They Chose Computer Farmer

My wife rejected my suggestion for our son’s graduation party almost immediately, which only increased my affection for it. I proposed a voting station where guests could help determine his future. Instead of repeating his sensible plan for community college, work, and living at home, we could invite people to vote for options including a beard model, computer farmer, regional Sasquatch consultant, and a podcast guest with suspiciously strong opinions about beef jerky. I considered a write-in option. I was the only one who found the joke funny.

One evening, between the actual graduation ceremony and the party weeks later, my son stood in the kitchen clearing dishes, mentally preparing to attack a broken lawn mower with his father in the garage. While most parents we know humblebrag about academic performance, my wife and I express deep affection for a son who, with no prompting, is not only frugal but also mows the lawn simply because the grass grew shaggy. I continued proposing imaginary professions, which he tolerated with the long-suffering restraint children eventually develop toward fathers who amuse themselves too much.

Then our conversation shifted from the future to the past, and we reflected on his middle and high school years. Like many parents, I received official reports, but my son rarely gave me access to the deep struggles he faced. We had grade reports, we had meetings, COVID intruded, IEPs came, and my son continued on toward graduation. But now he spoke of his experiences with more clarity, describing what it felt like to sit down to write an essay while watching software attempt to finish the sentence before his own thoughts formed.

Then he said, “We need to go back to analog, Dad.”

I laughed and suggested going straight to rotary phones. He smiled briefly, then returned to his point.

Anne Lamott, who I have come to regard as the patron saint of messy writers and emotional honesty, reminds her readers in Bird by Bird of Flannery O’Connor’s belief: if you survive childhood, you possess enough material to write for the rest of your life. Listening to our son talk in our kitchen, I recognized the peculiar anguish of adolescence, even if my journey through those years erected different landmarks.

Despite its analog context, my adolescence was no paradise. My cohort consumed plenty of cultural garbage and inflicted humiliations face-to-face. I moved to Sterling, IL before my freshman year of high school to live with my father, carrying exactly two useful athletic qualities: I ran fast and caught a football reasonably well. Football offered the toughness and discipline my father valued, so, reluctantly, I played.

I remember one game against Geneseo with absurd clarity. We lost by a single miserable point, and afterward I watched my friend Dan lean over a sink, vomit from frustration, and cry between heaves. Somehow, we simply suffered in each other’s presence that night, and understood, imperfectly, that suffering counted for something. Football, at least, had rules. I soon learned emotional life never offered such structure. About the time of that game, I wrote a painfully sincere poem for a girl, only to have it make the rounds before reaching her. She responded with kindness and accepted my invitation to homecoming.

Then she changed her mind.

She chose a boy with a car and more popularity. My body responded accordingly; nausea arrived first, followed by dizziness, then that peculiar hollow sensation that convinces a young person some internal organ has quit. I presented my symptoms to the school nurse with the solemn seriousness of an emotional statesman.

Through teary eyes I cried, “I feel like crawling in a hole and dying.”

She paused and asked, “Do you have a plan?”

I stared at her. “A plan for what?” I asked, “Who I am going to ask to homecoming now?”

She asked whether I intended to hurt myself. I remember answering with complete sincerity, “What could possibly hurt more than this?”

That exchange would probably generate paperwork today, but at the time it mostly revealed how little vocabulary I had for heartbreak. Looking back, I feel tenderness toward that boy. He could survive football practice, family upheaval, and public embarrassment, but he lacked the words to describe anguish without sounding clinically alarming.

A few days later, my friend Dan—armed with the unshakable confidence and dubious logic unique to some teenage boys—suggested I ask a Mennonite girl to homecoming. Mennonite girls, in our experience, made excellent dates. They fished, gardened, climbed ladders like ballerinas, and possessed a quiet competence. I took his advice.

One evening I found myself at a dining room table with this kind, unassuming girl and two of her friends, our fingers still stained from pitting a late crop of cherries. We played Monopoly while her mother drifted in and out of the kitchen with honey cookies from Amish relatives. I was busy acquiring railroads and extracting rent from my would-be future bride when her mother glanced at the table and remarked she felt uneasy about a young rooster in a hen house. I should have nodded respectfully. Instead, I interpreted this as an invitation to contribute.

“I am definitely playing Monopoly like a rooster in a hen house,” I replied.

Her mother blushed instantly, then recovered and said, “I think it is time for you to leave, Colin.”

I looked down at the board, sipping a glass of iced tea and said, “But I’m winning.”

“Go home, Colin.”

Confused, I left with better manners. The relationship lurched forward. I eventually ended the brief romance because I lacked the emotional maturity. I am not sure if then, or now, I would call any of this analog or just the ordinary, untidy work of becoming human.

My son’s point about going analog led him to describe his brief tenure with the robotics team. He joined with a mind full of ideas and excitement but got slotted into a rigid role with no room for making a real contribution. Listening to him in the kitchen, I recalled the five-year-old who used to stay up late in our living room, building intricate leprechaun traps out of cardboard, tape, and string—a child who engineered complex systems out of pure, unmanaged wonder.

But the boredom of bureaucratic management was nothing compared to the cruelty he met in the hallways. In the wake of the pandemic, my son navigated a school population that had weaponized its own collective panic, and he endured a whispered brand that followed him from class to class: a rumor that he looked like “the next school shooter.”

When a girl finally confronted him face-to-face in the hallway with the rumor, he didn’t shrink or offer a tearful defense. He fired back with a blistering, locker-room-grade insult about her mileage that left her momentarily speechless. When she stood there, confused by the sudden outburst, he looked her in the eye and said with cold, mathematical precision: “If you can’t calculate the distance, no wonder you’re failing geometry.”

Hearing that story, I remembered a playground fight from a decade before. Behind the hurt teen I saw the little boy who unapologetically took an ass-whooping on the winter grass to shield his friend with Down syndrome. The school authorities labeled him the aggressor then, just as the hallway whispers tried to brand him a threat in high school. But I remembered him as a protector who refused to let his friend go without his lip balm.

My son’s attempt to find something real was met with a sharper violation during his junior year. He painstakingly crafted a backpack with his own hands—a quiet, analog triumph of independent utility. Then someone stole it right out of his locker. It was a cynical theft of his actual labor.

By last Christmas, the hallway whispers and the looming ghost of graduation came to a head. Sitting at the kitchen table, my son confessed that he was terrified of what came next. He was looking into a future he described as completely tracked, sterile, and hostile. It was a heavy, existential dread, and for the first time, his quietness felt genuinely concerning.

Without offering him a clinical processing circle or a list of optimized next steps, it seemed enough to suggest we get out of the kitchen and walk through the biting December air of downtown Rockton. The streets were decorated for the Christmas Walk, and while I lingered outside the library, drifting into nostalgia with a neighbor. My son wandered into every independent business on the street. He introduced himself, shook hands, and told each owner he planned to stay in town after high school. I hadn’t suggested this plan. He simply started making himself known.

In a culture that measures a young person’s success by the velocity with which they escape their hometown, I found myself questioning the mainstream parenting script. By physically putting his body in those rooms, my son was learning membership, of his own choosing. He was refusing optimized independence and choosing instead to become an accountable, visible part of his own town.

Later that spring evening, with his graduation behind us, we stood over the wounded lawn mower in the garage, projecting far greater mechanical competence than the evidence supported. We removed panels and offered theories with the confidence of men narrating a failed moon landing. The graduation jokes returned. I asked whether the public might still support his candidacy for a cereal influencer or the town drunk. He rolled his eyes with the familiar, weary mercy of a son who knows his father isn’t done playing the bit.

Watching my son, I felt no temptation to compare generations and award my own some invented hardship trophy. Generational comparisons are always limited. I lost football games under bad lights and stumbled through heartbreak with a terminology assembled from whatever emotional scraps boys trade in privacy. My son lost years of ordinary adolescence to a pandemic, absorbed the downstream cruelties of a digital world, and still described his inner life with a clarity I lacked at his age. Where I locked away my inner life, mistaking silence for maturity and carrying cynicism like armor, he chose to speak.

Anne Lamott understood something true about adolescence, though I suspect she understated the matter. Surviving those years does not merely furnish stories for later use; it teaches a person which pains pass, which linger, and which quietly compost into the rich, fruitful soil. Lamott writes, “what people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.” Perhaps that is what adolescent hardships should prepare us for—we don’t need to enter adulthood ready to change the world, but we should be mature enough to begin the lifelong work of repair.

Right as I was workshopping my next absurd hypothetical, my son’s phone buzzed. He wiped a streak of black engine grease onto his jeans and answered. I heard his voice settle into that plain-spoken clarity he had fought so hard to find. He spoke briefly, hung up, and looked across the lawn mower hood in the fading garage light. He had just accepted a job behind a stove downtown. While I was amusing myself inventing imaginary careers for him, my son had quietly anchored himself to our community. He was going to stand over a flame and feed his neighbors—a modest, ancient sort of anchoring, at least for now.

The mower eventually coughed back to life, its engine smoothing out until the noise filled the small garage. There was a quiet relief in our small success. We gathered our tools and walked back into the house. In a few weeks, our friends would laugh over paper ballots and pretend to vote on his future. But somewhere among the hallway whispers, the stolen backpack, a sputtering small engine, and a cold December afternoon spent shaking hands with business owners downtown, our son had already decided who he intended to be. Parents spend years on the impossible task of trying to prepare their children for a hostile, unpredictable world. That evening, I was grateful that my son had become the kind of person who sees a broken world and instinctively reaches for a tool to mend it.

Image Credit: Caspar David Friedrich, “Moonrise by the Sea” (1822)