Parents

 

Myself and My Mother

My Father and I

In his savvy, savage, quick-like-a-bunny play Endgame, Samuel Beckett reserves as the worst slurs and pejoratives words connected to human reproduction qua reproduction. The characters Nagg and Nell are contemptuously accused of being "accursed progenitors." Though Beckett relied on his mother well into his adulthood as I have, I see things quite a bit differently than he, and I think that is largely contingent on the fact that I was set up with about as good a pair of parents a guy like me could ask for, sharing their genes, naturally. Did we quarrel? Just the right amount. My mother has stood with me through trials and tribulations nobody else could have handled to watch from even a comfortable distance, screaming-squealing torrents of dissipation and wreckage; it's partly her nursing background and partly just the stuff of which she's made. My father is one of the most charming, warm, and genuinely attentive people I have ever met. I interfaced with a whole lot of men and women when I was young who told me how much they liked working for my dad. These days, I seem to always feel much better after a little time with him.