A Letter to My Baby Gold

I see you, wrapped in the knotty wooden pine of a banquette at Fitzgerald’s Babygold restaurant in Berwyn, clutching that cheeseburger dripping with bacon aioli, one of the better patties in Chicagoland. 

Fitzgerald’s is probably the only Irish-named-roots/Americana-music-slinging-southern-New-Orleans-inspired-barbeque joint in America. In its uniqueness and its mash-up of many contrasting things, Babygold is not unlike the 15-year-old you.   

You are no longer a child, but not yet an adult, three years away from college, or a job, fearful of being pushed out of the nest, or at worst maybe being asked to pay a little rent on your waffle-quilted Purple mattress. You are confused. You have concerns. 

Your mother and I are not going to kick you out. And we only want you to go to college if that’s your desire. Partly because for many, college is now a very expensive default and not a dream. 

You are obsessed with hip hop and sports. Admittedly you laid down some pretty good bars as an 11-year-old, but you’ve been unconsciously doing play by play of everything, including your baby brother eating breakfast, since you were four. You know more now about the history of sports than I will ever know. I don’t believe in destiny or predetermination, only manifestation and determination. But your sporting obsessions seem like an inevitability. 

But because nothing is certain, if you want the thing, especially a thing so many others believe they want too, you should start now. You don’t need, nor did you ask for permission, but sometimes providence requires volunteered license. 

When I was your age, I was good at boring things like science and math. I was a first generation American on my mother’s side. The first-generation child’s responsibility is success, a payoff for the immigrant parent’s sacrifice and struggle. Struggle is like the tree, blinding the parent to the forest and its magical uncut swaths of delight. The struggling parent only sees the well-worn path and thus encourages the proven ways, say becoming a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. 

I don’t blame my parents. They were always supportive and proud, neither too encouraging or discouraging of any one thing, but their own examples taught me to seek safety. I worry, so have mine.  

You see, I think I started too late to do the thing I wanted to do.  And even if that’s not the reason, that’s something I tell myself to soften the blow, if the thing never happens the way I’ve always imagined. You don’t want to spend your life mitigating disappointment when you can always be seeking enjoyment. 

I’m trying now of course. I/we are doing the thing. Sitting here alongside honey-colored furniture, cords of lumber, indoor planters and trellises spilling fake green licorice plants and silk ferns while the delicious lilt of applewood smoke fills the Babygold dining room is pure contentment. 

The pile of delicious French cakes, aka French toast pancakes topped with caramelized sugared half-moons of banana drizzled with brown sugar syrup does not suck. That they inspire me to write you these words is treasure. 

But, also I know far too often that you often see me in my office or on the couch scowling at a laptop working at my “real” job. Or sometimes you don’t see me enough because I’m on a plane to the next client site.  

I worry that you see my frustration and not my determination to write. I worry that as I see you housing your cheeseburger with fervor, you see me hunched over my delicious but cognac-spiked and praline-dusted whipped cream infused coffee at 11 AM on Saturday, the same way I see the blonde woman slamming her third glass of Sauvignon Blanc in the corner at the bar: one seeking balm for believing they’ve made so many wrong choices. 

My choices aren’t always wrong, but they do seem like a complicated mix of chasing mirages and oases (Obviously, I should stick to the rivers and lakes that I’m used to).  

The babyback ribs at Babygold are a lot like this too. They have a nice chew, are well seasoned and accompanied by perfectly piquant pink curls of pickled onion. But the bark, it’s lacquered sheen beckoning like the classic swoop of a headlight housing on a Burgundy Porsche 911, is a touch mushy like it’s been held over too long. 

Because I chose financial security over a life entirely devoted to art, that means we get to house a lot of delicious brunches (once again I sound like a Goop-drunk mommy blogger – sorry). These choices means I get the pleasure of a bowl of New Orleans-style BBQ shrimp swimming in the right combination of garlic, butter and Worcestershire, and silky grits. This dish has the best flavors of the French Quarter and not, as so many screw it up, the disappointment of krill doused in Sweet Baby Ray’s.  

We are here in Berwyn because my job subsidizes very good health care that paid for the dental appointment all four of us just had in Oak Park.  My real job means I don’t have to construct a bevy of inconsequential click-baity listicles. For better or worse, no one is telling me to stop parenting my kid through a food review or making 90s pop references. 

But of course, the split life, one lived as a writer and the other as a product data technical guru, is exhausting. Exhaustion fosters festering indifference, moodiness, and a touch of madness. Sometimes I can’t hear you, and I am not always the model of achievement I wish to be. 

That’s why, even though to you it sounds like my grandfather telling me he walked uphill both ways to school, every Sunday as we watch the NFL together, I point out sideline report Tracy Wolfson. I tell you how she and I were on student government together in college.  I want you to know that, a normal human, someone I once knew, is doing a version of what I know you’d love to do too.  

Actually, my grandfather’s stories were never so self-serving. Rather his accounts were often about the violence and oppression he saw during WWII living in Poland. It was witnessing a defenestration that made my grandparents visualize a better life. You and I are in front of our big screen television sitting in very ample recliners, because they had the courage to leave the only land they loved and knew. 

As your great-grandparents knew, to be what you really want often requires sacrifice, determination, and a healthy disregard for what many others see as impossible. You can’t start early enough. I can’t fathom how they did it but I admire folks like Zadie Smith who wrote White Teeth at 24 or Tavi Gevinson who published her Style Rookie blog (down the street in Oak Park) as an 11-year-old. I also love Anthony Bourdain finally making it in his forties or Frank McCourt teaching for decades before publishing his first novel at 65. It’s also never too late to start.   

No doubt the demands of geometry, the constant churn and earn of juvenile friendships, the rigors of standardized tests, and this essay written by your father, probably feels to you like mortgage payments and grocery bills feel to me. I get that. But, also there’s a real fortune in your youth. You have swaths of unadulterated time for iteration. No one is actually watching right now, so once you get past the monsters in your head that tell you otherwise, failure is a real option and also a luxury. Which is to say failure is fuel. Failure is education. Failure is the foundation of success.  

The modern world is working against you in this regard. Today we mistake hovering protection as nurturing. We infantilize each generation more because we primally believe that being a child means that you should never have to feel failure or fear. We believe preserving childhood means the avoidance of conflict, of effort, of accepting responsibility.   

It’s ok to preserve childhood forever if our focus is instead that being a kid is about dreaming, accepting no limits or predispositions, doing what’s fun and what YOU want, especially if it doesn’t come at the expense of others.  

Yes, you’re a kid. That’s why you should start that podcast you’ve been talking about. You should write an email to Eddie Olczyk or Jason Benetti asking them how they did the thing you want to do.  You should work for the grades and test score that get you in to the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse, the alma mater of Benetti, Bob Costas, Marv Albert, and Liam McHugh. 

What I wish for you is what John Adams hoped for his grandchildren: 

“I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” 

It’s your time. You have the right. I hope more than anything you achieve what it is YOU hope for. I know you have the stuff in you to do it, because the determination with which you denied me a second bite of your cheeseburger at Babygold is exactly the thing you will need to succeed.  

P.S. I would have done the same thing. The burger was that good. 

Babygold is located at 6615 Roosevelt Rd in Berwyn, lllinois