Defining moments

This editorial from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. caught my attention today.

For those who don't have subscription access, I'll summarize. The author, a history professor, asked his students to identify the most important event in their fathers' life. Some listed Big Historical Events like the Vietnam War, the civil-rights movement, etc., that are discussed in typical American history textbooks. Others listed arrival in the U.S. as an immigrant, or some significant event overseas that influenced their fathers' decision to emigrate. But the majority identified, instead, some purely personal event:

In some ways the even greater challenge to the conventions of the field came from the majority (55 percent) of students who listed private matters as most decisive. A few of the answers were self-referential, whether flippant ("having me"), conventionally sentimental ("meeting between him and my mom"), or the opposite ("father not a part of my life"). More responses singled out death -- of parent, sibling, friend -- as a historical influence on their father. (One student elaborated, "death of his mother -- my dad has nine siblings, so he had to help out because they live in Poland and he lives here.") Culinary schooling in Rhode Island, admission to the Chicago Fire Department, entering the Marines, quitting drinking, getting shot, imprisonment in Texas, retirement, divorce and single parenthood, college graduation at age 50, and health and money problems rounded out a long list of life-altering events.

Before even reaching this passage, I had come to the conclusion that this was true of most of my relatives. Although I don't pretend to be able to identify *the* most important event of my father's or grandfathers' lives, I can make pretty good guesses at the two or three most likely possibilities, even after leaving aside the obvious answers like being born healthy, meeting their future spouse, or the general childhood environment that helped form their personality.

For my father, for example, the decision to finish his college education at a state university with a strong engineering program, and his later decision to go to law school after he became dissatisfied with engineering as a profession, seem to have had the most far-reaching effects in determining the course of his life. It got him off the farm and out of the Ozarks and sent him on a peripatetic career, living as far east as Pennsylvania, as far south as Texas, and taking occasional trips to countries around the world.

For my grandfather B., it's a little harder to tell. Perhaps it was his fathers' death of pneumonia when he was twelve years old, leaving him as the primary male support for his mother and his younger siblings. Or perhaps it was a genuine text-book Historical Event, the Great Depression that hit shortly thereafter, making life on a hardscrabble hill farm even more difficult than it was before. Or perhaps it was his stint in the CCC camp where he quickly became a gang foreman due to his hard-work ethic, his stubbornness, his mechanical aptitude, and the burly build that made potential troublemakers reluctant to challenge him. Perhaps the vocational course in sheet-metal working that he took on the eve of World War II, or the job that he was offered working the aluminum-shaping drophammers in an East Coast bomber plant during the war. Again we see economic considerations directing a life: that job took him out of the Ozarks and away from the hardscrabble farm country. Even today he talks about the long, long drive from Baltimore back to Kansas City, where he spent the rest of his working life in an oil refinery before retiring back to the small town in the Ozarks that he had never quite forgotten.

For my female relatives, the choice of spouse seems to have been the most dominant influence on their subsequent lives -- or at least the most obvious one that is apparent to me. (I'm not necessarily privy to all their personal experiences!) Of course, this is largely due to the fact that, whether by their own inclination or due to the prevailing social customs of the time, they had no long-term careers of their own and, to a large degree, followed their husbands and their husbands' jobs around the country.

As for myself -- well, I'm not sure that's quite obvious, even to me. Every move from one place to another, from infancy to the present, could be looked at as a critical event, since it introduced me to new people and places. Every new acquaintance who has shaped my thinking and affected me in both good ways and bad, The loss of freinds who had, over the years, become like a distant but intimate part of myself. The books and movies, etc., that have shaped my thinking. Getting a masters' degree in library science. Every change of job, including the one that took me from Texas to Michigan.

Big news events like the September 11 attacks and the war in Iraq have affected my own life mainly in indirect ways and through the way that observing them has affected my view of the world. I have been fortunate in not having any freinds or relatives who were directly affected by these events. My closest brush with a major catastrophe was a recent interview for a job at a university which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina shortly afterward. I didn't get the job -- thank God for small favors, eh?

Finding out about This Thing Called Blog must also rank somewhere among the defining events of my recent life. Heck, even a long-ago, casual decision to post a comment on the blog of somebody who lived in an entirely different country could have momentous effects....