The Perseid meteor shower came and went like Kohoutek last night. Which is to say, with four to eight eyebeams boring into the sky, we saw nothing but the reflected lights of Plano. I wished for a brightness knob I could turn hard left, or at least a power failure.

The kids had fun arranging deck chairs and sleeping blankets. I guess Squinx figured it's always cold at night where she is sleeping, so why be without heavy bedclothes in the driveway? I tried explaining what 84 degrees felt like, to no avail.

The mosquitoes had the best time of all. When the neighbor's security timer triggered two floodlights, they were sad to see us go.

i want someone to buy me Lileks' Gallery of Regrettable Food, but the remission of coffee-table books in this house will probably continue for several more years. Unless they're board books. Little Roo shows no reverence for publications. They're all projectiles or rugs to him. And one thing I can't stand is to see a book or magazine walked on.

Right now, as the first-time father of my first son, I am tussling with my attitude. Consciously, I know that to be a good father I have to respect him for who he is and whoever God wants him to be. Unconsciously—as suggested by the closing sentence of the last paragraph—I want him to respect the same things I respect.

Foolish, of course, because he may become my opposite. He might love football and have no patience for reading. Or he might decide that accounting is the be-all-end-all of professions, and aspire to nothing else. Tours of European cathedrals with Dad, tracking the subtleties of Western Civilization up close, could be his idea of Hell on earth.

And somehow I have to prepare my subconscious for that, because he'll read me like a ... book. Every father wants to help his son avoid the pitfalls that bedeviled him growing up, and yet those pitfalls will be in different places and take forms no one can predict.

So will the opportunities. I've daydreamed about what I would do if he announced one day before his 18th birthday that he was declining all his college acceptance letters to join the neighbor boy's band. What I would do, that is, after peeling my smoldering brain matter off the ceiling and packing it back into place.

And yet ... at that age I also fantasized about leading a band. How could I deny him the choice?

But what if he sounds like Bob Dylan? Should I be honest? "Son, you have the voice of a macaw undergoing surgery without anesthetic." Then again, if Bob Dylan had been discouraged at just the right time, he'd have taken that civil-service job in Trenton and be retiring to a mid-priced condo in Florida right about now.

So here it comes, the final test of my maturity. Will Rittenhouse rise to it? Stay tuned.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 06:03 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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