Playing Office
My younger son had a wish come true.
Maybe wish is the wrong word. No, definitely the wrong word. Wishing is done on an industrial scale these days. I never liked anything to do with Harry Potter, for instance, because at its heart, it’s just wishing that things were different, and by wishing, it happens. A steady diet of that rots the mind, and the soul.
No, not a wish. He had an ambition? I guess. I seriously don’t know what to call it.
He was really young. Maybe eight or nine years old. We didn’t have any money to speak of, so the kids had to amuse themselves a lot with whatever’s handy. He’d make Rube Goldberg machines with his marbles and various bric a brac from his toy box. Stuff like that. Then his ambition, if that’s what it was, showed up.
It was immensely charming, and quite offbeat. It was all his idea. He put on a suit jacket and a clip-on tie. He wore eyeglasses with no lenses in them. He carried a leatherette backgammon board that looked vaguely like an attache case. He set up an office in his room. He didn’t have a computer or anything for his office workstation, so he made one. He found an old monitor and set it on the desk. He got a printed image of a spreadsheet, and taped it to the monitor. He found an old IBM keyboard in the electronic junk box we keep, the kind that goes clickety clack real loud, and put it in front of the faux spreadsheet. He found a recording of office noise somewhere or another, and played it in the background. And best of all, he’d commute down the hall, and sit down and pretend to work.
Later on, he started to crush on Mavis Beacon. We had a CD with her lessons on it, and he loved her voice, and I guess the typing lessons, although I can’t remember when he couldn’t type. Eventually, he composed a vaporwave tribute to playing office called, get this, Playing Office, and sampled the little burble of notes that used to play when Mavis turned on.
His mother taught him at home in his grammar school days, dutifully slipping one worksheet after another under his nose as he sat at an antique school desk we got at a flea market. When he got to high school age, we enrolled him at a statewide charter school. We lived in a rural place, and the schools were uniformly awful, so it seemed like the way to go. He was co-valedictorian of his school, which since it’s a statewide thing, that technically makes him a valedictorian of the whole state, I guess. It was entirely online. When it was time to attend college, I’m sure he was smart enough for fancy schools, but he likes Maine, and we couldn’t afford to send him anywhere else, anyway. He went to UMaine, and graduated in three years, summa cum laude, with a B.S. in Computer Security. He got an A-minus once, to avoid being boring.
Everyone goes into debt to go to college these days. They select the most expensive one they can find, and then they treat it like a four year Carnival cruise, or early retirement or something. Our boy stayed in Maine, because that’s where he grew up, and he has a loyalty, or affection or something similar for it. Practical, too. He did the whole thing online, same as high school. He got every manner of scholarship they had, including one that we never did figure out the reason it was awarded. After the tuition was paid, there was money left over for living expenses, but he lived at home the whole time. He had enough to buy a car, and graduated with the leftover ten grand in his bank account.
We love the picture of him they took with his cap and gown and diploma. He’s smiling so broadly you can’t see his eyes. It really meant something to him. It certainly meant a lot to my wife and I when we sat in the big auditorium and watched him get his sheepskin. You couldn’t see our eyes, either, because we were wiping them.
He wanted a job, but they’re hard to come by, no matter what the BLS says. He limited himself to Maine jobs, for the same reasons that he stuck with it for his education. He was willing to start out for short money for any job even remotely associated with his credentials. I couldn’t believe anyone would turn him down, but they did. If they had a brain in their head, they would have driven to his house and kidnapped him as soon as he applied. But the process for filling jobs is supremely dysfunctional nowadays. I really shouldn’t have been surprised.
He hung in there, and didn’t complain. Eventually, it was all for the best, and a useful company, run by nice people, with an office in a posh town in Maine, decided that maybe they could use someone like him in their office. You know, the best of the best this state has to offer.
His car was in the shop for repairs, so we gave him a lift home after work the other day. A mundane thing, perhaps, a quotidian chore at the end of an almost endless series of everyday tasks, strung out on the calendars in the rear-view mirror since the day the doctor slapped him, instead of me as I deserved.
I remember distinctly the last time I carried my two sons in from the car after a long road trip, and up the stairs to bed. One on my back, and one in my arms. Such ghosts appear unwonted from time to time. The finality of things sometimes cements them in your head. So I’ll remember dropping him off for the rest of my days, watching him walking up the driveway to his house, his empty lunch pail under his arm, a man in full. When things shift like that, you notice. He’s not playing office any more.
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