Tongue-in-cheek text from younger son: “Ugh: I have to read some ‘Being Norbertine’ article by one ‘Allen, S.’ for my first graduate course.” Which is how we in the office discovered that the cover story of our Summer 2014 issue is now required reading on a college syllabus. A syllabus for our own brand-new MBA program here at St. Norbert, in fact.
Well, that’s one more piece of mine that will have been read by one of my own children, for a grand total of … two.
The first was a piece that I more or less bribed my first-born to sit down and read. I’d made the tiny public library of my childhood home the subject of my editor’s letter in our Fall 2009 issue. The children always loved visiting and exploring the village where I’d grown up, and I’d shown them where the library used to be and told them about the fearsome librarian who presided there. So I thought my daughter would enjoy seeing some of this material in print.
She settled down grudgingly on the sofa and I put the mag in her hands, open at the page in question. She read. She leaned forward. Her face brightened. (An engaged reader!) She looked up at me, a question forming on her lips: “This is beautiful. What font is this?”
By the way, I have always wondered what the families of those slice-of-life columnists think about the whole deal. And how they get away with it. It only now occurs to me that I could have been writing away like Erma Bombeck all these years, making a mint out of columns full of the comical misdeeds of spouse and kids. They’d never know – they’d never read them, because they would just be some thing Mum wrote.
I am a prophet without honor in my own family.
