I was thinking about my oldest son the other day. I don’t see him much–he stayed in New York after graduating from college. Coming home, for him, is something he feels he should do–not something that he really wants to do; and when he is home, he’s only around for meals and to sleep and on the third day, inevitably, he starts talking about going back to his apartment in New York. Losing your son to a brand new life is incredibly sad, and it tears at your heart, but it isn’t what I wanted to write about, nor why I was thinking about him.
I was thinking about a day when my son was truly sad.
He was twelve or thirteen. He played basketball in a league at a local gym. They had games on Thursdays and Saturdays. I normally blew off the Thursday games because of work but that day I went. I sat in the bleachers at St. Jerome’s ancient gym, which looked like one of the gyms in the movie “Hoosiers” and watched my son sit on the bench for the entire game. Not once did the coach think to put him in, not even at the end of the game, which was a rout–the kind of game that even the most unathletic kid gets in for thirty seconds.
After the game, I saw my son. He didn’t realize that I was there, which meant A) he could ride home with me rather than on the bus; and B) I had seen him ride the bench.
He silently got in the car, put his seatbelt on, and started to cry. And I’m not talking sniffles and red eyes, I’m talking about a veritable explosion of pain, embarrassment, resentment, anger, and frustration. I was about to start the car, but I didn’t. I just let him wail, and I put my arm around him and talked to him. We talked about a lot of things, which shall always remain between us, and remain between us to this day.
After a while, he wiped his eyes, and we drove to a Jack In the Box, got some food and went home.
Thank God that I was at that game.
But I almost didn’t go. The reason I went is what I wanted to write about.
I was working at the time at a company that sold paint pigments. I am not going to try and explain the intricacies of a company that sold paint pigments, mostly to Detroit car companies, because it doesn’t matter what it sold. It’s a company like all the other companies that I’ve worked for. There is a product, and you sell it. If you sell a lot of it, you are successful, and if you don’t sell a lot of it, you are marginalized, and if you can’t sell any of it, they fire your ass.
I wanted to do well at the company so I went in early, stayed late, went drinking after work with the other salespeople and when I was home, I pretty much ignored my wife and kids and I thought about work.
But one day, when my son was about twelve or thirteen, the older guy in the next cubicle asked me about my family. I shrugged and gave him some generic bull shit, and after that, whenever he struck up a conversation, he talked about his family–his wife and kids, all kinds of details that I generally never thought about when it came to my own family, and eventually I opened up about my kids, and I told him that I wished I could go to more of my son’s games and such…
And one day he told me a story about his own son. It was a lot like the story of my son and his basketball game. At the end of it he said that of all the things that he had done in his life, he absolutely never regretted spending time with his kids when they were growing up.
He said to me,
you’ll never regret the things that you do; you’ll only regret the things you don’t do…
I thought about that a lot. I decided that he was right. That night my son told me that he had a game at St. Jerome’s on Thursday. He didn’t tell me because he thought that I’d go; he was just telling me. And on Thursday I told my boss that I had to skip the sales meeting because I had eaten some bad chicken, and I went to the game.
And I started to go to a lot of games. And practices.
TASK:
Actually, there are two tasks. 1) What are you ignoring in your life because of work? And 2) Pass along what that old man said to me about regret.
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