I think my dad has always been scared of being poor.
My dad worked at an aerospace company in the 80s when defense spending was crazy and companies like his were fat and happy. He had a ton of experience in commercial art, so he was manager of their design department, did brochures, commercials, fun stuff.
When the recession hit, that aerospace company started a slow decline that lasted a decade and spaned a high of 15,000 employees and a low of 300. My dad was one of the few that survived to the end with a job intact. He wasn't doing art anymore though, somehow his position had shifted little by little until he was managing security for the building, which was a big deal as they did classified work with rocket engines there and he was the one who had to know all the rules behind security clearances, deal with the yearly audits by the NSA, and other security related shit when you've got rockets and the most powerful rocket fuel in the world being sprayed around the place.
When the company finally died and (mercifully) they laid off my dad, he went into business for himself as a design consultant and if you think the stress was bad before, recently it's been insane. He was up to 2 pots of coffee a day until he had his heart attack. He had all sorts of problems with debt and back taxes.
He had a heart attack and almost died Friday. The only reason he survived (the surgeons said) was because he lived five minutes away from The Tommy Lasorda Heart Institute, where the best open-heart surgeons in Los Angeles work, and his wife gave him two baby asprin before the ambulance arrived. The odds were way against him surviving the first couple hours. From what I gather, it was something like a 20% survival rate for the first 24 hours for a heart attack like he had.
But he's made it so far.
I flew down to L.A. Friday, of course, and spent the weekend just visiting him and thinking more than I've ever thought before about what the measure of a good life is. The doctors say that he had advanced heart disease and it was only a matter of time before he had a heart attack, in fact, two of the arteries of his heart have been completely blocked for months so he was fucked anyway.
I think though that it's not our fucking genes with implied family history of heart attacks that doomed him, it was his fucking hardcore determination to stoicly stand between his family and the street. He was so fucking hardcore in what he did and the lengths he was willing to go to to keep his family secure that it made him miserable most of his adult life, and really impeded his ability to have fun.
My current theory is that it's not the genes that fathers in my family are passing to sons, it's depression-era thinking. His dad grew up in the aftermath of the depression and I heard stories from my grandma that when my father's father was a kid he used magnets in fields to find nails that he could sell as scrap metal to help his family buy food.
I was talking to my brothers and some of the parallels between my dad's outlook toward work (and stress) and my own, and they all felt the same way: worrying is a Judge family trait. If we're not working, we're worrying that we're fucking everything up, so even if I'm out and watching say, a movie, I'll still be thinking about work.
We're defined by our work roles even to each other: I'm the computer programmer, my oldest brother is the math teacher/union representative, my next older brother is the star thermodynamic engineer, my sister is the media buyer.
What the fuck.
I came back from this experience a changed person. I'm not doing it, I'm not going to be a fucking workaholic anymore. I used to be fun damnit.
This week I'm getting a therapist and some of these computers are going to fucking BURN. It's a little more complicated than that, but it's less so at the same time. I moved to Seattle hoping that I would worry a little less and have a little more fun and it hasn't happened yet, so I'm going to make it happen.
It doesn't take much work to take dinner out to the grass outside, and yet we never do it.
We're going to do it.
My dad worked at an aerospace company in the 80s when defense spending was crazy and companies like his were fat and happy. He had a ton of experience in commercial art, so he was manager of their design department, did brochures, commercials, fun stuff.
When the recession hit, that aerospace company started a slow decline that lasted a decade and spaned a high of 15,000 employees and a low of 300. My dad was one of the few that survived to the end with a job intact. He wasn't doing art anymore though, somehow his position had shifted little by little until he was managing security for the building, which was a big deal as they did classified work with rocket engines there and he was the one who had to know all the rules behind security clearances, deal with the yearly audits by the NSA, and other security related shit when you've got rockets and the most powerful rocket fuel in the world being sprayed around the place.
When the company finally died and (mercifully) they laid off my dad, he went into business for himself as a design consultant and if you think the stress was bad before, recently it's been insane. He was up to 2 pots of coffee a day until he had his heart attack. He had all sorts of problems with debt and back taxes.
He had a heart attack and almost died Friday. The only reason he survived (the surgeons said) was because he lived five minutes away from The Tommy Lasorda Heart Institute, where the best open-heart surgeons in Los Angeles work, and his wife gave him two baby asprin before the ambulance arrived. The odds were way against him surviving the first couple hours. From what I gather, it was something like a 20% survival rate for the first 24 hours for a heart attack like he had.
But he's made it so far.
I flew down to L.A. Friday, of course, and spent the weekend just visiting him and thinking more than I've ever thought before about what the measure of a good life is. The doctors say that he had advanced heart disease and it was only a matter of time before he had a heart attack, in fact, two of the arteries of his heart have been completely blocked for months so he was fucked anyway.
I think though that it's not our fucking genes with implied family history of heart attacks that doomed him, it was his fucking hardcore determination to stoicly stand between his family and the street. He was so fucking hardcore in what he did and the lengths he was willing to go to to keep his family secure that it made him miserable most of his adult life, and really impeded his ability to have fun.
My current theory is that it's not the genes that fathers in my family are passing to sons, it's depression-era thinking. His dad grew up in the aftermath of the depression and I heard stories from my grandma that when my father's father was a kid he used magnets in fields to find nails that he could sell as scrap metal to help his family buy food.
I was talking to my brothers and some of the parallels between my dad's outlook toward work (and stress) and my own, and they all felt the same way: worrying is a Judge family trait. If we're not working, we're worrying that we're fucking everything up, so even if I'm out and watching say, a movie, I'll still be thinking about work.
We're defined by our work roles even to each other: I'm the computer programmer, my oldest brother is the math teacher/union representative, my next older brother is the star thermodynamic engineer, my sister is the media buyer.
What the fuck.
I came back from this experience a changed person. I'm not doing it, I'm not going to be a fucking workaholic anymore. I used to be fun damnit.
This week I'm getting a therapist and some of these computers are going to fucking BURN. It's a little more complicated than that, but it's less so at the same time. I moved to Seattle hoping that I would worry a little less and have a little more fun and it hasn't happened yet, so I'm going to make it happen.
It doesn't take much work to take dinner out to the grass outside, and yet we never do it.
We're going to do it.
I'm so happy your father is hanging tough. As for indulging in fun, as my journals will attest, you are a couple of days too late. But we'll do what we can!