My sons (now seventeen and twenty) face
the precipice of manhood and career,
and I’m bewildered by the manic pace
of change, accelerating year by year.
My father’s father’s early days were like
his fathers’ from a thousand years before—
a horse, a wagon, sky, a singing shrike,
the edges had evolved, but not the core.
But now? The world I walk at middle-age
can’t fathom that of my own childhood,
and future-focused teens are forced to gauge
which non-existent living would be good.
A dad should help his children find their way,
but how, when future paths are nothing like today?
—David Jackson Lohnes
2022
Notes:
I am not a helicopter parent. I believe the best service I can offer my children in preparing them for adulthood is to put education, tools, values, and experience in their hands and then send them with love out into the world to learn the real lessons that come from the hard knocks of experience. But change is happening so rapidly it’s difficult to give specific advice about future career choices. (DL, Dec. 21, 2022)
father’s father’s early days – My grandfather, Herbert Joseph Lohnes, was born in Cherokee, Iowa in 1899.
the edges had evolved – By the turn of the 20th century, the railroad, steam engine, telegraph, telephone, kerosene, electricity, and other technological advances had begun to transform many aspects of work and urban life in the United States and were reaching more and more of the population.
but not the core – Urban populations rose throughout the 19th century from historic norms (especially in the United States), but in 1900 the the majority of people living in the United states (and the vast majority everywhere else) still lived in rural areas, and the rural experience of daily life was in many ways unchanged from centuries past.
But now – The sonnet is Shakespearean in form, but these words establish a clear transition between octave and sestet.
that of my own childhood – I was born in 1978 and lived my childhood through the eighties. Much of the stuff of daily first-world life today (websites, cell phones, streaming media, online dating, GPS, video calling, and—increasingly—AI) simply didn’t exist.