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Paul Lavik
I can't believe it took Allan Grigsby's passing to draw me into this. My time in Shaker was a mixed bag, and with faculty like O'Rourke and Grigsby, it is a wonder that any of us went on to school. The upside for me was a friend, Linda Kramer who I walked to school with many a morning, and Marty Meshenberg (sorry, I still can't spell) who taught me how to be a student. But back to Grigsby, he was probably right, in that the best predictor of future human behavior turns out to be past behavior, and with mild dyslexia and a variety of soft neurological deficiencies (like having only half brain as my wife tells me) I did not have an academic record anyone wants to show off. But population-based projections do not apply to individual cases and we are each, an individual case. I was the product of family of late-blooming Norwegians. My father was a preacher's kid born in Camrose, Alberta who married my mother after attending a Norwegian-Lutheran college in Minnesota, St. Olaf College. (As a side note, Norwegians always viewed women as equal and most saw to it that their daughters were educated. My grandmother Lavik was a college graduate as was my mother, all of my aunts, uncles counsins and siblings.).Grigsby did not understand families or imigrant stories. My father started out teaching high school, got a PhD in biochemistry from the U. of Wisconsin when they were discovering vitamins, came to Cleveland after the war, grew up doing research in radiation biology , got his MD along the way, and retired as a radiation oncologist from the Cleveland Clinic. I remember walking home after Grigsby told me I had no future thinking what a fool he was for saying such a thing to the son of any parents with the number of graduate degrees my parents had earned, even if their son was a loser.
Some families take a slower path. I was saved, in a way, by the war in Nam because it gave me time to grow up. I got a Ph.D. in psychology, so I could figure myself out (I think most psychologists are probably head cases, at least a bit!). I realized that what mommy had always taught was true, money does not buy happiness, to your own self be true, and that family matters. I was never a shooting star, but I wanted to do the best I could by my kids. They are all happily married. Oh, and they all have Ph.D.s in bio-medical research, the boys both have MD's as well, and our daughter brought a computer geek into the family. Every family needs a computer geek. So what is success in life? You tell me. I'm too busy playing with my grandkids (The other gift of having been a psychologist who worked with lots of kids, it seeing, with wonder, how they unfold and grow. They are so amazing. They learn, to speak, to by nice, to hate and to cheat, just by watching us. Not only are they interesting, little kids are easy for grandpas to impress!)
The bottom line is that guy like Grigsby piss us off enough so that we learn to persevers, fight back, and prove that we are not f _ _ _ups. Thanks Allan. Sorry to the rest of you for that rant. Old wounds never heal!
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Illustration by Luci Gutiérrez
