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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Monday, May 16, 2005

ABOUT MEN

Truth does not always set you free
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By Mike Gordon
Advertiser Staff Writer

The Little Darlings caught me in a lie halfway through dinner. We were eating Dijon mustard chicken when the conversation turned to marijuana.

"They already know the truth," Mrs. G. said. "I told them."

Right then, in a moment without fanfare, we passed from childhood innocence to adult reality. Too soon, perhaps, but there we were.

It seemed to me an astonishing juncture.

And I felt a reckoning in order. A confession. A lesson.

Ever since my daughters were born, I had planned to skirt the truth, to tell them everything they needed to know about drugs and leave out the part where I inhaled. The times where I drank myself blind. The near misses with oblivion.

But you can't reinvent your past, no matter how much you have changed. Each of us has an episode or two filled with bad behavior.

I was lucky. I did a lot of stupid things and survived, the how and why never clear to me. No one dwells on it. As you grow older, the things you did become easier to forget than to explain.

The worst of it was in college, when I led the charge to every party. I suspect that my daughters, young as they are, could understand the attraction of a good time.

But in youth, nothing has a consequence until the next morning, when you wake up on the floor smelling like beer and tequila.

And they should know, too, that I paid for that by puking my guts out for an hour at a time.

There are friends I see almost every day who, back in the day, trusted me to drive them around town when I was like this. Once, I lost them, waking up in someone else's dorm room without a clue as to where my friends were.

Sounds funny now. It wasn't.

For every near miss with tragedy or addiction you can find a wreck on the highway and a life wasted.

That we are all here is proof of guardian angels.

These were not the stories I had planned to tell my children. Not that I had a clear picture of what I would say. Truth was, I never planned to say anything.

Now I was an example.

That night at dinner, the Little Darlings wanted details, so they got some, plus a warning: I told them the world had grown less forgiving since I was their age.

They said they understood — but hasn't every parent heard that and still feared the worst?

They probably never realized the dread my confession created within me.

I had been lucky. Couldn't they see that?

The topic has not come up again, leaving me unsettled. My daughters had pressed me for a truth I was unprepared to share. Still, they had put their trust in me in the same way they had put their hands in mine when they were too young to cross the street alone.

Now I have to trust them.

Reach Mike Gordon at mgordon@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8012.