IMAGINARY FRIENDS - Page 25

7

It wasn’t that Jeff didn’t love his parents. He did. He just would have preferred they live much farther away. And didn’t call so much…and maybe only wrote once in awhile.

His mother was old-school patrician. She served on every community board in the city – at least, every community board where the majority of the members belonged to the Minton Park Country Club. She was the head of several small charities, all of which specialized in fundraisers at tea parties and champagne brunches at the Minton Park Country Club. She presided over a scholarship fund, which every year gave a nice sum of money to an exceptional, college-bound high school senior whose father and mother usually happened to be millionaire members of the Minton Park Country Club.

Jeff’s father was more of a regular guy than his mother, though that was like saying gold is more of a “regular metal” than platinum. She had grown up in the fashionable Birchmont section of town, whereas he had been born on the wrong side of Mainland Avenue (where the denizens were merely upper middle class, rather than rich). But he had used his disadvantaged youth as a launching platform, and pulled himself up by his polished leather bootstraps to become a lawyer, and a very successful one. He made partner in the firm of Bailey, Banks, and Biddle when he was only 29, at which point he had met and married his wife, and then spent the rest of his career mostly absent from the Tanner household. Now that he was retired, he spent five days a week playing golf at the Minton Park Country Club, and the other two watching football and talking about golf.

They had had big plans for Jeff as he grew up. Harvard Law…Johns Hopkins Medical School…studying architecture at wherever one studies architecture (architects were permissible, of course, but not quite on the order of doctors or lawyers). Jeff could do whatever he wanted to do, so long as the tuition to learn to do it would top out over $300,000.

Of course, Jeff’s plans to become a business major had met with some consternation. But that quieted down after awhile. After all, it mattered more what type of business it was he went into. There were plenty of stockbrokers and real estate magnates and technology overlords who were members in good standing at the Minton Park Country Club. And if he met a nice girl at the club, and found a father-in-law who was willing to take him under his wing…

So Jeff’s announcement that he was marrying a Fine Arts major from Tampa, Florida was met with tacit disapproval.

And his decision to become a toy executive encountered flat-out disdain.

“We didn’t put you through five and half years at Stanford” (Jeff had not exactly been the best of students) “so you could sell tinker toys!” Jeff’s mother had sniffed.

“I’ll be designing and marketing,” Jeff had explained, “and I’ll probably be working with products that weren’t considered a classic toy in 1975.”

“Tinker toys were great!” Jeff’s father raged. “If they were good enough for you, by gum, they’re good enough for the little hooligans of today!”

Once Jeff had proved he could pay a mortgage on a house (“Modest…but quaint,” Jeff’s mother had evaluated it) and start a semi-respectable life as an adult, there was a bit of grudging respect paid to him. And when he and Susan had Brian, well, most of the old disappointments were forgotten. After Jeff’s mother got over the shock that she was now a grandmother, the elder Tanners saw their grandchildren fairly often – at least for people who spent so much time at champagne brunches and golf.

Which was fine with Jeff. If Brian and Davey never set foot in the Minton Park Country Club, he would be a happy man.

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Copyright © 2008 Darren Pillsbury. All rights reserved.