Jessi and Zelda Golly, booksellers

So I says to the wife, "Yo, the son found a room in a house with some friends in Brooklyn, across the street from his sweetheart, a 20-minute subway ride from his job at a bookstore in New York freakin' City, the publishing capital of the world. Pinch me, I must be dreamin'."

So she did. Ouch, I ain't dreamin'.

So the wife she says, "Yo, the daughter ain't doin' so shabby neither. She works at a pretty good bookstore with a nice benefits package, she just graduated from college, and once in a while she comes home for dinner. Now if I could just get her to clean her room." Then she pinches me again, harder.

Ouch. "I didn't say pinch me."

"Just makin' sure," she says.

It seems like a small thing, both kids being gainfully employed. It's not like they were made partner in a major law firm, got tenure at a university, found a cure for cancer. These aren't those kinds of career moves. Neither one has published a book (yet). I realize these are small steps. But my heart bursts with joy that they are doing things they care about, which also happen to be the kind of things their mother and I care about.

Jessi started working at Forbidden Planet a couple of months ago and seems to be doing well making the transition to a full-time job. He had been doing a number of part-time gigs in New York, Tucson, and Portland for the last few years, so it's a bit of an adjustment going in to work all day every day. From all accounts, he is holding up just fine. I'm really anxious to see his new digs and to browse the shelves of the store. Sounds like a good excuse for a trip to the city, eh, wife?

Zelda has taken a different path into the bookstore business, somewhat more straight and narrow but not without its twists and turns. Staying with the academic program - and becoming much better at it than she was in high school - was reason enough for Ma and Pa Golly to be happy. Her student jobs at the local branch library, then at the University library, and finally at the stadium, were the kinds of things we could relate to, and her summer internship at Large Publishing Co. was a timely capstone to the whole curriculum.

This bildungsroman is far from over. It just happens to be at a very satisfying point in both their trajectories toward wherever they are going. In both cases, as most of my friends are tired of hearing me say, the best part is the conversations I am able to have with my grown-up, literate, critical, thoughtful, independent-minded, creative, bookish, authority-questioning children. And I'm looking forward to reading the next chapter.