Bob Lucky
Coming of Age
On my 16th birthday, my father herds the family into the station wagon and drives an hour away to a popular pizza joint. Along the way, among the chaos of traffic and five kids squabbling in the backseats and smoke from my mother’s cigarettes, he asks me what I want to be when I grow up. I’m reading Zhuangzi and am convinced I want to be a Daoist hermit. I know better than to say that, but I do.
summer sunset
thunderclouds
piling up
at an intersection
the silence in the car
About the Author
Bob Lucky‘s books include My Wife & Other Adventures (Red Moon Press, 2024), My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019) and Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), a winner of the 2018 James Tate Poetry Prize. Lucky lives in Portugal, where he’s working his way through all the regional cheeses and wines.
Some things are better left unsaid! 😊
Perhaps, yet it’s his 16th birthday and perhaps this is the beginning of not being a ‘yes man’ to his father or that it’s time to leave home. But I’m just projecting. I was an elder son living at age 16 with mom, dad, and three siblings aged 5, 4 and 2. And I left that year. My dad was quite silent … unlike Bob’s dad who I read as using an indirect message as in “grow up, son.” Bob might have to tell us more about how he read his father’s message and the chaos in the car, but he’s left it to us to project into the setting.