Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [35]
The first step, I decided, was to sit down with my five- and seven-year-old daughters and ask them what it was that they wanted out of life. As I asked the question, it occurred to me that I was an idiot. Who asks a five- and a seven-year-old what they want out of life? They’re five and seven! They want whatever makes them feel good in the moment. Despite being relatively intelligent girls, they have no concept of big and small in the metaphysical sense (nor should they be asked to make the distinction). They are creatures of the concrete, not the abstract. They are five and seven. All they wanted out of life was another cookie.
But I was not to be deterred. I would have Order—a plan for my home life. I would create Visions. I would break those down into Plans. These Plans would become Tasks. We would have Order in this family, Order in the best traditions of Benjamin Franklin.
In the end what I got was a nascent plan to take a trip to Disney World. Hardly grand Vision stuff, but by the end of the morning, we were checking out the Disney website and guessing which rides we’d like the most. We assigned a date to the trip, put it on the calendar, and took the first tentative steps toward planning a family vacation. We were having fun in a very middle-class, bourgeois sort of way—hardly virtuous. Oh well, Mickey, here we come. Ben would have to wait. I bet he would have liked Space Mountain.
ORDER
{CHAPTER 4}
Resolution
Resolve to perform what you ought;
perform without fail what you resolve
AT THE RISK OF HAVING SOMEONE FROM THE TELEVISION SHOW INTERVENTION turn up at my door, I have yet another confession. By my senior year in college, my mother believed I drank too much (she may have developed the belief long before that, but she kept it to herself up to that point). I don’t want this to sound overdramatic. She didn’t drag me to an AA meeting or kidnap me and have me deprogrammed. She was simply concerned that, having invested heavily in my postsecondary education, I was spending too much of my time in the campus bar.
{ Tomorrow, every Fault is to be amended; but that Tomorrow never comes.}
My mother is a clever creature. She knew that interminable parental lectures have little effect on inveterate behavior. Better the carrot than the stick, especially with men/boys barely out of their teens. So she waited, picked her shot, and when I came looking for a favor, she went all Don Corleone on me.
At Christmas of my senior year, my roommates had signed up for a spring break bus trip to Florida. After nearly begging my parents to send me as a graduation present, my mother surprised me. Notwithstanding the burden it would place on their own finances, they quickly agreed to the trip. “There’s a catch,” said my mother. “We’ll send you if you agree not to touch a drop of alcohol from Christmas to spring break.”
If ever there was a time for Resolution, this was it.
So I took up the challenge (a little chagrined that it was proposed at all) and steadfastly refused to imbibe for a solid three months. I was on the honor system. My university was only two hours from my hometown, but there would be no motherly monitoring, no daily checkups. If I was to keep up my end of the bargain, it was all on me. In the end, in the conflict between youthful intemperance and honor-driven resolution, it was no contest.
For three months I didn’t hold, smell, drink, or even clean up alcohol. I became the world’s most dependable designated driver.
Finally, the three months came to an end, and I duly reported to my mother (who had already paid for my spring break trip) that I had maintained my end of the deal. I had been resolute; I had, in the words of Franklin, “performed without fail what I resolved.” And never had there been a more concrete reward for resolution: I was on my way to Florida. I, several of my closest friends, and eighty