posting omar's life

One of the joys of having a teenage son is to enjoy open discussions.

You know the kind. The type that Robert Young would have with Bud. Where the son tells you his deepest desires and you share your dad-acquired life tips that will help him avoid the mistakes you made in your youth.

I suppose on some ideal planet in the Triangulum galaxy that may be true. But, here on the planet Earth, teenage sons are as guarded with their inner thoughts as -- well, just as I was when I was a teenager. If you ask my mother, she will say the same about me now. The only reason she reads my blog is to discover what I do not tell her.

When I wrote last year that I had acquired a son, a reader left a comment that she was looking forward to hearing stories of how an aging American expatriate with limited Spanish faces the challenges of raising a Mexican teenage son who can speak a bit of waiter English. I suspected the task was doomed for the very reason we just discussed.

And then a miracle occurred. Maybe not exactly a miracle. But I felt a thrill akin to Michel Ange Lancret when he realized the Rosetta stone just might be something important.

I woke up one morning two weeks ago to find a large poster in the kitchen. Omar had stayed up most of the night with his girlfriend creating it as an assigned project for one of his high school classes.

Glancing over it, I almost felt as if I had discovered his unlocked diary. It was a list of things he wanted to do with his life. Some I knew. Some I had guessed at. Others were surprising.

"I'm going to be a dentist" was what started our dad-son saga. The people he worked with had marked him out as someone who was going to be successful in life. All he needed was the coin to put in the opportunity slot. That is where I came in.

I thought he had strayed from that goal last year, but there it was in black and white. One more year of high school and he will be on his way.

I considered "I won't have a problem at work" to be aspirational; after all, we all hope that, don't we? And that "I am not going to be a shipwrecked" as simply a response to the instruction sheet that created the borders of the project.

Omar has hinted that he would like to join me on one of my journeys. And now I know where. "I will go to Paris" (great choice); "I'm going to travel to Cancun" (northerners who sneer at the Malaga of Mexico take note); and "I'm going to study in Puerto Vallarta" (I thought the dental school was in Guadalajara). The list may be why he thinks he will not end up shipwrrecked.

He is an acquisitive soul. I already knew that. He wears designer clothes and keeps his motorcycle looking as if it were new.

So, none of these surprised me. "I won't have a small house" (though he thinks mine is too large); "I will have a dog" (something he has wanted since the first day he moved in): "I'm going to have motorcycle 250" (attainable); I will have a RZR" (with five words, he quickly won his uncle Darrel's favor); "I'm going to have a car" (a lobbying effort that started last April for his 19th birthday); "I won't have an old car" (entiendo); and the reassuring "I'm not going to be in prison" (that cuts off several ways of getting the booty listed).

Before I knew him well, I knew he was a gym rat. He had the over-pumped look of a collegiate wrestler. But his changing focus in life has interfered with his gym days. "I won't be a body builder." That may be one reason he is confident in claiming "I'm not going to die young."  Several of my young Mexican friends are convinced they will be dead before they get old. They mean 30.

None of that is very personal. But the poster had its head-snapping personal revelations. First, let me put this in context. Omar has a very steady girlfriend. Over the past year, they have spent more time together than some couples who have been married ten years. I keep expecting him to tell me they are getting married -- other than the fact that marriage seems to be something of an unneeded burden in these parts.

But not for Omar. "I'm not going to get married before I'm 35 years old." The sentence struck me as a bit odd voiced in the negative. That is quickly followed by "I will have two wives." Sequentially? Concurrently? The ambiguity dangles like an orphaned participle.

From those two wives will come progeny. Omar has six siblings. But he is not interested in continuing that tradition. "I'm not going to have many children." Instead, he opts for the New Mexican Norm. "I will have two boys."

As I read through the poster, the lawyer-who-never-dies, who lives in the basement of my brain, shifted into cross-examination mode. Even though I would like to know the answers to the questions raised by the poster, I told my old self to shut up.

I now have an opening for future discussions with my teenage son (who will be leaving that adjective behind in less than a month). There is no reason to scare him off the discussion by being too northern.

Whoever it was who requested a Bringing Up Omar story. Here it is.

Who knows, this may have all the makings of a Netflix miniseries. It couldn't be worse than "Chasing Cameron."