Without Reservations

The longest journey

If growing up means, substantially, the casting off of parental shackles, perhaps being grown-up means accepting that parents shape who we are, for better and worse, long after we stop living with them and even after they stop living. For, shockingly, they do. As an incidental matter I wonder whether it is ridiculous to speak of "grown-up" in a way to suggest that this is an attainable condition rather than a misty and often turbulent continuum we spend our lives voyaging across; I wonder whether anyone I've ever known could accurately be described as "grown-up." The answer is yes, but in a surprisingly small set of cases, and that would be a whispered yes, for one would not want to call down a jinx on the happy few.

My mother would not wear the mink coat my father bought her a few years ago, though they lived in a cold climate. She did not like what fur stood for: the killing of animals for their pelts, to be made into garments for well-to-do women — a time-honored activity in North America from the days of the 17th-century beaver trappers. At the same time, she was never a vegetarian; all her life she ate pork and she ate beef, and in her final weeks she craved cheeseburgers. Although she was, like her mother before her, a right-wing Republican and a reader of Human Events, she deplored suburban sprawl and the neglect of the beautiful old buildings amid the town in which she lived all her life; she disapproved of waste and of consumption for its own sake, or for status. That aspect of her conservatism was, to me, the best sort of conservatism: conservative as conserver, guardian of the worthy. She was a vigilant tender of the earth who recycled long before recycling became custom and reflex.

Like my mother, I too am not a vegetarian, though I am concerned about the treatment of animals under our sway and experience flashes of unease on this account every day. I disagreed with her about George W. Bush, whom I regard as a criminal; she hated him but voted twice for him. I buy, or bake, whole-grain bread; I have no taste for soda pop but like old buildings and live in one. Long ago I accepted her credo that one should not obsess about material goods, but that if one were to buy something, one should buy a quality version and make it last — maybe for a lifetime, however long that might be, never long enough.

Paul Reidinger

paulr@sfbg.com