I so loved this ‘moment’ with Bernadette, so loved the pole-climbing work that I extended my initial three-month contract twice over. I was making $180 a week. I had free room and board on top of that. I spent six bucks a day on smokes and a couple of drinks. I saved the rest. At the end of nine months I had $5400. Enough to put a down payment on a small house in North Hollywood. Which is what Papa insisted I do. Just as he insisted that I leave my high-altitude work and return to the real world and start my career – and stop acting like life could be fun. Why did I buy into this program? Perhaps because I’ve always felt the pull of authority over me. When I am having one of those four-in-the-morning moments of looking at myself in the mirror – and wondering how it all turned out this way – I plead guilty to the fact: at those crucial moments in young adult life when I could have broken free, I played the ‘keep Dad quiet’ card. Maybe because I’ve never been brilliant about standing up for what I want. And, in turn, that could be linked to another uncomfortable truth: I’ve never had the big grand passion that fuels a career, a love, a sense of life as an evolving adventure. I knew I was being talked into playing it safe. I allowed myself to be led down that path. Because I really didn’t know what else I should be doing with myself.

Could it be that, like so many of my fellow citizens, I kowtow because I can’t figure out a different storyline? I knew that I never satisfied my very critical father – but I still followed his directives about what I should do with my life. Just as all those years as an altar boy and being told to respect the ultimate authority of the priest – especially as God was always sitting in judgment on us all – did indoctrinate in me the belief that I really did have to do what I was told … even if today I understand that those telling me how to live my life didn’t have my best interests at heart and really had no idea about the world beyond their narrow, limited experience of it all. Only now – starting to crowd sixty and realizing that time just isn’t on my side – am I beginning to think: why this lack of imagination when it came to dodging risk, danger?