I Cried a Lot When Gary Died

On mentorship kinda

Thirtysomething kicked my ass. I watched every episode and taught myself guitar by playing along to W.G. “Snuffy” Walden’s theme and incidental music. (“The rhythmic major 7^th when Elliot says something wry,” etc.) I scheduled college classes around the daytime reruns on Lifetime, one of the 13 channels we got at U of Illinois. I wished only to navigate the challenges of the Philadelphia advertising scene while raising children in a mixed-religion household. That was the life for me.

Also I was a “sensitive” teen, something I was proud of because I’d learned from prime-time dramas was that women were always looking for sensitive men. Men who got to be married to Hope Steadman or Nancy Weston.

As a middle child, I didn’t ask for much, which means adults also called me “mature”. I used my new music skills to write piano dirges in A-minor with titles like “Have a Nice Life” and “Happy Birthday to Me”, but kept them secret. I flunked my way from Chemical Engineering to Chemistry to Rhetoric, where I studied fiction and poetry.

Richard Yates became a siren. “A Glutton for Punishment” hit particularly hard – the story of a lifelong loser whose childhood skill was to pretend to be shot in a game of cops-and-robbers, to “stand poised in a moment of graceful agony, pitch over and fall down the hill in a whirl of arms and legs and a splendid cloud of dust.” Walter, the protagonist, fails at literally everything, and after my first few rounds of identity trauma-- well, here’s how the story ends, as he tells his wife he’s lost his job.

Linking to a used copy with the amazing Vintage Contemporaries cover

“It was the most graceful thing he had done all day.” That’s the line that lands, 30 years later. I still sometimes collapse into a chair after a long day just like this.

At swim lessons last week, the kiddos were learning some safety. One kid would get pushed out into the water (in a life vest, to be clear) and the other would climb out the pool to get help. My son didn’t quite get the help part, but when he got to be the drowning boy, he was all in. “Help! I’m drowning really bad!” He wanted to be the victim round after round, to be rescued again and again.

So I’ve been thinking about mentorship. I never had someone I looked up to in school or at a job. Even my AA sponsors were more like advisors than mentors. Closest thing I had to a mentor was Fran Fine, TV’s “The Nanny”.

Lately Instagram is showing me videos of Fran Drescher descending the stairs in some incredible clothes. I can only assume that the algorithm saw me watch Ms. Drescher give an impassioned speech during the SAG-AFTRA strike, and knows I follow clydesofly, leaguefits and WNBA leaguefits, so from there it’s just math. In college, I’d watch “The Nanny” alone, sitting close to the dial to change the channel when my roommate came in. That sounds lascivious, but I watched in silence (the show wasn’t all that funny), wishing for a mentor who’d tell me what to do because I had no idea. (Clearly I was right about Fran Drescher, given her real-life leadership skills.)

Later, a thirtysomething suggested that rather than come home from rehab, I should probably move into sober living. She pragmatically recommended I look into insurance coverage to pay for it. A friend at rehab congratulated me for marrying into such strong boundaries. So I got my wish, in a monkey’s paw kind of way.

I’m way past thirtysomething, and yesterday my son explained that when he’s 20, he’ll have a movie and a TV show, and that he’ll make sure they’re free for me by putting them on apps I already have. He’ll also have his own app, but it’ll be a modest one-time fee because he knows how much I hate subscription apps. Mentorship is naturally part of fatherhood, so I’ve been steering him away from screens, and last week at my favorite outdoor coffee shop during drawing time, he drew an angry face that represented the hardest levels of “Geometry Dash”.

Thirtysomething consoled me because it showed that adults had no idea what they were doing. Someday my son will figure out that they got me. But not yet.