Congratulations, Jake. Here's the experiences of another father for you to ponder:
Stanley is about eighteen or nineteen, I am not sure which, but looks much older than his years. He is taller and thinner than I but otherwise resembles me as closely as can be expected these days. His face can look positively cherubic on occasion, but this makes no difference to the fact that he can be a fiend from the blackest pit when he likes. I've had a lot of trouble with him. A few weeks ago he was at that stage where he had given up the idea of being a pirate, engine-driver, or chief rescuer in the fire brigade, and wanted to be a poet. He has altered greatly since, but I would much rather rear a platypus than a boy. Problems innumerable beset the conscientious father, but the greatest problem of all is to know in what trade or profession the boy will be best fitted to support his old father at a later date.
The medical profession, of course, suggests itself immediately. I have no yearning to have Stanley descend to the familiarity of listening-in to the heart-throbs of the vulgar, and punching people in the ribs and asking if it hurts. Neither do I wish to stand on one leg with my mouth open and say ninety-nine, as I would undoubtedly be compelled to do if he were training for the medical profession. His mother would see to that. Furthermore, judging by the number of divorce cases that doctors become entangled in it would seem that the only way some of them can keep their names untarnished is by the application of a little metal-polish to their brass plate. And whatever else Stanley is, I want him to be untarnished. That is to say, he'd be fool enough to get caught.
I could make a lawyer of him. He really has a talent in that direction. He comes home in the small hours of the morning with an iron-clad alibi and even the wife can find no chink in his armour of excuses. He is a fountain of fluid eloquence. I'm a bit that way myself: it runs in our family. Still, admitting that lawyers are quite all right in their place, the trouble is to find the place.
There is the Church. Somehow I don't think he is fitted for it. He hasn't heard the call, so to speak. It seems to be a weakness of his, this deafness to calls. Every morning I have to go to his room and pull the bed-clothes off him before he shows any signs of life. This despite the fact that his mother has shouted herself black in the face at the foot of the stairs and his aunt has battered the paint off his door. He did show some interest in the subject of the revision of the prayer-book. His suggestion was to insert cross-word puzzles on alternate pages with blank leaves interspersed here and there for sketches and notes to be passed along to fellow sufferers during the sermon. He can be wooden-headed, dull and entirely lacking in imagination when the mood seizes him, and taking into consideration these assets, I had hopes of a brilliant career for him in the army, but unfortunately he is flatfooted, so his other qualifications go for
nothing.
I could, I suppose, put a stiff collar on him, give him a pair of gold cuff-links, a cigarette-holder, and a couple of fountain-pens and incarcerate him in a warehouse; to emerge at the expiration of his sentence as a business man: a successful business man: a man who has won the right to put his thumb in the armhole of his vest and look over the top of his glasses and grunt. Or I could start him off in the Public Service. There he could remain for about forty years in a more or less comatose condition and later be dismissed from his position of Temporary Casual Supernumerary Class II clerk with a pension. The pension would not be sufficient to keep me and I could not bear the thought of filling in forms, LX2, A3, Folio 9716Q in quadruplicate, digging up birth certificates, writing out references for him and getting his finger-prints taken in order to get him on the waiting-list.
I have read of fathers cutting their sons off with a shilling and casting them into the world with a clout in one ear and a lot of invaluable advice in the other. And the sons have become celebrated Lord Mayors, bushrangers, politicians and big business men. Worked themselves up from newsboys to a position where they can sign cheques for thousands without having to flee the country immediately. I have thought over this arrangement of cutting him off with a shilling--but I cannot spare the shilling.
(Lennie Lower in "Here's Luck")
