In the mid-80s my father was about the same age that I am now. He was the same father that I'd known all my life. As usual he would comment on the events of the day with the perspective of a person for whom everything was either black or white. The AIDS epidemic was in full bloom --- bad. The then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had declared a moratorium on the deployment of middle-range missiles in Europe --- good. Underlying everything was the unshakable belief that there would be a stock market crash and another great depression. It was just a matter of time.
Several months earlier, I'd gotten my father a computer terminal with a modem that allowed him to connect to a BBS (bulletin board service). He was a dedicated reader of several newspapers and a voracious consumer of news. My belief was that we could use this service to keep in daily touch since we lived in different communities, a long distance call apart.
I've always been an optimist. At the beginning I could only see the upside of this arrangement. I knew it would take a bit of time to get him up and running and comfortably using this system and I was prepared for the trips to see him for both training and encouragement. Eventually, I came to realize that my optimism was unfounded and we abandoned the project.
On one of my last visits before abandoning my plan, we had what seemed like just another anodyne conversation. He was kvetching as usual about the usual things... the state of the world, how he didn't think this was going to work and how he was tired. As I tried to assure him that things would get easier, he turned to me and in his often patronizing way said, "Things are going faster than when I was your age. When I was your age things were growing after the [second world] war. There were terrible things happening then, there was McCarthy and the cold war, but at least you knew what was happening. Now you can't even keep track of what's going on." Unlike when he was younger, his voice trailed off. He was truly tired.
But I was determined to see my plan through to completion. In that, I was a lot like my father, convinced that I would succeed in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It took me a few more visits before I --- finally --- threw in the towel.
