"Right" of Passage

“The thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.” 

— Tim O’Brien from The Things They Carried.

The numerous albums of family photographs, which my late mother had dutifully curated throughout her life, were spread out out across my younger sister’s dining room table. Inside them dangled the keys to unlocking “remembering.”

There were countless photos of relatives, vacations, and all five of us kids at various stages of development.

“Wow…I had forgotten about that,” became the afternoon’s catch phrase.

“Rememberings”

Loving – There was the photo of me and Carol waving goodbye at the front door as we headed off to our senior prom. Outside of my family, she was the first woman I can honestly say I loved. Smart. Funny. After graduation she headed to the University of Wisconsin, and I went to the University of Illinois.

Reasonable reasoning at the time: “I’ll write to you every day and stay true.”

Eventually the letters slowed, and Carol finally offered that let-him-down-gently but vapid promise, “We can still be friends.”

Journeying – There was the photo of me and my high school buddy, Doug, sitting on the hood of his Corvair just after we had returned from our abortive “journey to the coast.” We had driven through the Badlands, taken in the eerie beauty of Yellowstone’s thermal springs, and sipped Coors beers as we drove through the Rockies, singing along with Jose Feliciano as he belted out our favorite song “Come on, Baby, Light My Fire.”

“Brewed with Pure Rocky Mountain Spring Water,” we’d offer each other when we popped another can. So enamored with our temporary passage into adulthood – one could legally buy beer at 18 in a number of the western states – that we decided to drink the actual water one night at our campsite. 

Reasonable reasoning at the time: “If the beer is good, the water should be, too. Right?”

Doug dipped his cup into the slow-moving and seemingly clear mountain stream, took a healthy drink, and let out a satisfying “Aaaahhh.”

Shortly thereafter, we watched as a line of cattle crossed the stream just above us, following what we would soon realize was a well-worn path. One stopped and left its signature in the water.

Shortly thereafter, it was back to civilization and an emergency room visit.

Later, I drove as Doug slept it off in the passenger seat. We made it as far as Ely, Nevada, and then reluctantly turned east and headed back to Chicago. The Pacific would have to wait.

Owning – And then there was the photograph of model airplanes and ships arrayed neatly on shelves in the basement of my parents’ home. They had all been lovingly and painstakingly assembled from kits my brothers and I had purchased from Hill’s Hobby and Model Shop.

Hill’s was a hole-in-the-wall doorway to a young boy’s fantasy: Seemingly endless model and train kits were stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves. Completed models hung enticingly from the ceiling, whispering “You can build me, too.”

My father had a well-worn expression: “If I had a dime for every time ______.” Well, if I had a dime for every time we went to Hill’s to pull out coins and crumpled bills for another model, ______.”

Looking at the models in that photograph brought back another memory: the day my younger brother and I destroyed them.

Back from college for a short break, I scurried with him to the roof of our house with most of the airplanes. We somehow set them ablaze, and threw them high into the air, mimicking air battles.

All made of plastic, the models either hit the ground and broke into countless pieces, or melted into pools of quickly congealing lumps of green and brown.

We took the ships to a nearby swamp, loaded each with one or more firecrackers, and watched the explosions rip them apart.

Reasonable reasoning at the time: We made them; we got to destroy them.

When my dad pulled up the driveway that night, most of the detritus of battle lay in place. He stopped and surveyed the mess.

I had seen him angry more than once in my lifetime. There was the time he caught a very young me horsing around with my older brother and sister as we dressed before a special family event. Location is everything, they say, and that doesn’t always mean good. I was closest to our bedroom door and an easy grab.

“I will not” (spank) be late (spank) because you chose to (spank)….” My dad hated to be late.

Then there were the two incidents of my either not eating or creatively eating peas. Food, observed my dad, who was raised during the Depression, was not to be wasted or played with. If life were a hockey game, the announcer would have come over the kitchen's PA system with: “Now serving a dinner suspension for playing with food, Jeff Ikler.”

And how could I forget this? There was the time during my high school years when I took the sawdust puppet I had made in fifth grade, put it in the lotus position, and set it ablaze on the driveway. I must have been driven to that after watching Buddhist monks self-immolating in protest to the Vietnam War.

Reasonable reasoning at the time: Puppets were for kids.

When my father pulled up to the garage that night, only a small mound of ash remained– which, it turned out, permanently stained the driveway – and some charred hook-and-eye screws. The arrow on his angry meeter quickly moved to red.

Passages

I thought at the time that my dad’s anger about the models probably stemmed from two realizations:

?   The shelves he had built for us were now glaringly empty.

?   The backyard he and my mother meticulously maintained was a mess.

Now, looking at the photograph of those shelves filled with boyhood passion, pride and patience, I know the real source of his anger:

“At your age, you should have known better,” he said at the time through clenched teeth.

“You” was becoming a young man, beginning the passage out of his dad’s harbor to his own open water.

And my rite of passage into self-leadership was to be, as most are, a long and not always graceful one. Young men don’t always know “better”; sometimes all they know is now.

But it was, I would come to realize later in life, my rightful passage to make.

After graduating from college, I began the process of packing up and moving out of my parents’ house for good. I climbed up into our attic to retrieve a large box of personal memorabilia that I had collected through my youth: report cards, letters, photographs, sheet music, my last high school yearbook, and a trophy from my sophomore year on the wrestling team with a small brass inscription that I imagined read something like:

“For his selfless willingness to wrestle one weight class above his own; to suffer defeat after defeat at the hands of heavier and stronger young men; and to become one with the mat for the team.”  One could be proud even in the jaws of defeat.

Most important, though, were the stanzas of an A.E. Housman poem that was read at the end of the unforgettable coming-of-age film, “Walkabout.”

Into my heart an air that kills / From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills, / What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content, / I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went / And cannot come again.

I clicked on the attic light only to find that the box was not there. When I confronted my dad, he denied ever having seen it.

Did he throw the box out because it was his way of dealing with my leaving home; my passage to adulthood? I don’t know. We never talked about the box again, but it sat figuratively between us for years.

We all have our “Walkabouts.” We travel happy highways to various places, but as we age – as we grow the muscles of personal leadership – we realize they are places to which we cannot come again.

Except in the photographs. They always remember.

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Much thanks to Susan Rooks, the Grammar Goddess, for her editorial support. She is a true pro.

I am a certified executive career and personal leadership coach at Quetico Leadership & Career Coaching. I partner with individuals to remove the obstacles that stand in their way of achieving the level of leadership they want in their life and work.