My dad died of pancreatic cancer in March of 1984 at the age of 69. His great calling and passion was teaching, and he taught his university classes right up to the very end, dying on spring break after the finals were graded and the grades were turned in and posted. Part of my motivation for writing “Lefty Parent” is to reclaim and honor the best of my memory of my dad. He gave me so much love and support and I find in so many (sometimes too many) ways I am like him.

After he and my mom remarried each other and moved from Ann Arbor down to Dayton Ohio in 1977, and then I moved to Los Angeles in 1978, I became increasingly distant from my dad. I think he had been at his best with me when I was a young kid, relating to me through sports, his sense of adventure, and the realm of imagination. But as I moved into adolescence and young adulthood, with issues of self-esteem and emotional development taking the fore, I think he felt increasingly inadequate as a parent to play a mentoring role in those areas and in my life. When I would call home from Los Angeles I would invariably speak to my mom for a long time about her issues and mine and then just a few final moments saying hello to my dad, him saying he would hear all my news from my mom after the call. (more…)

Life, at its best, is an adventure – not always successful, not always happy, but a compelling narrative worth living and sharing with others. Though he never said it in so many words, that was one of the most compelling lessons I learned from my dad, exemplified in how he lived his life, and how he inspired others to do the same. I try to frame my own life as an adventure (or maybe better, a series of them), exemplify that in how I live day to day, and inspire my kids to do the same.

Maybe the greatest adventure my dad ever inspired was in the late 1940s when he convinced my mom (at the time just a friend, they were not engaged or even a couple) to accompany him to Ann Arbor (some 600 miles west of where they both lived in Binghamton, New York), promising her that after a year of establishing residency, he could get her into the University of Michigan. They lived separately for several years and continued their relationship as friends while he got his bachelor’s degree in English and my mom hers in Sociology. Eventually they did become a couple, married and my brother and I were born. It was certainly a very unorthodox adventure, particularly for a single young woman during that period. (more…)

As I get older, I am more and more amazed about the story of how my mother, Jane Roberts, decided to go to Ann Arbor. An unlikely odyssey in 1946 for a single young woman of 23, but one that started a chain of events that led to my birth. Thirty-two years later in 1978, I would embark on my own odyssey to Los Angeles, coincidentally at age 23 as well.

Based on her telling, Jane had had a childhood mixing idyllic joys and adventures with some difficult family relationships, particularly with her mother Caroline. Jane was the first of three children, her brother John just two years younger and her sister Pat born to an entirely different generation 14 years later. (more…)