Don’t Be A Tool

For Gen X-ers Who Learned to Win by Avoiding the Game

Yesterday was the last of a watercolor painting class I took with my mother. My mom is a late-in-life artist, a development I admire a great deal. Like any story of someone picking up something new in midlife or beyond, it pleases me to be reminded that we are always being and becoming, we are not reduced to the output of choices made long ago.

It was highly atypical of me to do something like this, to take a class for no special reason, especially during a workday when the kids were hopefully at school. This wasn’t a doctor’s appointment or a workout that could be chalked up to utility. This was inarguably a frivolous undertaking.

On the first day, we pulled up to the church across town and I exhaled, having survived my mom’s driving.

To be clear, I’m not throwing ageist shade at her for driving at 82. I’m appropriately terrified because behind the wheel you can see firsthand that her formative years were spent in New Jersey battling the roads around the Holland Tunnel and Newark Airpor…