RE: Supporting one's kids as they find their own joy...
Growing Up With Mr. Fix-It
By Michael Kelly
Wednesday, August 8, 2001; Page A19
The Russians last week released John E. Tobin Jr., a 24-year-old Fulbright scholar whom they had accused of spying and had convicted and jailed on marijuana charges. The trumped-up case against Tobin was an obvious retaliation for the United States' expulsion of Russian spy-diplomats in retaliation for the recruitment of the traitor Robert Hanssen. Tobin spent six months in prison.
So, what does John E. Tobin Sr., the father of this wrongfully punished young man, have to say? In a news conference in Moscow this week, he said that, in a way, his son had "had a marvelous experience. . . . He's gotten to see Russia from the inside."
When I read Tobin's father's words, I could hear my own father. My father, Tom Kelly, is 78, and he has four grown children, and they have had their ups and downs. And over all the years, for every up, my father has been there to say how splendid (and how deserved) was this particular up; and for every down, he has been there to say how splendid (though not at all deserved) was this particular down.
An insane love, a failed grade, a lost job -- there is nothing that befalls one of his children in which my father is not able to find "a marvelous experience." This is not to say that he is irresponsible. If you (assuming you were one of his children) were to tell him that you had always felt yourself to be a duck trapped in the body of a human, and that you were determined to rectify the situation through trans-species surgery, he would argue (gently) against the idea. What about your mother's feelings? he might say. And what about duck season, what about duck à l'orange?
But he would not say that no Kelly had ever been a duck and by God none was ever going to be one, or that he had not fought the Nazis and worked two jobs for 10 years to send you to college to have you spend the rest of your life sitting around on your tail bobbing for duckweed.
And if you went ahead and had yourself duckified anyway? Oh, he would proclaim it through the neighborhood: What a wonderful, what a brilliant, what a brave and clever and good thing this was to do -- and what a duck you were! Was there ever such a duck?
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