CHAPTER I
JUMPING INTO THE MIDDLE OF THINGS

As a young person, I read a lot of books, though I never seriously considered writing one.  If I thought about such things at all, I suppose I regarded authors to be a sort of royalty.  They were rare people whose ideas were good enough or entertaining enough to deserve being bound up in pages which other people might actually pay to acquire.  By comparison with such elite characters, I considered myself pretty common.  I still consider myself in that light, though I no longer uncritically admire all that is written in books.  I've read too much, and found too little satisfaction.  

Somewhere on the pathway from youth to my middle years, I tripped over an uncomfortable truth about the written word: it offers no intrinsic morals or built-in guarantees.  A lot of things written under the label of "deep ideas" might be more truthfully advertised as entertainment.  At the age of 21, this realization was a disappointment.  After all, it is much harder to develop one's own notions of Universal Truth than it is to look them up in some enlightened author's book.

  By the time my fortieth birthday rolled around, however, disappointment gave way to a sort of wry amusement.  Experience had shown that few people spend large portions of their waking hours searching for Truth.  The more immediate concerns of daily life properly overshadow abstractions.  For most people, hunger is not a satisfying lifestyle.  Most common people have to work for a living.

Certainly, daily existence in the middle years of my life is a little too busy to support prolonged introspection.  I work hard at a responsible job that involves a fair bit of business travel.  I have also run a small business in my "spare" time.  Like many spouses, my wife is also employed.  Until recently, she has also been going to school part time, and running a house full time.  We have two adult offspring who have begun to experience their full independence, several hundred miles from our home.  Our "empty nest" is populated by three rambunctious cats and occasional visitors whom we drag home.  We don't lack for things to do.

How, then, did I get tangled up in the keys of my word processor so frequently as to produce a book? To tell the truth, I'll be darned if I know.   From what I hear and read, I don't seem to be the sort of person who normally does this sort of thing.  Though I guess most people would consider me reasonably literate (I read a lot and remember much of what I read), I am also quite ordinary.  I am not a self-made millionaire, a celebrity sports star, or the sole survivor of a recent catastrophe (natural or terrorist-made).  I am, moreover, trained as an engineer.  That's a handicap.  As many editors will tell you, engineers are notoriously poor writers (and maybe you will even agree after you wade further through this story).  So how did all this happen? That's a long story.

My life started out and continued pretty simply, by contemporary standards.  During the years I was growing up, my family was a short step from being flat broke most of the time.  That condition had a way of eliminating a lot of the alternatives which seem to confuse kids today.  My Dad was a skilled craftsman.  Man sold ladies' sportswear in a department store.  The three of us worked long hours to put me through four and a half years of college.  We were pleased and proud when I was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Air Force, and then married a strikingly smart and pretty girl, a few months later.  

Life got more complicated when I later weathered a messy divorce and spent several years as a bachelor.  It became even more complex -- and far more rewarding -- when I remarried.  I have since watched in dumb wonder as my second spouse has raised two thoroughly decent kids.  Together, the four of us have shared what I would guess is about the usual quota of heart-stopping late night phone calls and grin-until-your- jaws-hurt congratulation parties.  In more recent years, a fifth member has been added to our family: a daughter whom I once regarded as lost, has begun to assume an increasing importance in our lives in a very rewarding shared relationship with Ann and me.  

Mine has been a life unfolding in the mainstream of the 1960's and 70's.  I believe firmly that my family and I are normal people, modestly successful and perhaps a bit lucky, not greatly different from most Americans and not greatly different from you, the reader of this book.  	

However… l have arrived in my fifties with a nagging feeling.  What is this normal, average person, I ask myself from time to time, doing in the middle of such crazy times? Why is it that half of my waking hours, I am afflicted with a sneaking suspicion that the whole darned world is nuts?

 I’ve spent a large fraction of my adult life observing and working with people.  As individuals, I tolerate most folks pretty well.  I even like some of them.  But for reasons I do not entirely understand, I find that in activities which involve large numbers of these likable people, the outcome is quite frequently something that I don’t like.  It sometimes seems as if am a character in a science fiction novel.  In this novel, any meeting of more than four people (or maybe six) goes stark-raving crazy if it remains in session for longer than an hour.   People do the damnedest things! 

Pick up a newspaper almost any week and you can read about craziness by the hour.  A Parent-Teacher Association sends its volunteers into the community to seek votes for two ballot measures; one bill raises teacher salaries, while the second rejects teacher competency testing.  A convicted felon successfully sues a school district for its negligence in not barring the skylight through which he fell while seeking entry during the small hours of the morning.  Catholic bishops presume to instruct their parishioners on the morality of nuclear deterrence as a national military defense.  An evangelist claims on national television that God has personally instructed him to run for President; he captures a substantial vote in a state political caucus.  Another evangelist is able to solicit seven million dollars, after claiming that an enormous image of Christ has promised to strike him down unless the money is raised.  

Some biologists believe there is evidence homosexuality may have genetic roots.  However, the US Supreme Court declares that sodomy -- in private, between consenting adults -- is not a constitutionally protected freedom.  Marijuana is estimated to be the largest cash crop in California but a Supreme Court nominee is forced to withdraw under Congressional fire, after admitting to having smoked pot several times as a law school professor.  A Presidential candidate withdraws from the race after journalists reveal flagrant incidents of adultery.  He re-enters the competition six months later, backed by no campaign organization other than his loyal wife.  Remaining candidates in his party are widely referred to as "the six dwarves".  In yet another presidential race, three candidates are characterized as "Slick Willy", "the Resume President", and "The Mouse That Roared".
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When I read my morning newspaper, I am astounded and perplexed by the number of rock-solid, convinced, angry believers whose letters barrage the editors.  What catches my attention is not the divergence in opinions between various writers.  Contention seems typical of American public life throughout our recorded history -- if anything about Americans can be called typical.  However, I am more bothered by the undertones of outrage which shine through the letter columns.  Regardless of the glaring internal contradictions that pervade their ideas, a lot of common citizens seem to think they have cornered a special monopoly on Truth.  They cannot understand why everybody else isn't bowing to the same altar.  They know they are right and their opponents are fools, Godless conspirators, or worse.

While I am disturbed by the number of political crazies who seem bent on publishing their ideas, I am equally disturbed by the confused apathy I sometimes encounter in other quarters.  For instance, it is simply amazing to me how many adults don't know how to say "no" when children demand that parents foot a $120 dollar tab (in 1990!) for athletic shoes...  and the kid has never been on a basketball court! Families seem to be organized around the tastes and entertainments of adolescent children.  I realize that I share my puzzlement with more then one commentator on American society, but somehow the company doesn't make my perplexity any more comfortable.

I can still remember one of the few times I ever "grounded" one of our kids for serious misbehavior.  In the days which followed, it was as if guerrilla war had been declared in the Lawrence household.  Our offspring became a political orator, bent on demonstrating how out of step I was with modem morality and proper parental values.  The notion that an adult might presume to restrict the social activities of a young person in the name of an abstract concept like "self discipline" struck our youngster like a bolt of lightning.  Such parental reactions were a decidedly rare experience among our kids' peer group.  To this day, I am uncertain whether our off-spring was shamming or genuinely shocked that his freedoms had been violated.  

In my connections to adults these days, I get the impression that an awfully large number of us feel inadequate to cope with our kids.  Those of us who grew up in financial limitation are embarrassed to impose such limits – and the learning experiences that limitations may entail -- on our children.  Rather than endure battles with our immature adolescents, we succumb to their sense of immediacy, their shortness of view, and even their tastes in fashion.  

We're glad to see our offspring working at the fast food restaurant, even though they'll need a car (says who?) to drive six miles from home.  We hesitate to be too harsh when the 15 hours each week they spend "at work" is compensated by 12 fewer hours with books.  When they spend $70 dollars on a pair of jeans to obtain the "right" label, we feel unqualified to offer the observation that a false sense of values seems to be operating here.  After all, it's their money… isn’t it?  Or is it, really? 	

My observations concerning the on-going and possibly normal battle between the generations probably have the odor of sour grapes.  I have personally fought a few of these skirmishes.  Like many parents, I have not been uniformly successful in passing on to my kids the values I proclaim for myself.  However, I keep trying.  This book is partly an attempt to say, "Listen up, kids.  Some things in life are worth striving for, and some things aren't.  I know you'll decide for yourself which is which, but may I share my ideas on the subject with you? Just a few?" 

If Matt and Kate ever decide to seriously dip into this volume, it seems appropriate for them to begin in the middle of my life.  That's the part of my experience which is closest and most familiar to them.  Even in familiarity, though, there is a certain amount of unknown territory.  Neither of the kids has shared my journeys prior to 15 years ago.  In some of the particulars, I hope neither of them will have to.  However, their lives will unfold primarily from their choices rather than from mine.  So they'll learn different lessons than I did.  The lessons will not necessarily be easier for being different.  

I speak of my life as a journey, recognizing that the metaphor probably seems naive and "1970's-ish".  Maybe this nuance is something that I acquire from being born in California; a chronic case of speech and thought mannerisms from Psychology Today.  However, despite its triteness, there is some justice in the metaphor of the journey, applied to my life.  I've traveled a long distance from my roots.

Both of my parents were born on farms.  Each moved to a city in young adulthood.   The central themes in their lives were hard work and the hope that their kids would learn more and attain more than had they.  Their hope seems to have been realized in considerable measure, though at a noticeable cost.  In important ways, their lives remained fixed and unchanging, while their kids have moved onward and away.  Our interests diverged.  

In the middle of my life, I am increasingly aware of a gentle sense of contradiction.  A great deal seems to be happening, all at once.  But very little of this activity seems to fit into neatly explicable patterns.  For every stream which seems to be going somewhere in particular, there are multiple eddies going everywhere in general.  The labels which might once have comfortably contained the wholesale messiness of life, no longer serve well.  As we were overly fond of saying during my college years, I some times wonder, just a little, who I am.

It was once nearly axiomatic that the first question one would be asked after an introduction to a stranger was, "So...what do you do (for a living)?”  It was only after years of prodding by pop psychologists that it became fashionable to hear an irony in the automatic response, "Oh, I'm an accountant..." or "I'm a homemaker"… or whatever.  In recent years, we're a little more sensitive to the notion that accounting is a skill by which to pay the rent, rather than an appropriate label for an entire personality.   Still, old habits of thought die hard.  

Though I served in the Air Force over 20 years, I somehow never got around to thinking of myself as an Air Force Officer.  Officering was a group of skills that I used -- something which I did -- not something that I "was".  A lot of my colleagues might have debated whether I properly qualified as a military person at all (presuming there is such a creature).   By the standards which professionals apply to such matters, many would have considered me a civilian in uniform.  It is difficult to imagine a commanding officer who would send a non-pilot Ph.D.  engineer out into a battlefield with a trusty M-16 rifle.  Moreover, when I finally took off my uniform and put on a three-piece suit, I promptly went to work for a large corporation doing a highly similar type of engineering work. 

Similar doubts might arise concerning whether I am properly "an engineer" in my continuing career.  Though I've acquired two graduate degrees and a fair-sized technical vocabulary, I have very little in common with a lot of practicing engineers.  In the Air Force and thereafter, I have applied my engineering vocabulary mostly to activities which might be called business management.  I supervise groups of engineers and contract specialists, who in turn oversee other civilian contractors, assembling hardware and writing computer programs to be installed on airplanes and satellites.  Now and then, I dust off a textbook to check out a technical detail.  Mostly, however, I supervise meetings and keep track of large sums of money.  It can seem like strange work for an otherwise honest man.  

On a personal level, moreover, I probably don't think a great deal like a military officer, an engineer, or a manager is frequently believed or expected by non-engineers and other civilians, to think.  My interests are too broad.  Despite the investment which has gone into my education, I do not regularly read a single technical or management journal.  Nor do I frequently tinker with micro-circuits or computer programs in my basement workshop.  

During the little spare time I have from an active career, I have run a small and struggling business in photography.  I also try hard to be a considerate husband and a thoughtful step-dad for some very important people.  Add all of that to writing a book, and there isn't much time I left for doing the stereotypical things which proper technical specialists are generally supposed by non-technicians, to do.  

Thus, a professional title does not sum up the sort of person I am.  That's fine with me.  At this point in my life, only a few of my really important issues seem to relate to the particular organization or place where I work.  For 21 years, I was content to allow the Air Force professional environment to remain one of my "givens" -- the fixed conditions around which my personal equation operated.  I was well treated by the Air Force meritocracy, and I tried to return that treatment in effective work.  When I moved on from military service into civilian life, it was less from a sense of frustration with military life, as from an intuition that I had learned all I could learn and done all I could do in my "first career."   It was time to move on.  Meanwhile, a lot of other things have been going on in my life.  

I am fortunate in this period of my life to be sharing home and hearth with a person whom I consider to be very special.  My wife is one of those rare individuals who seem immediately to impress strangers as unaffectedly "nice".  Anne is also wise in situations where I am merely smart.  I've learned in fifteen years of marriage to trust her judgment, though I frequently fail to comprehend the reasons behind her feelings.  She's able to run her life quite well without such baggage as "reasons".  For that matter, she's able to run my life rather well, too.  

At times, I do not make Anne's life al together easy.  Some people consider me a rather intense and private human being.  For periods that can vary between a few minutes and a couple of days, I'm prone to withdrawing into myself.  It is almost a physical phenomenon.  An invisible curtain falls and a subtle psychic radio broadcasts the message, "go away and leave me alone." During such periods, Anne gently chides me for being her "cave bear".  Fortunately she understands that such withdrawals have little to do with her. I disengage  from just about everything when I need quiet time to recharge my mental and emotional batteries.  

Anne accommodates to my busy work routine and to my occasional moodiness with remarkable grace.  When I'm locked up in thought, she continues to work or relax nearby, neither invading my time nor role-playing at a false meekness.  And, despite my need for private time, I really do try not to be a grumpy tyrant to this loving female who shares house and home with me.  

If I have a single concern for Anne's well being, that concern grows from the sort of person she is.  She has spent much of her life "doing for" other people, particularly her family.  Sometimes these involvements haven't left much energy for her own interests.  Though she and I agree that she now deals with this sort of thing better than in years past, I continue to wish she would say a little more often, "No -- not right now, please," when other people ask too much of her.  I include myself among those others.   

I admit to being of at least two minds concerning the most important person in my life.  During the 1970’s, I spent several years being "house broken" to the phenomenon of liberated and independent women.  Thereafter I married a person who had never consciously needed to be liberated, because she had never conceived of herself as un-free.  This lady has more than once scratched her head in puzzlement, trying to sort out why I have encouraged her so vocally to "be her own person".  She didn't need the encouragement, since she has always been her own person.

I can tell I'm making a mess of this -- it's beginning to sound like some of my conversations with Anne on the same subject.  

I admit to being a little confused these days about relationships between men and women in general, even if I'm not particularly confused about my favorite female person.  I attribute my disorderly thinking to the fact that I belong to a generation of men who have been forced to learn, sometimes painfully, not to take the women in their lives for granted.  During a decade of struggles in the 1970’s, men and women seemed to spend an enormous amount of time re-examining their roles and expectations in relationships.   Some of the roles changed and some didn't.  On the whole, the process was pretty untidy while we were going through it, and a lot of loose ends are still lying around twitching.  Perhaps I am one of the loose ends.  

I hesitate either to blandly accept or to directly challenge the accommodations that my companion has made to my personal habits.  Part of this ambivalence derives from knowing when I'm well off.  Life is a lot more pleasant without the constant questioning, self-doubt and simmering conflict which characterized so much of the Liberation Decade for so many people.  

In fairness, however, the decade of the 1970’s taught me some helpful lessons about valuing and paying attention to my closest companion in life.  I no longer assume my partner's objectives and wants will be the same as my own in all situations.  I have fallen out of the habit of acting unilaterally in matters which concern her.  But, I'm not so good at this new skill of interpersonal relations that I can do it without thinking about it.  Anne finds my consideration touching, but wonders why I'm so obvious about the whole business.  

I'm not sure why events have worked out this way, but there have been a number of women in my life who were puzzled over my doggedly "mental" approach to daily life.  I’ve been more than a little lucky to have the long-term friendship of several of these women, perhaps in spite of my habit of analyzing close relationships.  As a widely sold greeting card tells us, "A friend is someone who knows all about you...  and loves you anyway." In that sense, I’ve a lot to be grateful for.  

Much of my growing up has been guided or prompted by female friends.  A thoroughly outrageous girl geologist decided almost 30 years ago to adopt me as her very own "Little Brother".  She is to this day, one of the two people whom I will permit to drag me through Christmas shopping crowds (Anne is the other).  A lady who led me through psychotherapy opened doors in my soul and let in a lot of light.  I grew to appreciate -- though not always to approve of -- a street-wise, scrappy female friend who lived in the human zoo of Los Angeles and struggled to accomplish something in a life fractured by more than its share of man-made catastrophes.  Her early death from cancer leaves me feeling "unfinished" perhaps even today, 10 years later.  There was a lady in Boston who drove 400 miles to celebrate at my second wedding, just as she paused seven years earlier during my divorce, to say "I care.  Hang in there and life will get better." 

Each of these people is in highly individual ways, beloved.  The experience of each has spoken to me and said something essential.  A perhaps slightly peculiar aspect of each of these friendships is that I have somehow avoided trying to seduce these females, and they have avoided seducing me.  In the Liberation Decade, that was no mean accomplishment.  If I am to believe what I see in public entertainments and hear from personal acquaintances in the 1980's, and 1990’s  lasting friendships between men and women who choose not to sleep together are still uncommon.  For that matter, long-lasting relationships of all kinds seem to be pretty uncommon.  

It is beastly hard these days to be a good friend, either to non-intimate acquaintances or to a person with whom one sleeps.  Caring connection isn't impossible, of course; merely difficult.  In the 1960's and 70's, the strains on long term relationship seemed to focus on casual, un-committed sex.  It was easier to get laid by strangers than to go about the hard business of learning to consistently cope with another human being who knew enough about our private selves to be a real threat.  In the 1980’s, however, some of the tension in relationships seemed to shift from sexuality toward the economics and the time pressure of city life.  

Having recognized the dangers of sexually transmitted disease and the alienation and loneliness which often characterize a "singles lifestyle", some unmarried people in the 1990's have became more discriminating in their choices of sex partners.  More importantly, many couples -- married and unmarried -- find themselves struggling to make ends meet, even on the incomes of two wage earners.  Two people who both drive from office to home through rush-hour traffic are probably more likely to argue about a lack of money and time to enjoy life, than about extra-marital affairs.  Children at home tend to complicate schedules even further.  

Will somebody please tell me what kind of person these days has the time or energy to cultivate two bed partners (each unknown to the other)? Maybe a few Hollywood personalities, truck drivers, or traveling salesmen find the time.  Though I know it happens, I'll personally be darned if I can see how anybody else manages to get together, regardless of torrid tales seen on daytime television.  I can only guess that some of us are doing it on or beneath corporate conference tables!

In the fifteen years of my second marriage, my immediate circle of friends and Anne’s has shrunk noticeably.  During our Air Force service, this doubtless had much to do with our relocating every three or four years to a new assignment.  We send greetings each Christmas to a lengthy mailing list in three countries.  However, even after leaving Service, we don't seem to share as many interests with present immediate neighbors as we did with friends left behind.  Likewise, we are no longer occupied by the community activities which once proceeded naturally and unthinkingly from having teenagers at home.  

At the middle of my life, I am corning to realize how much of our attention and time for the past few years have been centered on Anne's kids.  Their absence leaves a noticeable void.  

Though I have occasionally considered my role as stepfather to be a crazy-making avocation, there have also been a lot of rewards.  Not least of these is that I've learned a tremendous amount about communicating with people, while being required to throw out or modify in practice most of the child-rearing theories I might once have believed.  It is amazing, what common sense we learn from physical exhaustion.  

Like a lot of step-dads, I came into my kids' moving picture show in the middle of the plot.  Matt at 13 and Kate at 16 were already well formed personalities (if adolescents can ever be called "well formed") when I first met them.  The death of their natural father had left each of them with a lot of unfinished emotions, some of which I inevitably found myself mixed up in.  I faced the challenges most step-parents face, searching for a balance between helpful friendship and the necessary adult exercise of prudent authority.  For several years, the family did a lot of muddling through.  I wouldn't trade those years for any amount of time spent in peaceful disengagement.  Matt and Kate are two of the people in my life over whom I count my blessings.  

The kids' personalities and their growth toward autonomy and adulthood have been quite different from one another.  When I first met Matt, he impressed me as "13 going on 40".  He was one of those youngsters whom mothers tend to call "such a good boy”.  However, Matt's common sense seemed to go into hibernation following his 16th birthday.  Anne and I weathered a lot of storms as Matt tested his limits and our own.  Through it all, a basic human likeableness showed through even the worst of his personal peccadilloes.  Algebra may have required three frustrating exposures to begin to sink in, but in the less formal course called "human relations" -- which only life can teach -- Matt now seems to be on his way to earning A's.  He has changed in many ways, but he continues to favorably impress people with a personable manner and consistent capacity for hard work.  If anything, his mother worries that Matt takes on too much hard work, and doesn’t say “no” to people who should hear that answer.  It’s an ironic reversal of sorts, when you think about it. 

Though she shares Matt's willingness to work hard, Kate is a bird of a very different feather.  There have been years when I was convinced she would never be "my" daughter.  I was concerned that she might even sever her connections to Anne.  There was an air about Kate which discouraged the use of the possessive pronoun.  In her late teens, she was an intensely private person, disinclined to share her thoughts; much less concerns or fears.  Her small circle of close friendships was defended fiercely against even the most casual interest on my part or Anne's.  When asked what she thought about Anne's pending remarriage, Kate responded, "it's your life, Mom." 

It was almost four years after marrying her mother, before I got to know Kate more personally.  After college graduation, she lived with us for several months while getting established in her first job.  She brought her own increasing maturity to a well cemented and caring family in which Matt was a very real participant.  After an initial period of quiet wariness, she "joined up".  Though I continue to cultivate a careful respect for her privacy, I sense that she is now a good friend, in the manner which adult offspring can be friends of their parents.  On occasion, she has pleasantly surprises me by asking for my advice and even taking some of it.  I guess that's progress.  

The kids are now beginning to make their own way in the world, and Anne and I are relearning a similar set of skills.  Several hundred miles separate the home in which the family jointly celebrates its Christmas holiday, from the suburban apartment which Kate and Matt share with a third roommate while beginning their working careers.  The two places are poles and generations apart: ours quietly resonating to Boston Pops as theirs shakes to audio sounds which Anne and I find incomprehensible; ours an orderly refuge from demands of the outer world, and theirs a temporary landing strip between multiple social involvements, bordered by a no-man's-land of displaced objects that seems to resemble the staging area for a military invasion.  

Though our respective homes are distances apart in style and circumstance, there are unintentional and revealing similarities between them.  The kids are struggling for the first time to learn budgeting skills which carne almost on reflex to their mother and me.  In the past, I have occasionally irritated Matt by suggesting that his preparation for real life has been disadvantaged by never having been poor. Je is now beginning to see some  justice in the remark, as he tries to out-race his bank account to the end of each month.  On a longer time scale, Anne and I ponder our own difficulty in establishing an effective savings and investment plan for our eventual retirement.  An automotive breakdown can represent disaster to our kids.  Prolonged hospitalization for my aging father could precipitate a similar crisis for us, as it did several years ago with my Mom.  

Though our family finances are far from qualifying for hardship status, Anne and I are continually amazed at how difficult it is to increase or even preserve our savings.  Something always seems to "come up".  One year, it was the failure of the furnace, the hot water heater, and a section of the roof in my parents' home.  Social Security -- their only retirement income -- didn't help with that sort of thing.  Other the years, we made our savings deposits in Kate's college education.  More recently, it was an accident which totaled Matt's car, after we had just paid off a loan for a major engine overhaul.  At times, we find ourselves "waiting for the other shoe to drop".  

Given the financial demands which unexpected events place on us, Anne finds it hard to believe that our present family income rates in the top 20% of American wage earners.  When I left the Air Force a few years ago, a commissioned officer with my seniority had an "equivalent before-tax wage" just over $60,000 dollars a year.  Of course, that wage included some things that aren't very visible in a bank account, such as the value of our family medical coverage and my eventual military retirement.  As far as Anne was concerned, if it isn't hard cash, it might as well be Monopoly money.  After I retired from military service, my continuing military pay just about covered the payment of our monthly mortgage.  

Even after accounting for non-visible benefits of my employment, we're not going to get rich any time soon.  After the Federal pay raises of the early 1980’s, my income was roughly comparable to that of civilian engineers and project managers with my level of experience.  During much of my military career before and since, however, I consistently earned twenty-plus percent less than professional acquaintances in industry.  Anne's part-time jobs and my business helped to keep us reasonably comfortable.  But "secure"? That wasn't so obvious.  Right now, we're playing "catch up" for the ten years during which we moved too often to build serious financial equity in a home.  

There are elements of our family situation that are not completely typical of a lot of upper middle class families, or of most military families.  Unlike a lot of people we know, we are not up to our ears in consumer debt.  Anne's European upbringing produced habits concerning credit that many Americans would find downright strange.  For her, plastic is something one uses to cover lettuce in the refrigerator.  Debts are obligations to pay as quickly as possible, and without recurrence.  The possibility of "balances due" exceeding five percent of yearly income, is for her, a kind of waking nightmare.  

Our fortunate situation also grows partly from lessons learned by Anne in a very hard school before we married.  During her first marriage, Anne and her husband wisely prepared for accidents of fate -- which for them, actually happened.  Jacques died suddenly in his early fifties.  Insurance paid off their debts and home mortgage, and left a little more for a new start.  Such a death is a high price to pay for security.  In lesser ways, I had also paid dues.  Divorce and six years of bachelorhood had left my obligations smaller than those of many family men in their thirties.	I had few debts and a small amount in savings.  Thus Anne and I started family life with a few advantages.  In the years since, some of those advantages have been life savers.  

Shortly after Anne and I married, Kate entered a two year college.  She was uncomfortable with not paying her own way, even to obtain her Associate degree, but common sense and hard talking by Anne prevailed.  While the rest of the family went to Germany on Air Force assignment, Kate lived in a dormitory, slugged it out with 16 to 18 credit hours every quarter, and cleaned apartments during evenings for "casual money".  Then, as her sophomore summer approached, she decided that two more years in school might create more long-term independence than the immediate satisfaction of working for the lower wages that a two year degree would bring.  

It fell to Anne and me to plan for the continuing and increased expenses of a State University, on about three months' notice.  Getting organized wasn't made easier by the fact that a significant source of Kate's school funds was being reduced.  Along with thousands of other families across America, we experienced a three-year phase-out of Social Security payments from Jacques' estate.  At the same time, the State reaffirmed that my income was too high to qualify Kate for grants in aid.  Strangely, we didn't feel particularly "well off" at the time.  

Please understand that I did not then -- and do not now -- resent the moral logic which required me to assume responsibility for Kate's education.  It was a necessary logic, at a time when government entitlement programs were being reconsidered.  As Kate’s Social Security (Survivors) benefit phased out, Anne and I took Kate's education "out of hide", just as my parents had supported me, twenty years before.  There was justice in that.  

If there was a personal pang in this experience, it was mainly that it forced us to re-examine a number of subtle expectations concerning our standard of living.  When we started rearranging budgets to cover Kate's tuition, the "options" tended to get postponed.  For various reasons, such deferrals continued in the years after she graduated.  At the time, I think I may have felt a little cheated.  

Don't misunderstand me, please.  I am grateful for the living which we have.  I know from experience what serious financial limitation feels like.  Yet, I must confess to a certain bewilderment that so much my "earning power" in the past few years has turned out to be more apparent rather than real.  

While I was in college in the early 1960’s, I worked 15 to 20 hours a week at odd jobs, while taking as many as 19 course credits.  Both of my parents worked overtime to earn less than $6000 dollars a year.  They lived in a house they had bought about 1950, for less than $8000 dollars.  By the time I graduated, they had borrowed to the limits of Dad's life insurance and were flat broke.  In my first job with industry, I earned more after taxes in the first three months, than my parents made together in a year.  At that time and since, I have tried to repay some of the investment they made in my future.  Meanwhile, the house my parents bought 35 years ago now stands in the midst of a run-down area of the urban sprawl around San Francisco Bay.  Nearby yards are tangles of weeds.  Broken cars rest in odd corners.  Wrought iron bars have become fashionable on ground floor windows.  Yet, none of the houses on the block where I grew up can be bought for less than $70,000 dollars.  Quite "basic" three-bedroom ranch houses within a few miles are sold for over $250,000 dollars (in 1992).  

In the late 1980s, military friends whom Anne and I knew were reassigned to Washington DC after a three year absence.  Following a long and disheartening search for affordable housing, they learned that the home they had earlier vacated was coming back on the market.  The house was the best compromise they had seen between space and cost.  They bought it for only slightly less than twice its sale price of three years before.  

Likewise, the US real estate market has moved in more than one predictable direction since the boom of the 80's.  Thousands of families across the country who rode the Reagan Expansion to its peak and bought homes in 1990 or 1991 are now holding property that no longer meets their family needs, to avoid selling out with losses in the tens of thousands of dollars.  Such wild swings in real estate quite candidly scare the hell out of me! They seem unprecedented in the post-World-War-II American economy.  These dynamics signal a new world for many of us, and one decidedly less secure than the one in which we grew up.  

Anne and I lived in Air Force Base housing or rented homes for the last eight years of my service career.  We did not live extravagantly.  Anne drove a six year old Toyota, and our Chevy had seen over 130,000 miles when it finally died.  In the year I entered civilian employment, we could afford more reliable transportation, but still we bought only one new car.  That decision turned out to be wise.  In the rural area where I took my first job after service, our home came with a $135,000 dollar mortgage, despite our investment of Anne's equity from her first home and a chunk of our savings.  When I was forced by a corporate merger to change jobs, our next home in the suburbs of a large city added $50,000 dollars to our mortgage.  Even after twice refinancing our home to lower our mortgage interest rates, I continue to be astounded by how much we pay out every month to keep a roof over our heads.  

In a financially insecure world, I am also concerned for our kids, particularly Matt.  After high school, he spent a rough couple of years deciding what he wanted to do with his life.  He began and then interrupted college study.  He went through military basic training and entered the Army Reserve.  At the end of a period of continued flailing about, he finally decided that clerking in a hardware store didn't offer much future security, and signed up for a year of vocational school.  Anne and I quietly drank a glass of champagne a few months later, on the occasion of his first promotion in a full time job.  

During Matt's struggles with his education, I've felt a profound sense of ambivalence.  I was concerned that without college credentials, he might find his earning capacity severely limited.  Adding to my ambivalence was the knowledge that Matt's vocational course cost three times as much as Kate's university tuition, four years before.  However, if he chose to return to college full time, Anne and I would face expenses of thousands of dollars, at a time when investment in our own retirement is becoming an increasingly critical need.  

I am concerned for both Matt and Kate.  They are emerging from childhood into a world which has even fewer apparent certainties than the world in which I grew up.  Education no longer seems to be a sure or affordable ticket to a "better way of life".  A rapidly changing world can be a very unfriendly place for the unprepared.  It seems likely to me that events during the next few years may require that our kids either take firm hold of their lives and capacities, or face continual instability and financial hardship.  

As Matt and Kate begin to grapple with their own lives, I have asked myself what I can offer that will help them.  Financial assistance during their school years was substantial, but it may well prove in the long run to be less important than other factors.  When they were teen-agers, I was very conscious of the need to offer an example of decency and human caring in my own life and in my connection to them.  I continue to strive to be such an example.  I have tried to love them and to let them know that I do.  In caring partnership with Anne, I offer them a sense of continuity and trustworthy connection in their family life.  Some of Matt and Kate's acquaintances seem unable to lay claim to such resources.  

I certainly can't give Matt or Kate their independence.  That, they will find on their own and sometimes "in spite of" me.  I can't give them certainty, for there isn't much of that commodity running around in the world these days.  I can't give them a great many answers to life's important questions, only recently having started asking some of the more interesting questions of myself.  

What I perhaps can do is to expose them to a few of the questions.  Maybe I can suggest through my own experience, that some puzzles are worthy of frequent reexamination, even when solutions take a few years to work out.  Perhaps I can say in my life, what words can only outline: that there is a fundamental worth in our existence, a value in our growth and full flowering as human beings, a sufficiency in our just being here and struggling and coping.  Perhaps I can say "I love you" and my kids can know what I mean.  

Such attempts at clarity are among the fragments at the middle of my life.  Though they may lack a clear pattern, these pieces make a rough kind of sense; they fit together.  Like any human pattern, my life is incomplete and sometimes not even internally consistent.  But somehow, it seems to work.  I can look at the substance of my years and when I am not forced to wince over some self-perpetrated foolishness or vanity, I can smile.  I am well with my world, and people I care about are well with me.  Trying to share that wellness with people who matter deeply is possibly what has most prompted the writing of this book.