all twins are. Why isn’t it all that often now? While I’ve never really known for sure, I think it’s because his interests are very different from mine. I read a lot, spend a lot of time in my room alone, and I don’t mind being by myself. He’s always out doing things with others. A social animal, that’s Toby.
As I said, he’s smarter. I have to work to keep getting A’s at school. He seems to absorb the lessons at school and rarely has to read the textbooks. He runs through his homework in half the time it takes me, and his grades are always just as good as mine. We both are straight-A students, but it isn’t a competition between us. One way I want to define myself is by my academic achievements; I can be proud of them. He’s good at everything and certainly wouldn’t define himself by his academic performance. I don’t know how he’d feel if he got a B. Probably wouldn’t bother him in the slightest. He’d shrug it off like he does anything that’s nettlesome. It would bother me a lot.
Does he tease me, put me down, condescend to me? No. We’re friendly. That’s about it. Close? Not any longer; we were when we were young, of course, but not now. It’s that ‘different interests’ thing that has caused most of the loosening of our bond, I guess. And maybe a bit more: he loves challenges. They allow him to prove himself. I don’t present any challenge to him, so he probably finds me boring. And for myself, I’d just as soon not be challenged to do anything. It’s scary. What if I don’t succeed?
But back to different interests. If I could speak intelligently about the capabilities of the running back on the NFL team he follows or the ace of the baseball team’s pitching staff he likes, maybe we would talk more. Or if we still shared a bedroom, maybe we’d talk more.
But I don’t know or care anything about sports, so talking about them is a nonstarter for me. We could talk about homework, I guess, but who wants to do that? Just get it done as fast as possible and forget about it. Talking about it? Ugh!
If we shared a room, maybe he’d talk about all the kids at school he shares himself with and what the latest scuttlebutt is. I wouldn’t have much to say, because while I’d know the kids he was talking about, I wouldn’t really know them. There aren’t many kids there that I know well at all, so I wouldn’t have anything to say when Toby was discussing them. Maybe it’s good we don’t share a room.
Going your own way in life is a lot easier if you don’t have someone to compare yourself to who outshines you.
When did all this separation start? We just drifted apart from each other, started that around the age of nine. We are two different people living in the same house. Still twins, biologically, but in name only.
My parents. They are both great. They both love me. They both talk to me. I’m not all that good at holding up my end of the conversation, but that might be because I’m a teenager. Teenagers rarely talk about personal things with their parents. Perhaps that might be why this writing thing appeals to me. I don’t much want to speak about what I’m thinking, but I do have things in my head that would like to see the light of day. Letting them come out and breathe by being written down will give them an outlet.
Except it won’t be on paper, of course. It’ll be on the screen of my laptop computer in my room. I spend a lot of time in my room alone anyway. I have plenty of time to write my thoughts down.
We have a dog. She’s a miniature mixed breed and is very cute. She’s a bit standoffish with strangers but warms to people quickly once she trusts that they won’t hurt her.
She warms up after barking at them shrilly for long enough to make her point, of course; she needs to let them know she’s no pushover. Her name is Samantha, but of course she quickly and permanently became Sam. I love her. She’s a family pet, but she sleeps on my bed with me and tends to spend much of her day there. Her choice. I always wonder if that bothers Toby.
If so, maybe there is some small bit of competition that I’m not aware of. Would I be happy to learn that yes, he resents Sam liking me more than him? I don’t have a quick answer for that. I guess I could ask him. But I think he’d be surprised at the question and want to know why I was asking, and that would be awkward. Anyway, I’m not sure I want to know. Things are fine between us now. Why go looking for trouble, stirring things up? Let sleeping dogs, like Sam, lie. I’m just happy that she sleeps on my bed.
Mom’s a teacher. She teaches fourth grade, but not at the school Toby and I’d attended. She works in a different school district. She is one of the reasons for our straight-A accomplishments. She’d have been disappointed if we didn’t perform like that. It is always best not to disappoint her. I think Toby and I feel differently about why that is. I don’t want her to be sad, which she’d be if we didn’t perform up to our potential. Toby doesn’t want her to feel bad about him, disappointed in him. Different.
Dad’s an aeronautical engineer and worked for NASA back when the space program was flourishing and they had thousands of people doing thousands of jobs that, all being conglomerated into a whole, put a man on the moon. When I grew up, someone had been there and back a long time before, so it was just another historic fact I’d learned; nothing special. I often wondered what it must have been like when putting a man on the moon was just a pipedream and then no longer was. It had to have seemed like an impossibility before it actually happened. Maybe that would be similar to people in 2080 thinking, ‘what was it like, I wonder, before people had learned how to fly like Superman and move objects with their mind?’
Today, Dad works for Boeing in an executive position. Both of my parents are smart and earn good salaries. We live in a very nice area of Seattle, probably what people would call an upper-class neighborhood. Well, I’m being modest and there’s no place for that here; honesty must prevail, or what’s the point in writing this at all? It’s going to be about things as I see them and understand them. It’s not supposed to be fiction. Just the facts, ma’am; just the facts. So, here’s how it is: I have to be careful when talking to people not to come across as a rich kid, but when writing here, the point is to say what’s what and not dither around with niceties. So, yes, we have a great house in an upper-class, gated neighborhood and live cheek by jowl with very affluent neighbors.
It feels very strange, writing that down. I’ve avoided mentioning that all my life. I’ve lived in the same house all my life, so labels like upper-class and affluent don’t mean much at all. This is just home.
The only kids in the family are me and Toby. My mother always says that the two of us are all we need to be a family, and anyway, she doesn’t want to risk having another set of twins, or, heaven forbid, triplets. Mom has a very dry sense of humor, and it’s always hard to know how truthful most anything she says is, especially when she smiles while saying it. She smiles a lot but has her sarcasm honed to a very fine point.
I guess it would be fair to say that I am closer to Dad than Mom. It might also be fair to say it’s the opposite with Toby. But as I think it would offend both parents to hear that, I never say it out loud. But I only do serious, private talking with Dad. I have no idea if Toby does any of that kind of talking at all with anyone. He might not even think serious thoughts. Being my twin, I’d guess he does, but he gives the impression that what you see is what you get with him, and there’s no depth there at all. I doubt that’s true. He can’t be all that different from me.
Some might think it strange that Toby, the enthusiastic athlete, would be closer to Mom and wonder why Dad wouldn’t identify with him more than me. But it’s not that way. Sure, Dad spends time with him, but you live in a house with people, you get to know them intimately, and Dad has a special smile for me, one he doesn’t show for Toby. And Mom will always be more attentive to and inquisitive about Toby than to or about me.
Of course, maybe that’s because Toby has a more interesting life than I have.
Toby’s and my interests are so different. I’m into music, art, writing, puzzles, books, intellectual games, things like that, if indeed by lumping those things together they become a thing. Toby is into girls, sports, girls, popularity and girls. How do I know this? We talk as a family. We always eat dinner together. Dad makes a point to be home at dinnertime unless he’s eating out with some big shot or traveling, and we all talk at the dinner table. Both of us boys are asked about what’s going on in our lives, and as we’ve been involved in dinner-table talk from the time we could talk, it is easy for us to continue doing it now, even though we are teens and have secrets. I am sure Toby has a lot more than I do, but we can talk about most anything other than what our parents don’t need to know about.
When we began doing this, Toby and I would want to talk about the same things. We were together all the time, so it was natural we would share experiences. We’d try to talk over each other, each wanting to get out what had happened that day before the other did. Thinking back now, I remember, he usually got to say what he wanted to say. Even then, I was the quieter and less assertive of the two of us.
Those talks are the way I generally know what’s going on in Toby’s world and he in mine, if he really listens while I’m talking, which isn’t all that much. One thing about Toby—that boy can eat!
I suppose I should let the cat out of the bad here and now: I’m gay. The only other person in the world who knows this is Dad. I can’t say that for sure; it’s possible he’s told Mom. I wasn’t sure about that and finally asked him.
“Artie,” he said, “it’s not my place to tell her. You told me in confidence. Sure, she’s your mother and my wife, and she loves us both, but your sexuality is your business. It’s up to you to tell the people you want to know. Not mine. When you’re ready, you’ll tell her.”
So, I guess he didn’t tell her. She hasn’t ever asked me about it or acted differently toward me since I told Dad. I know Toby doesn’t know; there’s no way he wouldn’t have said something to me about it. We all know how straight he is because most of what he talks about over dinner is girls. Girls and sports. I could mention over dinner that I’m gay, but it seems the wrong place to do that. “Pass the chicken. Oh, I’m gay. And the gravy too, please?” No, the timing just doesn’t feel right. Besides, I don’t want anyone to know. Dad’s okay. No one else.
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School is school. We don’t go to a private school, but as we live in a great neighborhood where many of the parents have quite a bit of influence with the powers that be and care about their kids’ education—and of course have college degrees themselves—our high school is top notch. I just started there a week ago so don’t really know much about it yet, but so far, I like my teachers fine. And the kids seem okay, too. Not that I’ve made any friends yet. Toby has, but then, that’s the way things work. I sit at lunch at a table where kids I know from my middle school sit. I ate lunch with these same kids last year. I’m not great friends with any of them, but I am comfortable sitting with them. They’re just kids. None of us tease each other.
I guess this isn’t fascinating reading. It’s even boring me. I hope I’ll have more to say the next time I sit down to do this. But some background seems appropriate, something so readers, should there ever be any, know about the person whose thoughts they are sharing. I’ll try to find more interesting things to write about. I’ll be starting to be involved in school soon, so that’ll help. I also wonder if I should write in present tense as I’ll be writing about and expressing thoughts about what’s going on at the moment. But I think I’d be much more comfortable writing in past tense. Maybe I’ll use both! We’ll see.