Never ask my kids this question, pls

On keeping your heart as you get older

In my youth I remember adults had this strange question they liked to ask kids. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Typically you heard this question at family gatherings or school functions or birthday parties. Anywhere were adults were forced to interact with kids that were not their own. Stereotypical answers you’d hear were like, ‘An astronaut!’ ‘A teacher!’ ‘A fireman!’ Sometimes you’d hear some weirdo kid go, ‘I want to be a giraffe,’ and no one would say anything, but everyone would be like, ‘Man, that kid’s a dumb ass,’ and I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to think or say but it is what we thought and said.

Anyway, the smart answer, the answer that would make the adults coo and give praise was when a kid would shrug and go, ‘I don’t know, I just want to be happy.’ Now, this may be a weird insight about me as a child, but even as an 8-year-old I remember thinking that was a pretty dumb response. What kind of dream was that? Where was the ambition? Was there not more to life than happiness? From reading stories (mainly fantasy novels), I already knew there were emotions like hope and awe and wonder and those were way better than happiness, which never went deep enough for my tastes.

What annoyed me most about this question and response was how it insinuated happiness was a feeling you could lose, like it didn’t already belong to you, like it was this dragon you had to hold onto as a child or it might slip from your grasp forever. I suppose when it comes to this matter, I have always been on the side of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who wrote, “Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”

But the older I get the more I understand what those parents were getting at back then. What they were expressing really had nothing to do with happiness at all. It had to do with pain.

André Aciman best captured this idea in his novel Call Me By Your Name, which is about the sexual awakening that the precocious adolescent Elio experiences when his father, a professor of archaeology, invites the handsome 24-year-old grad student Oliver to stay with them for the summer in their old-world, cliff-side mansion along the Italian Riviera. As you might expect, a forbidden romance ensues.

If you read this book (or watch the movie), and you’re of a certain age, I promise you two emotions will occur to you. One, a swell of envy will flood your veins that your family summer vacations were not in an old-world, cliff-side mansion along the Italian Riviera. Not only does this mansion have its own swimming pool, just around the bend, a short bike ride away, is a crystal-blue, virgin spring hidden among the rockroses and pinewoods. Oh, and a couple nights a week, everyone in town gets together under the stars and they sing and they dance and they party until morning comes. Did I mention this archaeology professor’s salary can also afford a housekeeper?

Honestly, the book’s as much as fantasy as it is a romance. I mean that as a compliment by the way.

The second emotion is a little more complicated, but a lot more beautiful. Due to Aciman’s delicate prose, you feel the slow burn \ of first love that, with enough tending and attention, can grow into a roaring bonfire so bright it burns your skin if you get too close (and you always get too close). And you feel how this kind of love can burn you up, turn you into nothing but ashes as it does Elio by story’s end.

But Elio’s father, who never intervenes in his son’s illicit affair though he recognizes what’s happening pretty early on, urges his son not to slip into his despair. “We rip out so much of ourselves,” he tells Elio, “to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!”

As you get older, your heart really can close to the world if you’re not careful. It becomes this conscious practice to keep it pried open. In moments of exhaustion, you wonder if it’s worth it. Because you know your heart will get broken again by the world and by those you love. But when I reflect on those parents urging kids just to be happy when they grow up, I’m more certain than ever that it’s worth it.