Pass it On

I taught one of my boys to play chess. He was five. Within a shockingly short time, he was crushing me. 

I taught another how to improve his odds of getting what he wanted from a merchant...or anyone, really. Be charming and go slow, was the essence of it.

Fishing, tennis, basketball, golf. I taught them all that, with varying degrees of success. The fishing and a brief foray into hunting brought me around to feeling that I didn't want to kill anything, even for food. You can get food at the grocery store. You don’t have to personally murder it. Lately, it has gotten hard to think about anyone penning and slaughtering animals to feed me. For just that empathetic reason, one of my sons is a vegetarian. He taught me, rather than the other way around.

I taught them that their word is their bond. That their personal integrity is as important as eating and breathing. They embraced that lesson, with occasional youthful exceptions for Napster and BitTorrent.

I didn’t teach them math, even though all of them are great at it. I flatter myself that by staying out of their homework I was teaching them self-reliance. I think I was just lazy. Also, not good at math.

My kids are all grown now. None of them want me to teach them anything. I get it. These days I confine myself to lobbing in occasional bits of unsolicited advice. Much appreciated advice, I’m sure. “I’m aware,” one of them is fond of saying, in his charming way. The protege become the master.

I taught them to be kind, even though I was not always. That lesson seems to have stuck. Maybe when I wasn’t kind they saw first-hand how much better it is to be so. 

As I said, the proteges surpass the master.

That’s the best part of it, really: raising kids who are better than you. It’s like a last chance on this earth to atone for your sins, to correct your imperfections. To make the world a better place by leaving behind copies of yourself that aren’t copies at all, but are version 2.0, with more good features, better all around, just the way the original model should have been.