Roots And Wings

My son is interested in getting into the movie business. His cousin has a friend who has written a short film and wants to cast him as the funny-but-wise buddy of the guy who is falling in love. Not the lead, but an important role. My son chatted up his potential director about the screenplays he had been working on. "Man," said the twenty-three year old director to my fourteen year old son, "If you keep that up, by the time you're my age, you'll be a beast."
These were very heady words for my son, who has been lurking around the edges of show business for most of his life. His parents write: short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, this blog. For many years his mother and I have worried that our son would grow into the engineer he had always imagined himself to be without ever stopping to smell the roses of the liberal arts. When he drew, he drew pictures of cars and machinery. Getting him to write was an assignment, and even then it took a good deal of coercion to move him off of his minimalist stance. Until now. Where we once had to admonish him from staying up late, poring over books full of schematics and specifications of various makes and models of automobiles, we were now having to go in and take away his laptop. "Aww, just five more minutes," he pleads.
He is writing. And now we find ourselves in an amusing parental conundrum: Where he was once on a straight and narrow path to a lucrative career as a designer of electric vehicles or Lego models, he is now teetering on the edge of a life in the arts. What does the responsible parent do? In our case, we back up and give him room. Like the time that he thought he might tie balloons to his arms so that he could fly. We were there to cut the strings off before they cut off the circulation completely, but not before he had given himself a chance to take to the air. And later we can write about it.