My parents hoped I would marry a guy with good business sense, and we would take over and expand their properties into a dynasty. They were disappointed when I married a sociology student, but they gave him all sorts of unwanted advice about how once he had a job he could buy and fix up properties in his spare time and rent them out. Chris, my husband, explained how a compulsive drive for money squelches the human psyche and how landlords are a parasitic class in society. They reacted as if they'd been insulted, and I guess they had been. Disappointed that we were rejecting what they most valued, they predicted a life of deprivation for me, a sinking down to the level of their tenants, from which they had worked so hard to escape.
Chris and I became professors (anthropology for me), and although our income isn't high, we have enough.
My parents were delighted when we had a child. They doted on Josh, and he liked being with them. They even put a bumper sticker on their Cadillac: "If we'd known grandchildren were so much fun, we would've had them first!"
My generation expected our kids would finish the job we had started and tear down the social walls, breaking on through to liberation. But our expectations met with as much disappointment as our parents' had. The new generation enjoyed the fresh air we'd provided: creativity, sexual permissiveness, tolerance of diversity, self-expression. They took these values for granted, just as we had with the material security we'd grown up with. Of course some kids weren't this docile and did oppose established power, but they were the exceptions. Most didn't protest. Their main goal was something we paid lip service to but deep-down distrusted: enjoying life. Many things displeased them -- lower wages, expensive education, shrinking opportunities -- but the hard battles needed to overthrow corporate rulership didn't appeal to them. Rather than rebelling, they accepted the well-ventilated dungeon they found themselves in.
Josh is sensitive and caring, a much more easy-going person than I was growing up. But changing the world isn't his priority. In high school he started working for his grandfather, painting and doing odd jobs on the properties. The two of them got along great.
Although Josh is bright, he didn't study particularly hard and stopped his education with a junior college degree, then went to work full-time for his grandfather, moving up into the business side of it. He met a nice girl, and they got married. He didn't have his grandfather's energy and ambition, but he was making a decent salary and had a free place to live, so he was content. He and his wife became gourmet cooks.
I have to admit I was disappointed by his complacency, but I was also thankful that he and his wife were wholesome, not into drugs or self-destructiveness. They were a pleasant, stable family. Their son, Mark, was a delightful boy, and then they had a daughter, Linda, a real dear. I didn't mind baby-sitting at all.
As our grandchildren grew older, my husband and I enjoyed an easy communication with them. By the time Mark was in high school, we were having real intellectual discussions. I didn't have to persuade him to be against the war, he was that way spontaneously.
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