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Personalized Solutions in an Impersonal World

I know I sort of have this reputation of recommending that people go in with guns blazing to solve whatever ails them. It’s often a fair assessment of my predisposition. When this advice column was running in print syndication in 1983, I famously corresponded with some globetrotting medical students who needed an extra three days or so to organize the citations for their cardiology midterm essays. I considered their plight, and judged it best to ring some of my buddies in E-ring and nudge them to throw together an invasion of Grenada that more or less forced the professor down there to push the due date to the following Monday.

But with age has come an awareness of my ways’ recklessness. I now see the value of standing down as an often very viable alternative to intervention. Though you may have hoped otherwise, I will not call up the Tennessee National Guard and dispatch them to the Great Smokeys with infrared-armed Apaches and nightvision-equipped infantry who’d sweep that forest like Van Dyke, and surely spot and recover your son by dawn. I’m not shirking my responsibilities though, and am instead keeping your son out of a quagmire that dwarfs even Uncle Sam’s disastrous assault on Grenada.

Before you commence cussing, let me give a brief breakdown of just a small sampling of the current issues I’m dealing with in my own life:

• My Yaris is being recalled because the front and side airbags deploy if you beep while straightening out after completing a left turn, and fail to deploy at all if you crash during a weekend or March.
• My son is an excellent rebounder and shot-blocker, but word has gotten out in the Class B Coastal Middle School division that he’s inept from the charity stripe, so hack-an-Ernest is usually deployed for his games’ duration and it works spectacularly well. He ends games in tears and comes home soaked in them and I have to deal with it. He usually calms down during dinner, but after I tuck him in I hear him sneak outside to the hoop in the driveway, followed by the telltale clanks of his futile free throws, followed by further bawling. My wife and I lay in bed with our eyes open toward the streetlamps’ glow on the ceiling as we both silently wonder what to do.
• My PC caught a virus that fraudulently floods my Google search history with queries for explicitly amorous images of the cast of Pretty Little Liars, which has left my vigilant wife displeased both with me and with her own implied inadequacy for being merely legal and not barely so.
• Someone stole my identity, changed my state residency from California to Nevada, and then took out a loan to enroll a student at an unspecified University of California campus.
• My daughter fell asleep on top of the remote and ended up ordering Major League Lacrosse Season Scoop.

It’s all too much. I feel I’m just about done with this world. We should all hope to be as lucky as your son, who won’t even have to start with it.

Civilization has bestowed some great stuff to current humans. The Foo Fighters come to mind, or pretty much anything Dave Grohl blesses with his gifted presence (Nirvana ground to a halt once he left). But for every pleasure to be had in the modern world, there are no less than two precluding inconveniences. I’m so bogged down in petty minutiae that I’ve forgotten what I’m supposed to do once I’m done attending to it, which’ll be never. It’s misery masquerading as busy. Everyone with electricity and 4G is on the same treadmill, which must include you per your submission to my website via mobile.

Your son wised up and split. If he returns via his own navigation, be warm and welcoming, but not so much so that he feels obligated to stay with you. He’s amongst the wolves now. They’ll be more enlightened guardians. The only thing that will be on your son’s plate will be whatever he’s about to savor for his bloody suppers.

Go home tonight. Mourn your loss. As the nights pass, try to notice the distant howls that you’d once disregarded as just a disturbance. Most will bellow forth from wolves. But on some night soon, you will hear a howl that you’ve never heard before but will somehow find familiar. That will be your son, expressing his purest thoughts without the muddling connotations of language. Go to the window and swing it ajar. Tilt your jaw toward the highest star and howl back. Howl lovingly. If you don’t know how then you don’t know love, and know only the word. But you do know love, because you love your son. And he loves you. You knew that from his howl.

(There’s a chance the wolves will eat your son.)