I had just finished digitizing Volume 5 of the family photo albums and I was feeling a sense of accomplishment when, suddenly, I froze.

Fourteen hours in, maybe another hundred hours to go, and exactly why was I doing this? My first thought was that it’s all for the kids, or the grandkids, but that’s just one of those things I tell myself to make me sound like I’m a devoted family man.

Mostly, I’m like the guy who works nonstop to build a company and never spends time at home, but consistently claims it’s a “family business” and tells his kids he’s doing it for them. Well, at least he says that to his kids during the weekends when he has custody.

I’m pretty far from that extreme, or so I tell myself, but the pattern is the same. I get driven by some need of my own and I don’t want to feel selfish about the whole thing, so I make up an audience that will benefit from my unique brand of obsessive compulsive disorder.

Once I asked myself why I was digitizing the photos, the rest of my world started coming into focus, and it wasn’t pretty. I’ve saved copies of every newspaper article I wrote in college, and elementary school, along with my first license plate and essentially every photo or video I ever shot. I’m preserving all my “We try harder” buttons from Avis and my official membership certificate from the Merry Marvel Marching Society and the keys from almost every hotel room where I’ve ever stayed.

Meanwhile, more than a third of our apartment is dedicated to the two times a year when we have people over, and by “people,” I mean humans who aren’t in my nuclear family. For the nukes, the kitchen table is good enough. No, the living room couches and dining room table are for “company,” all the people who are so much more special than my wife and kids and grandkids.

I’ve written before about my challenges with the relics left behind by my own parents and grandparents, but I have not learned from their mistakes. I’m just more organized about it, having assembled boxes of “heirlooms” that nobody is going to see until after I’m gone, leaving them to wonder what the heck I was thinking when I decided to honor them with these gifts. I’ve actually thought about putting labels on the things that are on display in our apartment so the kids will know how important they are.

“Oh, look, this tiny birdcage with a little chirping bird is actually a clock that was once owned by someone we’ve never met, and dad never thought it was important enough to actually wind up,” my heirs will say. And then they’ll spend decades in court, battling for possession of all my priceless collections.  

OTOH, this is going to be really important when the Rosenbaum Historical Center opens in Chicago and millions of visitors line up to learn about my fabulous existence.

Yeah, that’s it. If I can save up enough stuff, the Rosenbaum Historical Center will be a giant success, a family business, if you will, and it will provide all the funds needed to support my descendants for many generations. This will be my finest achievement, establishing a dynasty that will last into eternity, all built on a chirping clock and 20,000 digitized photos.

So, really, kids, I’m doing all of this for you.

While my kids are feeling ever so lucky about their upcoming inheritance, this would be a good time for the rest of you to click here to subscribe to Dad Writes. Also, make your reservations for the Rosenbaum Historical Center, because tickets are going fast.

There’s a huge financial crisis coming and you’ll want to take steps immediately to protect yourself from the fallout. We’re talking gigantic, unstoppable, a veritable tsunami of lost wealth and shattered dreams.

It could have been prevented, of course, but woulda and coulda and shoulda are the Three Stooges of the apocalypse. They had their chance, they stepped aside, and now the whirlwind is upon us.

I discovered the impending disaster when I started going out with friends more, recognized that I have no presentable clothing left in the closet, and decided to buy a gray dress shirt. I never anticipated the dark web of financial chicanery that I would uncover, or how widespread the terror would become.

First, I went to a couple of actual clothing stores, and I thought my request was pretty simple. 16/32-33, dress shirt, point collar. How hard could it be?

Impossible, as it turns out. As I raced from store to store, I found places with gray shirts that weren’t my size, shirts in my size that aren’t gray, shirts with spread collars or two-toned collars or French cuffs or 35” sleeves that need to be altered at a “slight” added cost. Then I searched online and encountered the same issue, with the same white or black or taupe shirt available on 400 sites and my shirt on none of them.

And that’s when I discovered the unfolding crisis.  Almost none of the dress shirts have pockets anymore, and now all of us are at risk of financial ruin. Join us as we slide down the slippery slope…

All the great founders are dying or retiring and the conglomerates that run fashion houses today are driven by bean counters, not designers. Someone figured out they could save 14 cents per shirt by eliminating the pocket and that was that. Dress shirts today, casual shirts tomorrow, and then, le deluge.

Already, more than 18,900 pocket seamstresses—and seamsters—have been tossed on the street in Indonesia alone, plus similar numbers in Vietnam and Bangladesh, and they’ve started an underground movement to unseat their governments. If things go as planned, the Pie Day Revolution on March 14 will make this year’s supply chain disruptions look like a birthday party.

Before that tidal wave swamps American business, though, our domestic economy will be crippled. No pockets mean no pocket protectors, and every tech nerd in every IT department in the country will be afraid to walk out of the house without protected pockets. That means we’ll all be on hold an extra 27 hours when the internet goes down…which it will…and GDP will slide 8% due to the lost productivity.

Sales of pens and mechanical pencils will plummet, forcing the closure of seven Bic plants and every Office Max in 11 states. Emergency rooms will be inundated as men stab themselves in the chest with pens that once slid painlessly into their shirt pockets.

Apple will collapse as millions absentmindedly drop their IPhones into pockets that no longer exist, leading to a shortage of replacement phones that cannot be resolved by shipments from all those countries under siege from unemployed pocket seamstresses. Insurance companies that provided loss and damage coverage for those phones will dissolve into bankruptcy, which will prove to be the tipping point for the entire insurance industry.

E-commerce will dry up as millennials and Gen Z wander aimlessly, unable to make purchases without their phones. Uber and Lyft will fold in a world without phones to show their customers’ locations. Crime will soar as roving bands of robbers search out anyone who still has a working IPhone.

And all of this will happen because some financial geek at a clothing company decided it was a good idea to save 14 cents by getting rid of shirt pockets…and then bragged to all his other financial geek friends about what a genius he is. Well, congratulations, jerkface, you’ve ruined everything for everyone.

Sadly, there’s nothing left for the rest of us to do but stock up on beef jerky, gather in bunkers with our loved ones, and await the end of the world. It was so nice while it lasted.

There’s not much point in clicking here to subscribe to Dad Writes, since the internet is going down and there won’t be any tech support to restore it.

One of my grandkids is crazy about insects.* Another loves dinosaurs. That pretty much guarantees that we’ll have an entomologist and a paleontologist in the family, right?

Of course not.

Kids grow and change, their focus shifts, and the thing they love when they’re five or six is almost certain to be ancient history at ten or twelve. In fact, that’s one of the best things about being a kid—actually, about life in general. We get to try everything, like everything, and then find something new to like. The list of possibilities is almost endless, so it’s natural to sample from a wide array of options as we grow.

The simple truth is that none of us is smart enough to predict the future. And yet, so many parents with more money than common sense are working feverishly to secure the best possible outcome for their preschoolers.

The same people who couldn’t predict Covid, couldn’t plan for their own retirements, couldn’t anticipate the last rainstorm…think they can plot out all the steps for their kids to thrive. What school should they attend? What classes should they take? What careers should they target? Somehow, an awfully large number of parents think they have the answers.

Most of these people, btw, selected a college major that they didn’t know existed when they were in high school and ended up in careers that had nothing to do with their college major. Their lives took all kinds of turns along the way before some random detour became their main path. Despite their own experience, though, they absolutely know for a certainty that they can plot the future for the next generation.

They’re wrong, of course. None of us knows what the future will bring, none of us knows what life will throw at our kids, and none of us can predict what, ultimately, will make them successful. Heck, we probably cannot predict how they will come to define success itself. What industries will thrive 30 years from now? Will social skills be valued or mocked? Will we all be speaking Mandarin, or Urdu, or some digital language that hasn’t been invented yet?

One of the great things about being a grandparent is not having to deal with this stuff. I’d hate to be hearing from strangers who need to condemn me for destroying my children’s futures. It must be terrible to go to the park with the kids and start pushing them on the swings, only to be told we’re doing it wrong or saying the wrong things while we’re doing it or that we shouldn’t be doing it at all. It was great to be a parent in the old days, when you could ruin your kids’ lives in private without anyone calling you out about it.

There is some consolation, though, at least in the form of schadenfreude. Just as no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, no parenting plan survives contact with children. Helpless babies turn into stubborn toddlers and rebellious teens and, one day, independent adults. The only real guarantee here is that the plan will not be realized.

The old adage is that man plans and God laughs. I suspect that all these overly earnest parents make Him laugh the hardest.

*Between the time I started writing this post and today, dinosaurs have avoided extinction, but insects are already a thing of the past. Sic transit gloria mundi.

What will the grandkids latch onto next? The only way to find out is by clicking here to subscribe to Dad Writes.