Waiting for the electrician...or someone like him

A sixties cultural reference, lost on people who weren't there (except the cognoscenti) and many who were and don't remember it, to a Firesign Theater album of the same name. Think Monty Python's Flying Circus, but for radio instead of TV and American instead of English: four very clever guys whose insane sense of humor coincided briefly with the zeitgeist.

But what I really have in mind is another bright young man, breathing in a different zeitgeist entirely, neither a Firesign nor a Python but with elements of both, who has at long last decided in his own time and manner to go "back" to school, though it's not in any way going back.

My son C.A.A. Jessi S. Golly (perhaps we gave both him and his sister excessive middle name baggage, the least of our commissions and omissions) some time ago dropped out of Ubermensch College halfway through his sophomore year to do other things than go to class, write papers, and study for exams. Imagine, a mere 20-year-old getting the outlandish notion that there are other things to do than go to class, write papers, and study for exams.

So he volunteered at the infoshop, planted a garden, built a bike, cooked and served at the cafe, wrote to prisoners, helped edit EarthFirst! Journal, squatted, built community gardens, tutored kids, fought city hall, rode in Critical Mass, counseled summer campers, got paid for playing Don't Kill the Messenger on the streets of Manhattan, wrote articles, sold graphic novels, harvested cranberries, and six years later - a nice round mythic number - enrolled in the construction skills program at Apex Academy, a trade school in New York.

Gven and I were delighted, in a maternal/paternal, vicariously psyched, tubular kind of way, when Jessi started talking about becoming an electrician. Both of his grandfathers, a few of his uncles, and some of his cousins have that engineering gene common in homo faber. Initially surprised at the choice of a technical school, but then again not, and equally excited by the decisive change of direction. I would have pictured him getting into teaching, horticulture, bookbinding, semiotics, or animation, but wiring is cool. He is interested in literature and the arts, but what he wants to do for a living is make things and fix things.

The 900-hour program at Apex breaks down to a series of courses in three trades - carpentry, plumbing, and electrical - and we shall see where that leads. What opportunities will there be for work, apprenticeship, or further training? Will technical school itself be as interesting and rewarding as the gainful employment it presumably leads to? Will he find a niche in the sociocultural milieu of blue-collar Big Apple in a way that he did not at Ubermensch? Will the recessionary economy help or hurt his ability to make a livelihood in the building trades?

These are just the kind of questions a theoretically inclined parental unit asks. Who wouldn't benefit from knowing a little carpentry, plumbing, and electrical knowledge? I would if I had the right kind of mind, but some things skip a generation. Much remains to be determined, and the adventure continues.