Volume 5, Issue 72: The Parade

"No man should have to endure another man quoting poetry."

My upcoming novel, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, will be released on May 20, this Tuesday. 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.

I will be sending out a newsletter Tuesday, Pub Day, as well, you have been warned.

When does childhood end? I don’t mean when you become a legal adult, or an actual real, life grown-up, and I don’t mean when you’re not a “kid” any longer; I know guys in their 40s who still feel like kids to me. I mean when childhood is over. That does not mean you cannot act like a child anymore, or that you have reached some sort of official threshold of adulthood. It just means you are no longer a child.

I think it might be when you go to middle school. Now that I have a middle schooler—and, as of next August, I will have two of them, because next week, the purveyor of Real Storm will graduate from the elementary school, just down the road from our house, where we have been sending our children to for nearly a decade now—I think the change that happens then is the big one. It’s when they leave their warm, comforting, we’re-all-buddies grade school and start attending middle school, with its hormones, its awkwardness, its slang, its filming-lunchroom-fights-with-your-phone, its setting-your-computer-on-fire-because-TikTok-told-you-to … that’s the shift that sets them off in a new direction entirely. It is when your body starts to change, sure, but your mind really starts to change. It is when the world starts to feel less like something your parents dictate to you and more like something that is yours. It is when your life begins to have stakes, whether you realize it or not. It is when the decisions in your life begin to matter.

Two years ago, my son William graduated—or “moved on,” as is the elementary school parlance—from the same school my younger son Wynn will move on from next week. Because he was a good student and because he is a good person, the school asked William to make a speech at the Moving-On ceremony. (Wynn is doing one too.)

He did a great job. We were extremely proud of him. He remains a good student and he remains a good person. It was only two years ago. But the human being he was two years ago and the human being he is now are dramatically different. And how could they not be? Then, all he wanted was our approval, to have his parents shine their light on him. Now? Now we are already receding into the background, replaced by his friends, by girls, by text chains, by music, by memes, by the infinite number of things that only he can understand and that he, correctly, necessarily, he is beginning to shut us out of. This is not because we are now worse people, or worse parents, and it does not mean he has suddenly become a bad son. It just means his life is becoming his now. It will remain his until he has children of his own, if he has children of his own. That’s just the way the world is, for him and for us, moving forward.

And I realize now that middle school is when that began. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with the middle school he attends; there isn’t. Quite the opposite. It’s a terrific school, with hard-working, earnest teachers dedicated to performing a job that, personally, I would find impossible, to the absolute best of their abilities because they know how vital it is that they do so. He has good friends, some of which came from his elementary school and some of which he has met since he got there. There is nothing wrong with him, or his school, at all. They are great.

But the school has been a big part in clarifying, of vaporizing any illusions we might have had: He is no longer a child. He’s out there with the rest of us now. He has to navigate a world that is confusing, and shifting dramatically every day, and he has to do it on his own. We can be here for support, for anything he asks or needs, but part of the deal is that he’s going to need less and less, or at least feel like he does. Part of his life being his own is shutting us out of it, which is what I did to my parents and surely what they did to theirs. He’s not on his own. But I bet it feels that way. And the thing is: Part of me can only guess.

And that happened in middle school. That wasn’t happening two years ago. He was in elementary school then. He was a child.

I have a hard time conjuring up memories from my elementary school. Columbian Elementary School, just a few blocks from Mattoon High School. They tore it down a couple of decades ago. I remember the names of my teachers, I remember playing dodgeball (we called it “slaughter,” though I thought it was spelled “slotter”), I remember my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Lawyer, using a wooden paddle to spank a kid so hard you could hear the teeth of every kid in the class chatter. But these are hazy and unreliable—they’re half-memories, at best. School was a place I went during the day, but my real life was at home. When I think of growing up, I remember my parents, and my house, and my sister—my family—far more than I remember school, or my friends.

But middle school? High school? College? Grownup life? Just like with graduation, my parents are supporting characters, the people I had to check in with but were not central to my life, or to my story. They felt either irrelevant, or actively obstructionist. My life was, and always would be, inextricable from theirs. But they were no longer central. I was exploring the world, trying to find my place in it. It would be decades—really, until I had children of my own and at least realized what my parents had been through, understood what it must have meant to them when I pushed them to the background of my life—until they would play such a central role again. When I was an entirely different person entirely.

There were many gradual changes along the way, fits and starts, moments when we extremely close, moments when they had no idea what was going on my life at all. These things are not linear. But once I stopped being a child, when I started being my own person independent of them, when I had to figure it out on my own … the relationship was never the same. Not worse. In many ways, ultimately better. But undeniably, irrevocably, different.

And I really do think it happened with middle school. With puberty. With the desire for autonomy. With the need to be my own person—not theirs. Not anymore. I see it in my older son. I will soon see it with my younger one.

This week, my wife and I will walk our youngest son to his final day of elementary school. We will make our older son come with us. It is a walk we have made many, many times.

You can’t see it, but there’s a Hillary 2016 sign behind us.

We will make this walk one final time. This has been a great school. I already miss it. Someday my sons will walk its halls and it will seem so much smaller to them. They will remember when they were students there. They will feel like it was so long ago. They will be right.

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

1. Orioles Fans Should Not Yet Give Up Hope, MLB.com. Gotta hang in with the team I picked to make the World Series.

2. Holy Crap, Get Knicks Excited. New York. Monday night was a good sports night in the Leitch household.

3. This Week’s Power Rankings, MLB.com. I hope this isn’t the highest the Cardinals get all year.

4. Some Rivalry Week Rankings, MLB.com. Previewing the weekend.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, no show this week, Grierson is in Cannes.

Morning Lineup, I did no shows this week.

Seeing Red, Bernie Miklasz and I discussed my Victor Scott II man crush.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Trump’s Tactical Burger Unit Is Beyond Parody,” Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic. Charlie does a great job describing just how brain-melting it feels to pay attention to the news right now.

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

“Amplifier,” Jucifer. At the Akins Ford Arena here in Athens, there is a living museum exhibit (hosted the University of Georgia Libraries, which I’m on the board of) which features all sorts of great Georgia music history, including Peter Buck guitars, James Brown jumpsuits and sorts of other great stuff. They also have a Spotify playlist of just Georgia artists. There are some truly great ones: This playlist doesn’t repeat a single artist and still is more than nine hours long.

I’ve been listening to it all week, and I realized I’d never heard of Jucifer, a band from right here in Athens, and that fact made me very embarrassed.

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.

Seriously: Book is out Tuesday, all. Talk to you then.

Best,
Will