Volume 5, Issue 71: Heroes of the Frontier

"She wanted to tell every mother, every father: There is meaning in motion."

My upcoming novel, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, will be released on May 20. I believe you will like it. I hope you will pre-order it. Send me your pre-order receipt and I’ll send you a book plate and enter you into a contest to, like, hang out with me. Details here.

It’s graduation week at the University of Georgia. When you live in a college town, Graduation, one of the biggest moments of your life when it happens to you or someone you love, can’t help but start to feel a little rote. It really is the same thing every year. It becomes impossible to get a restaurant reservation for a full fortnight. Traffic becomes overwhelming. The line on Broad Street full of people waiting to get their picture taken under the Arch—it is UGA tradition that you are not supposed to walk under the arches until you graduate, and thus having your picture taken standing underneath symbolizes that you’ve made it—goes all the way down the block. It is the time of year when the locals, the townies if you will, hunker down and wait for all the students to finally leave so that we may have our town back. There is a certain flutter in the heart when you see the kids in their caps and gowns, just walking around, knowing what that moment means to them and their family. But you are also ready for them to leave. They’re going somewhere else. But you live here.

But more than anything else graduation week, I look at the parents. It is quite something to watch middle-aged people have no idea what they are doing.

Athens is not a big town but it is in fact a town. It is not a suburb, or off a country road out in the middle of nowhere. People live here, and they walk here, and they park here, and they do all the things that people do when they understand that there are a larger number of people in the campus and just-off-campus area (where I live) than necessarily what the geographic limits can contain. Thus, you have to follow the rules. You can only park in certain places. You have to use the sidewalks. You might, if you can believe this, have to share a crosswalk with another person. You cannot, say, walk out in the middle of the street.

Graduation week brings all sorts of people, family members from all parts of the state and the country, to Athens, a town they otherwise only visit for football games, if that. They are in an unfamiliar place, one that does not have the comforts and familiarities of home, comforts and familiarities we increasingly come to rely upon as we get older. But more than that, they are in this unfamiliar place during one of the most formative and emotional moments of their lives. Their loved ones are graduating! Little Bobby, Cute Jessie, that little tyke who once cried to you when they scraped their knee, who you strapped into that car seat not very long ago, is now, after all those years, getting their college degree and entering the grownup world. All those sacrifices, all those hopes and dreams, all those moments when it could have gone wrong, all that work everybody put in … it culminates in this weekend, this moment, with that beautiful kid in their cap and gown, a whole lifetime, the end of one story and the beginning of a longer, even better one. This is what it was all about—right here, right now.

So you can’t really expect parents to experience this life-changing, foundational event and still be able to remember not to walk out into traffic, can you? To see parents on this weekend is to see an endless series of zonked doofuses, amped on the endorphins of this moment but confused by their unfamiliar environment—they truly have no idea what to do with themselves. While driving my son to school yesterday, I had to slam on the brakes as a middle-aged woman in a sundress walked right out in front of me. My tires squealed, and I slammed toward the steering wheel. She stopped, turned to me, blinked, and continued to stand there as she took out her phone to figure out which direction she was going. (“Should I get out and help her?” my son asked, sort of sweetly.) There are so many dads in golf shirts who cannot believe how long that place’s line is. You can always tell the divorced parents too, doing their best to keep it together, c’mon, just for this weekend. It can be touching to watch, actually—until maybe it isn’t. (This happens with a lot of the non-divorced parents too. Maybe more often.) It’s just an infinite line of rattled, addled parents experiencing their life’s dreams in such an intense fashion that they have forgotten the basic rules of how to walk around and navigate the world. It happens every year. It’s my first sign that graduation is here.

This year, I caught myself thinking: Is this what my parents were like at my graduation? I know it was a massive moment in their lives. It was the culmination of my father’s life project, to work and save and work and save so that he could afford to send his children to college, something he himself never did, a way to pass it forward and live the American dream of giving every generation an opportunity the previous one didn’t have. It had to have been emotional for my mother, to see her first child earn a degree and head out to make his way in the real world, on his own, an opportunity she herself never got: When my mother was the age I was when I graduated, she was already married and locked in.

Did they stumble around Champaign in a daze? Did they walk out into traffic?

And I realized: I had no idea. I don’t remember my parents at graduation at all.

********************

I know they were there. There are pictures.

But I don’t remember them being there. I don’t have any specific memories of my parents, or any of my extended family, at my college graduation. I don’t remember where we went to dinner, or if we even went to dinner at all. I don’t remember them cheering for me when I crossed the stage. I don’t remember any serious talks, any family bonding moments, no hugs, nothing like that. Again: I know they were there. But I don’t remember them being there.

The reason for that is simple: I wasn’t thinking about them at all. Frankly, I couldn’t wait for them to leave.

Graduation, for them, was one of the most formative moments of their lives, what they had been working toward since the day I was born. But for me? For me graduation wasn’t about my family at all. It was about my friends. It was about the people I was about to say goodbye to. I already had a job lined up after graduation, in Los Angeles, all the way across the country, which meant that graduation was the definitive end to one chapter and a definitive start to another. I didn’t want to spend time with my family on graduation weekend. I wanted to spend time with my friends. I wanted to hold onto the last minutes of college that I had. I wanted to hit the final parties, I wanted to pack up my stuff at the Daily Illini offices, I wanted to hit Murphy’s one last time. I hadn’t spent four years with my family; I’d spent four years with my friends. I don’t remember seeing my family at my graduation. But I do remember getting together everybody the night before graduation, after I got my parents off and away so I could be free, and doing the same thing the next of graduation itself. I remember the hungover lunch at the Pizza Hut buffet the next day, a little too groggy to get too emotional but trying to soak it all in nevertheless.

My parents? My extended family? The people who came from all across Illinois, to an unfamiliar environment of hostile, scoffing townies? They were extras in the story of my graduation. That they were the reason any of this was happening, the people who allowed me this opportunity and this experience, held no real weight at the time. All that mattered were my friends.

This is, of course, how it works—an essential part of growing up is reaching the point that your friends seem more important, more current, more vital, than your parents. It would have been unnatural to skip graduation parties so I could go hang out with my parents, and my parents wouldn’t have wanted that for me anyway. I’m sure there was a point, several points, when a little part of my parents must have broken a little inside when they wanted to share an important moment with me and I instead shuffled them away, blew them off really, so I could go drink domestic beers with some guys from suburban Chicago they didn’t even know the names of. But that is how it works. That means I was having my own life. That means they did their job correctly. To the extent that one of the most important moments of their lives, a moment that was explicitly meant to celebrate me, was one I shut them out of entirely.

And, I realize, it’s probably what I’ll want for my kids too. This is, after all, already beginning. My children will both be in middle school next year, and they are clearly entering the “not really giving a shit about having their parents around anymore” stage of their lives. This next stage will in fact be defined by our absence: Who they are when we are not around, what they learn about themselves, how much distance they can get from us looming over them. This is a good thing. This is what all parents should want. But this is nevertheless happening, and it will be happening for a long, long time.

It starts with middle school, and then it’s high school, and then it’s college, and then it’s out being a part of the real planet, and the next thing you know there are just all these worlds that your children have created for themselves, and they are all worlds that don’t really have you in them. You are there for them when they need you—always. But that time they need you will decrease as well. Big moments for you become smaller moments for them. Their world expands; your world shrinks. They will go through this process themselves. They may start their own families; they will lost touch with those friends that were once so important to them. There will always be a place for you in their lives. They will come back to you, just like I came back to my parents; I talk to my parents now far more than I talk to my college friends, and it is a gift. But it is a long process. And it is one, again, that is already beginning.

I want that world for them. I see it forming, and it is wonderful. But I can also see it slipping away from me, as a parent. Again: This is how it works. It’s a beautiful thing. But a little part can’t help but break inside. And on and on it will go, and someday I will find myself wandering around lost around a college campus, trying to figure out where the hell I’m supposed to be going, and if my kids even realizes I’m there anyway, and also why am I in the middle of the street?

BASEBALL POPE

I am not Catholic, but my parents are, and to learn this week that the new Pope is:

a) American;
b) From Illinois;
c) A baseball fan;
d) Raised by a Cardinals fan;
e) Not a Cubs fan;
f) A protege of the (very beloved by the Leitches) previous Pope;
g) Thinks JD Vance is a jackass.

… well, it gave us all some hope during a time that can sometimes feel a little hopeless. I recommend this JVL piece on the new pope. I am very much rooting for the Baseball Pope.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Roger Goodell Is the Champion of Sucking Up to Trump, New York. Few men on earth have more experience kissing the ass of old rich men. I was very happy with how this piece turned out.

2. Why Aren’t You a Knicks Fan? The Washington Post. Why aren’t you?

3. Holy Cow Are the Knicks Suddenly Very Exciting, New York. Nothing more fun than getting to write about a team I know and love.

4. Mariners Fever, Catch It, MLB.com. It may finally be their year.

5. Struggling Teams That Could Still Come Back, MLB.com. Included the Cardinals!

6. This Week’s Power Rankings, MLB.com. If they ever expand, I’m asking for a raise for those extra two teams.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Thunderbolts*” and “Pavements,” and we previewed the Cannes Film Festival.

Morning Lineup, I did Monday’s, Wednesday’s and Friday’s shows.

Seeing Red, Bernie Miklasz and I lamented the Cardinals gameday experience.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Talking to the President,” David Roth, Defector. I have no idea how Roth can still write so insightfully and hilariously and tragically about Trump after all these years, but somehow, he can.

Also, I loved this piece by my old Bloomberg Politics colleague Josh Tyrangiel in The Atlantic about Anthony Weiner’s quixotic attempt to get on the city council in New York.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Breadfan,” Metallica. I was in my hometown of Mattoon last week, and I must say: I’m not sure there’s any band I listened to more, collectively, when I lived in Mattoon than Metallica. This song melted off my 14-year-old face.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!

Also, there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

This has the makings of a very good day today: The Knicks have a Game Three at what is going to be an absolutely wild scene at the Garden, and I’m seeing Wilco in Atlanta tonight. Sometimes things aren’t all so bad.

And happy Mother’s Day weekend, everyone. Shoutout to a couple of cool moms.

Have a great weekend, all.


Best,
Will