A few years ago I got my first pair of glasses. After years of people praising my good vision, it finally came to pass. I wrote at the time that I felt I was finally anchored in that middle aged box, and that it was interesting how a simple pair of glasses could put so many intangibles into perspective. I thought that was the moment. It wasn't. The moment was this spring.
Three Starting Lines
On May 23, Maggie graduated high school, and in the fall she goes off to college. Lisa is about to walk into high school. And Jennie, the girl I still call little Jennie, is about to start middle school. By the end of the summer, three of my children will have crossed three different starting lines, and I'll be standing at every one of them, wondering where the time went.
It's a strange feeling. Not sad exactly. Not happy exactly. It's the feeling of looking up from the stove after what you thought was a few minutes and realizing the whole dinner service is over. The tickets are gone. The line is wiped down. Somebody already turned the lights off in the dining room.
But that isn't even the strange part. The strange part is the other thing. I am realizing things that every man my age has always realized. I can feel myself doing it. And the realization that I am right on schedule, thinking what fathers have always thought, is the strangest realization of all. I'm sitting in a seat that has been warmed by every generation that came before me. And I can already see the ones who will sit in it after me.
So I want to talk about that. About children turning into teenagers and then into adults. About mortality. About why every generation is a little suspicious of the one before it and the one after it. And about how the whole thing goes around and around, across thousands of years, almost perfectly. There will be some food. There's always some food.
Six
I have six children.
My oldest was Alexandria Juliet. We called her Alli. She was born August 16, 1997, and she would have been twenty-nine this August. I'll come back to her.
Conner and Davin are grown men now, which is a sentence I have to read twice.
Davin and I went to San Diego for spring break in 2019. He slept on my brother Eric's couch in Ocean Beach, and I stayed in a hostel down the hill on Newport Avenue, sharing a room with five strangers that turned over almost nightly. In the mornings I would trek up the hill to retrieve him, and we'd go eat. He had a pile of several flavors of pancakes and a tower of hash browns at Breakfast Republic. We went whale watching. We splashed around on the beach until the only light left was a sliver of silver blue over the Pacific. He was a kid then. He is not a kid now.
In 2021 I posted a picture of Davin and Maggie and wrote that these two were pretty much grown. Maggie is three years younger than Davin. Every one of my children is so different. And then there was driving involved, and womanhood, and I asked the question every parent asks out loud to nobody: where did the time go? I called them the middle two. My oldest would have been twenty-four that August. Down to little Xu, who had just turned six.
Maggie is my fourth born. Margaret. AKA Margaret Mitchell, Maggie, Magpie, Maggie Moon and Mango. In the space of a few years she went to her first day of work ever, played varsity volleyball while I worked the concession stand, got her driver's license, worked her first double in a restaurant, made homecoming court for her junior class, and went to prom. Then came homecoming her senior year. I wrote that night that one minute you're teaching her how to ride a bike without falling, and the next she's walking out the door in heels, independent, mostly confident, and entirely herself. Now she has graduated. I keep a running list in my head, and every item on it happened faster than the one before.
Lisa is number five. Lisa Nguyen Davis. In Vietnam she was Su, sometimes Big Su, sometimes Su bear, the bigger half of the duo known as Suxu. In December of 2019 we took the girls to see Frozen II in Da Nang, and two years later I noticed she was almost as tall as her mom. Now she towers over her mother and just about everyone on her mother's side of the family. She plays volleyball. She went to summer camp. She turned eleven on horseback in Wyoming, in a storm, and thirteen back in Vietnam. Officially a teenager. And in the fall, she starts high school.
And Jennie. Our youngest of six. The child formerly known as Xù. On a Lunar New Year in the village, when she was four years old, she sat across a marble table from me and played cat and mouse with me over a sucker. She handed me one of her red envelopes and said, in the clearest English, "Here you go." It was empty. Quite a sense of humor in that little one. In 2021, despite the lockdowns, we managed to get her kindergarten graduation pictures done, cap and gown and all. In December of that year her mom lifted her onto an American school bus for her first day of school here. A couple of years ago she told me that some birds' beaks, legs and feet are yellow, and then informed me they missed an opportunity by not saying their eyes are yellow too. Maybe I'm rubbing off. Before we went back last summer, she didn't remember Vietnam. Now she's about to start middle school.
The Kitchen Goes Around
If you've read anything I've written over the years, you knew the food was coming. Here it is.
I was a chef for twenty years. I got my first executive chef job in my late twenties. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that a lot of what I know about my children, I learned standing next to them at a stove.
There's a picture of me in my chef whites with Maggie, maybe three or four years old, in an apron, stirring a big pot with a wooden spoon and grinning at the camera. I was teaching her. That was the deal. I cooked, she helped, and I fed her.
Then one afternoon in 2023, I came home from work and Maggie was getting home from school. It's rare that it's the two of us. She asked if I was hungry. Then she proceeded to make us two incredible cheeseburgers. Crispy and well seasoned outside, medium inside, special sauce, toasted bun, caramelized onions. I stood in my own kitchen and got served. By my kid. Who I taught.
That's the whole thing right there. That's what this post is about. The kitchen goes around. The one who stirs becomes the one who serves.
All of my children have similar traits at the table. Red meat in its almost rawest form is acceptable, maybe even cherished. Jennie wants the hardest cut and the most specific outcome. She wants her fish eyes to pop. In Da Nang, little Xu wanted balut. In Georgia, a gap-toothed Jennie gave the balut a thumbs up. Same kid, same egg, a different country and a few years later. She helped me peel the quail eggs for thịt kho, her favorite. Su learned to make pizza with me during a lockdown and made her own pâté noodles at the stove.
My mom always tells me a story about how my grandmother used to make clothes for my mother's dolls when she was a little girl. In the summer of 2021, while we waited on the last step of our paperwork to come to the U.S., Diem and the girls sat around fashioning new doll clothes out of old clothes she couldn't sell. Su even made little notebooks for the dolls' backpacks. I watched it and thought of my grandmother. You hand the spoon down, or the needle, and someday somebody hands it back, and you don't even notice the moment it happens until the burger is in front of you.
Nothing New Under the Sun
Here's the part where I can't help myself. You know I have this unhealthy urge to teach people things they didn't ask to learn. I'm working on it.
The oldest description I know of this feeling is in the Book of Ecclesiastes. The Preacher, traditionally Solomon, looks at the whole business of life and says it plainly. "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever." And then, a few verses later, the line that gives this post its name. "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."
That was written somewhere between two and three thousand years ago, depending on who you ask. And it reads like something I'd post on Facebook at eleven at night after the kids go to bed.
Then there's Aristotle. In the fourth century BC he wrote the Rhetoric, a handbook on persuasion, and in the second book he stops to describe the young and the old so a speaker would know his audience. About the young, in the old Rhys Roberts translation: "They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it; this, in fact, is why they overdo everything." About the old: "They have lived many years; they have often been taken in, and often made mistakes; and life on the whole is a bad business."
Read those two lines again. One is a teenager. One is a teenager's father. Twenty-three hundred years ago. Nothing new under the sun.
There's a famous quote that floats around the internet, credited to Socrates, about how children now love luxury, have bad manners, contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. It's perfect. It's also fake. It's a paraphrase of a 1907 book by a young Cambridge scholar named Kenneth John Freeman, who was summarizing what the ancient Greeks complained about. Somebody later hung it on Socrates. Which, if you think about it, proves the point even harder. In 1907, a young scholar summed up the complaints old Greeks made about young Greeks, and a century later old people are passing it around to complain about young people. The quote itself is going around the wheel.
George Orwell noticed it too. In a 1945 book review he observed that every generation imagines itself smarter than the one before it and wiser than the one after it. He only brought it up to knock it down, but he wasn't wrong about the imagining.
Irony and the Young
Every young person is going to do it differently. That's the job. Youth has to rise above the generation that raised it, or at least believe it can, or nobody would ever leave home.
Michael Stipe has a line about it in R.E.M.'s "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" from 1994, about irony being the chains the young wear. When you're young, everything your parents care about is a little bit of a joke. Their music, their worries, their rules, the way they say things. You keep it all at arm's length with a smirk. And that smirk feels like freedom. It isn't. It's the thing that keeps you from seeing that you are walking, step for step, down the same road they walked.
Then one day you're the one at the concession stand at the volleyball game. You're the one who promised to chaperone Maggie and two of her friends to an Arctic Monkeys concert months away because that's what the birthday girl wanted. You're the one saying they grow up way too fast. And the smirk is on somebody else's face now, aimed at you. And honestly, it should be. It's their turn.
The Turnings
In 1997, two writers named William Strauss and Neil Howe published a book called The Fourth Turning. Their idea, which they had been building since an earlier book in 1991, is that American history, and Anglo-American history before it, moves in a cycle about the length of a long human life. They borrowed a Roman word for it, the saeculum. To the Romans and the Etruscans before them, a saeculum ran from some founding moment until the last person who had been alive for it had died. Under Augustus they settled on one hundred and ten years.
Strauss and Howe break their saeculum, roughly eighty to a hundred years, into four seasons of about twenty years each. They call them turnings. First comes a High, when institutions are strong and people pull together. Then an Awakening, when the young rebel against all that order and chase something more personal and spiritual. Then an Unraveling, when institutions weaken and everyone is out for themselves. And then a Crisis, the Fourth Turning, when everything comes apart and gets rebuilt into a new order. Then the High comes around again, and the whole thing starts over.
The generations move through it like a conveyor belt. Each one is born into a different season, gets shaped by it, and plays a different role when it grows up. They gave the four types names: Hero, Artist, Prophet, and Nomad. And the types repeat, in the same order, cycle after cycle. Which might be the most comforting and the most irritating thing anyone has ever told me.
By their reckoning, the last Fourth Turning was the Great Depression and World War II. In 2023 Neil Howe, writing on his own after Strauss died, published The Fourth Turning Is Here, and he puts the start of the current crisis at the Great Recession of 2008, with an end somewhere in the early 2030s.
Here's something I didn't know until I sat down to write this. The Fourth Turning came out in January of 1997. Alli was born that August. And 1997 is the year the Pew Research Center now uses as the very first birth year of Generation Z. My oldest daughter was born in the first year of a generation, in the same year two men published a book predicting the crisis that generation would grow up inside of. She never got to grow up inside of it. But her brothers and sisters did.
Not everybody buys the theory. Plenty of historians think it's too tidy, that you can make any pattern fit if you squint. Francis Fukuyama, reviewing Howe's new book in The New York Times, called it an updated version of Whig history. Fair enough. I'm an old cook, not a historian. But I don't need a theory to be perfectly right to feel it. I've watched my parents' generation look at mine with suspicion. I've watched mine look at my kids' generation the same way. And I've watched my kids roll their eyes at both of us. I've seen the wheel turn in my own living room.
The Same Mistakes
There's a line everybody hangs on Albert Einstein, about insanity being doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. A while back I wrote a post called Einstein Had It All Wrong, about how time slows down in San Diego. Turns out he never said this one at all. The earliest anyone has found it is 1981, around twelve step meetings, decades after he died. A 1981 draft of the Narcotics Anonymous Basic Text put it as repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.
Whoever said it first, they could have been describing the human race. That's what gets me. Not that the wheel turns. Of course it turns. It's that we know it turns. We have the Preacher and Aristotle and Orwell and a whole shelf of books telling us it turns, and we make the same mistakes anyway. Every generation. Almost to perfection. We think we know everything and are always quite sure about it. Then we get taken in, and make mistakes, and start thinking life on the whole is a bad business. Then we get glasses.
And maybe that's not insanity. Maybe that's just being human. You can't learn it from a book. You can only learn it by living it. My kids can read every word of this post, and they still won't know what I'm talking about until they're standing in a kitchen someday while their kid makes them a cheeseburger.
Alli
We all deal with mortality eventually. I dealt with it early.
Before Alli was born, a specialist told us her brain had not formed correctly. Holoprosencephaly. If she survived birth, they gave her six months. She was born with tiny hands and soft blonde hair, and she was beautiful. Her mother and I took her home determined to defy the odds, and we did. I took CPR lessons. I taught myself nursing basics and learned how to insert and test feeding tubes. We bought a van with a lift and a custom wheelchair. We went to movies and played outside and took trips. She lived as rich a childhood as any child could.
On June 5, 2004, she stopped breathing in her sleep, and this time I couldn't get her back. We buried her in a white dress with her favorite stuffed polar bear tucked under her arm. I wrote the whole story back in 2019, in To Bury an Angel. I won't tell it all again here.
What I'll say is this. When you lose a child, you lose the whole version of them that was supposed to happen. I don't know what Alli would be like at twenty-nine. I'll never know. And every time one of the others crosses a line, a graduation, a first job, a first day of high school, I think about the line she never got to. Losing her is a big part of why I can't take any of their starting lines for granted.
A few years back I wrote that I was closer to the age Norm Macdonald was when he died than I was to twenty-five. That's always a difficult concept, especially in a world of loss. We will be here one day and gone another. It's what you do with that time that is the only thing that counts. I believed that when I wrote it. I believe it more now.
What Every Old Man Knows
So here's what I'm realizing, right on schedule, the way every father before me realized it.
The days are long and the years are short, and you don't believe it until it's true. The kids you're raising are going to roll their eyes at you, and they should, because you rolled yours. They're going to think they know everything, and be quite sure about it, and overdo everything. And then one day, they're going to stand where I'm standing and realize the exact same things, and think they're the first ones to ever realize them. The wheel turns. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. There is no new thing under the sun.
And somehow that doesn't make me sad. It makes me feel like I'm part of something. Every man who ever watched his daughter go off to college felt this. Every mother who ever watched her baby climb onto a school bus felt this. The Preacher felt it. Aristotle felt it. Now it's my turn.
A few years ago, on the day I posted that picture of the middle two, I wrote something I still believe. It hasn't always been easy, but it's always been blessed, whether I could see it at the moment or not. Peace, joy and happiness are in every moment in life. You just have to know how to see it.
Last fall, on my birthday, I offered everyone my Confucian nugget of wisdom for the day: you want to be humbled, have children. I'm learning to see it. Turns out that's what the glasses were for.
More from the family: To Bury an Angel: The Loss of a Daughter, A Girl Named Xù, Einstein Had It All Wrong and Zen and the Art of Instant Noodles
More from the family: To Bury an Angel: The Loss of a Daughter, A Girl Named Xù, Einstein Had It All Wrong and Zen and the Art of Instant Noodles
