Dear Spike,
You became an adult long before you were an adult in the legal sense that adulthood happens to us. You were smarter than the vast majority of us, for one thing. Wiser than most, too. I don't write this as a father enamored by his child, but as someone who knows lots of adults. Lots and lots and lots of them. And most of them — of us — really suck at it.
So it goes. The bar was low.
And now that you are an adult of the legal sort, as well, I can also see quite clearly the ways in which you are still a child. I don't mean that in any sort of critical way. I'm still a child, for goodness' sake, in many embarrassing ways. Your ways have more to do with the childlike awe you still have for the world and the emotional rawness that young people have before they calcify this and hide away that and create the adult who the world expects, instead of the child who looks expectantly at the world.
And at least you look the part. You will for a long time, and that's a good thing, I reckon, for someone who has spent a lot of their life on stage and might want to continue doing so. There's an old Hollywood trope — a good piece of advice, I reckon — that suggests that directors, producers, and fellow actors — if they have a say in the matter — should "never work with children or animals." And what that means on the Shakespearean stage, on which you have already spent considerable time, is that the casting folk will always be on the lookout for adults who look like children. Bully for you, that.
You're a small thing. You always have been. In one of first letters I wrote to you after you were born I said "tiny but tough" and you are that in many ways, but the tiny part has been very consistent while the tough part has taken on different shapes over time, and in some ways you're tough like a grizzled old warrior and in other times you're tough like a person who simply knows what they can handle and knows how to fill that cup with plenty of space under the brim. You can take a punch, a ball to the face, a slide tackle to the knees; you have felt those things, at least. You can also watch a friend drift away, lose someone you love, fail at something you hoped for; you have experienced that, too.
Last year, I told you that I knew you would be leaving home, soon. Now it's true. And it's even more clear that you're ready.
I suppose that your mother and I can take some credit for that. And we do. But now you are adult, and the thing we have done and will do — the advice we give, the values we seek to pass along — will assume a smaller a small part of the responsibility for what you are. It will remain — fractions of our beings can diminish but never disappear, for better and for worse — but what happens now is so much more about you.
Bully for you, that, too. Because I'm not sure anyone has ever been more qualified to be themselves.
Love,
dad
