“Why weren’t you more ambitious as an engineer?”
“After The Accident it didn’t seem worth it. Before The Accident, the only time I wasn’t working ten hours a day six days a week was when I was working twelve hours a day seven days a week.”
This was one of three or four actual conversations I ever had with my father. He was a Silicon Valley engineer before there was a Silicon Valley. The ethos, then as now, was that The Work was Important and everything else came second.
In 1965 came the event that shattered his world, all of our worlds. My mother was driving near Chico with my sister (5) and me (4) and my grandfather. She fell asleep and crashed into a dry creek bed. My sister died. My mother and grandfather were badly hurt. I came out of it with one little scratch.
My father rushed over from his job at Philco (you can still see the building on 101 in Palo Alto). He took a couple of days to make the necessary arrangements, passed me off to my grandmother’s care, then went back to work. He had a deadline.
Really, though, he was a broken man. He spent the next thirty years going through the motions at work. Work, the one thing that gave his life meaning, was shown to be a mirage, but he didn’t have anything to replace it with. “I missed out on your sister’s life. I wasn’t going to do that again.” He still wasn’t much of a dad. He didn’t have practice. He didn’t have models. In the end, by withdrawing, he lost everything.
We need work. All up and down Maslow’s Hierarchy we need work. Food. Shelter. Belonging, purpose, esteem, growth. We also need family and relationships, and they need us. The only way balancing is going to be easy is if one or the other side isn’t worth much, and that would be a shame. Withdrawing from either side is pure lose. My dad taught me that much.
