Two of my favorite people just became fathers for the first time. Alan is a genial Australian with whom I went to college in Melbourne in the late ‘eighties. A laconic, soft-spoken country boy with a wickedly dry sense of humor, a weakness for fast motorcycles, and a frightening talent for scaling tall structures when drunk, Alan also has a hacker’s genius for making computer systems do his bidding that he has parlayed into a successful financial career and twenty years’ worth of well-heeled bachelordom in places like London, Hong Kong, Zurich, and, most recently, the Bahamas. From the points of view of his more fecund friends, slogging through our late thirties behind the wheel of a minivan with a bunch of kids in the back, Alan appeared to be enjoying the journey very much and showed no sign of settling down. So we were all startled to receive a photo of him sent from the Nassau hospital, cradling a tiny, sleeping, wrinkled version of himself in his arms accompanied simply by the words, “It’s been a big day.”
Simon (“the Pie-man”) has been my best friend since we were seven years old and is the funniest person I have ever known. He introduced me to my wife when I was best man at his wedding in Ireland in 1993. As far back as I can remember, Pie-man always wanted to be a dad. And in the early years of their marriage, he and his Irish wife, Lisa, talked of little other than the kids they would have together—something that couldn’t have been farther from my mind back when we were all twenty-three. But things didn’t work out; Simon and Lisa divorced, and the guy to whom little kids always flocked, the one they climbed all over in the pool at parties, the one voted “Most Likely to Make a Great Dad,” spent his thirties and most of his forties single and somewhat adrift, working a succession of airline jobs through New Zealand and Southeast Asia and watching the best of his baby-fathering years pass him by. Then eighteen months ago, while working in Vietnam, he met and fell in love with a local woman, Nguyen. When they were married last month, Simon was suddenly a dad at last to Nguyen’s seven-year-old son, Bo. In Australia, Father’s Day falls on the first Sunday in September. That day, Bo told Simon that when he came to live with him, Bo was scared because his English wasn’t very good but that the books and toys that Simon had waiting for him made feel happy. In a Facebook post Simon wrote, “He followed by telling me, ‘I love you so much and forever.’ It’s my first Father’s Day, and I couldn’t be more happy or proud of my son and how he has coped with the many changes in his life. I will try and make sure that I show you, Bo, and soon your brother, everyday what a privilege it is to be your father.” The man who kids always adored does not appear to have lost his touch.
As I write this, my wife has been out of town for a week, by all accounts having a deliriously good time catching up with old friends at somebody’s wedding. For me, the resulting vacuum has meant a wall-to-wall week of homework, soccer practice, school lunches, violin lessons, and sudden stomach bugs on top of the usual work-related deadlines.
At times like this, I’m apt to eavesdrop on the glamorous-looking lives of my single, middle-aged, middle-class, unreproduced friends as played out on Facebook and feel the occasional twinge of envy. Because when the pressure’s on, it’s good to have a couple of friends who have spent the best part of two decades traveling the world, following their whims, and seeing and doing things that most of us would give a right arm to do.
But Alan and Simon’s about-face serves as a good reminder that there comes a point at which unlimited “me” time gets to be too much of a good thing and that further adventuring loses its appeal unless you have somebody to share it with. Ashley and I were lucky enough to do more than our fair share of traveling in an earlier part of our lives. But I have to say that now that we have our own family, the adventures we take together are exponentially more rewarding for the opportunity they provide to see the world through our children’s eyes. So despite the fact that I’m going to have to find another source for my fix of vicariously-lived adventure now that Alan and Simon, the Pie-man, have taken themselves out of the race, I look forward to watching my two old friends embark on this new journey, no matter how late they set sail.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
