Who wrote it?

I am of a generation that did not know their parents as just plain folks - as Tom and Agnes. Eddie and Wanda. Ted and Dorie - as democratically undifferentiable from their children as ballots in a box. I never once thought to call my parents by their first names, never thought of their lives - remote as they were - as being like mine, their fears the equal of my fears, their smallest desires mirrors of everyone else's. They were my parents - higher in terms absolute and unknowable. I didn't know how they financed their cars. When they made love or how they liked it. Who they had their insurance with. What their doctor told them privately (though they must've both heard bad news eventually). They simply loved me, and I them. The rest, they didn't feel the need to blab about. That there should always be something important I wouldn't know, but could wonder at, wander near, yet never be certain about was, as far as I'm concerned, their greatest gift and lesson. "You don't need to know that" was something I was told all the time. I have no idea what they had in mind by not telling me. Probably nothing. Possibly they thought I would come to truths (and facts) on my own; or maybe - and this is my real guess - they thought I'd never know and be happier for it, and that not knowing would itself be pretty significant and satisfying.

And how right they were! And how hopeful to think my own surviving children could enjoy some confident mysteries in life, and not fall prey to idiotic factualism or the indignity of endless explanation. I would protect them from it if I could. Divorce and dreary parenting have, of course, made that next to impossible, though day to day I give it my most honest effort.

To get a divorce in a town this size, I should say, is not the least bit pleasant-though it is easy, and in so many ways the town is made for it, appreciates it, and knows how to act by way of supplying "support groups" . . .

Roger Hillman won last month's Who Wrote It, identifying the excerpt from Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. The first entry identifying the above piece and its author, drawn after the close of business on Monday, June 16, will receive a $30 voucher from University House. ENTER HERE