20 Years Gone in a Flash
Peep Show: Issue #5
Peep Show is a semi-regular series where I pull back the curtain and go full Hemingway.
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."My son turned 20 last week and I’ve been on tilt ever since.1
On one hand, this is not the sort of thing that sneaks up on you. I’ve known the exact day of his birthday since he’s had one, and I can count to 20 between my fingers and toes. Up until a couple of days ago, I could still refer to him as a teenager. Now there is nowhere left to hide. He’s fully grown.
You often lose sight of the big picture in the daily minutiae of basketball practices and homework assignments. You know time is passing. Even when you carpe all the diems, what you seize is fleeting. Sand through the fingers. You can’t hold on. It’s impossible.
Kids grow up one day at a time, which makes the whole thing feel sort of inevitable. There isn’t a sudden radical change to coincide with a birthday. The changes are slow and subtle, so when we arrive at a momentous occasion, like a birthday, it feels like we’ve already been there.
But the reason I’ve been feeling out of sorts has less to do with him, and more to do with me.
Growing up, I wanted to be a writer because storytelling is a hell of a drug. At first that wanting was of the vague variety. I’d sit at a typewriter—because this was long ago—and write a page or two of what was probably Star Wars fan-fic, drawing as much enjoyment from the tactile typing experience as I did from the creativity, but that was as far as it went. It was a daydream. Unless you work at it, just thinking “it’d be cool to be a writer,” isn’t materially different from “it’d be cool to be George Clooney.” They’re fantasies.
All that changed when my wife got pregnant.2
I remember thinking, “This is it. It’s now or never.” It’s a ridiculous origin story, tonally similar to Star Lord deciding to get a Bowflex after witnessing Thor’s pirate-angel beauty. The goal may be pure but the motivation is sus.