A photo and a dedication

In youth, I had crappy parents.

In college, I had great parents, although I'm pretty sure they didn't know it at the time. And they weren't technically mine.

I was a rather depressed and brainy teen who was not taught anything about how to make my way in the world. This was not surprising, because I had parents who didn't know what they were doing. I think the brains saved me, though: When I got to college, I decided that what was required was a total makeover. What had those people done wrong, and what could I do better?

My sophomore year at Penn, I took an intellectual history course with Alan Kors, and after that started working on other projects with him. It was the early days of resistance to the invasion of the universities by politically correct thought reformers, and Alan was on the good side of that. His work ultimately resulted in the forming of FIRE (Freedom and Individual Rights in Education).

As much value as Alan was to me intellectually, it was nothing compared to what talking with him and watching him with his family did for me personally. Here was a guy who GOT IT; the first person I'd met whose ethics of respect for individual liberty were consistent through and through: politically, in professional dealings, and with his family and students. His kids (preteens at the time) were happy, healthy, intelligent young people. I watched how he talked with them. I learned all about his reasonable setting of rules and boundaries that let them flourish. I saw how an atheist taught his kids to be good people, the best. He was the first person to show me Chris Brockman's book What About Gods. I learned. I didn't forget. Once when I was there, Alan had his daughter Samantha tell me their family motto ("Don't take shit"), which profoundly changed the way I looked at the world. Three small words told me how to become a much happier person. I wanted my future kids to turn out just like the Kors kids.

We Rosses visited the Kors family at their home in PA last week; it was the first time Alan had met David, Madison, and Ella (although when the kids were babies we'd had lunch with Erika in Philly). Best of all, their daughter Samantha, now grown and with two baby girls of her own, was there with her family.

Madison and Ella LOVED Alan and Erika. The girls talked, they listened, they joked, and Alan clowned around with them. And, most significantly, Samantha noticed. My girls are the same distance apart in age as her babies, and she told both me and Erika that she wanted HER girls to turn out just like MY girls. "How do I do that?" she asked me. How gratifying that was. It was simple justice to be able to tell her about how I'm largely following in the pattern of her own parents.

The whole experience did make me realize, for a few minutes, what the girls are missing by not having grandparents. But I didn't dwell on what can't be helped. The girls are a lot better off for not having to deal with MY parents as grandparents, and as for David's parents, who would have been terrific, they unfortunately passed away long ago.

David took this photo of me, Alan, Erika, Ella, and Madison:



I hope I look like Erika when I'M in my late 50s.

I do love that man profoundly. It would have been too sappy and undignified really to show him the depths of my gratitude, but I'm pretty sure he got the general picture.