You can take the boy out of Scranton, but.....

I never liked the saying, "you can take the boy out of Scranton, but you can't take the Scranton out of the boy". Perhaps because I have spent most of my adult life trying to prove it wrong. It seemed from the minute I left home, at the age of 18, I was trying to shed my Scranton roots. First to go was that Scranton accent - a combination of Fargo meets Deliverance. Then there was the lingo. Where else in the world could you hear a phrase like "I'll have a couple-two-three of those beers" or refer to a funeral home as "a corpse house". (For Scranton beginners, this site is a nice guide to the region's special lingo http://www.brianweinberg.com/dictionary.html).

Next I needed to reinvent myself. Gone was the Yuengling beer. This guy needed to drink the drink of a gentleman. I had a phase with scotch on the rocks. But when I realized my reinvented self looked something akin to a 75-year-old country club retiree, I bought a book on wine. I upgraded my diet. Scranton is a land-locked, meat and potatoes kind of place. Indeed, my only recollection of fish was the frozen sticks from Mrs. Paul's (for those reading in England see http://www.mrspauls.com/). My newly-invented self dined on mahi-mahi, monk fish, and of all things, sushi (complimented with sake and plum wine). For entertainment, I shifted from the Multiplex to the arthouse movies at Lincoln Center. I joined a theatre that did Irish revivals. Hell, I even started going to the opera. And for a finishing touch, I needed a really cool job that no one in Scranton would do. I was hoping for guitar-playing rock star. But I never learned more than a handful of chords. So I settled for currency strategist. I figured there were only a few dozen or so of us in the entire world - surely I'd be the only one from Scranton. And in the world of high finance, it is about as close to a rock star as you can get. My transformation was complete.

But a funny thing has happened to me recently. I realize that I miss some parts of my old, Scranton self. While I still love wine, I am happy to see Yuengling have its own reinvention - as a micro beer available in Manhattan for $10 per bottle. I finally have to admit those arthouse movies at Lincoln Center are typically boring, and nearly always depressing. My last memory of Lincoln Center cinema was some movie about a school bus that crashed into a frozen lake. What's wrong with a little Lucas and Speilberg? Those Irish theatre revivals just remind me how sad early 20th century history was for my ancestors (I am Irish American). And to be honest, I find I just don't like opera. Why should I pay $75 per seat to cure my chronic insomnia when I can do it for free reading almost anything written by currency strategists.

But my reversion back to my Scranton roots is most notable in my parenting skills. It is here I had planned to shed anything I had learned as a lad. Don't get me wrong, I love my parents. But many of the funnier childhood memories revolve around their parental choices. There was the time my elder sister - the first of my family to attend university - convinced mom and dad that the university grading scale was a 3.0 rather than the actual 4.0. For most of her time in school, she had them duped into thinking she was a top student. As for dad, one of his most consistent parental choices was to get us kids to participate in activities that he liked. There was always a few Christmas gifts meant for me that he seemed to enjoy just a little too much. There were the times we played the Atari game system together. Every now and then I'd catch dad changing the difficulty on my controller when he sent me off to fetch him a beer. Dad liked to win. Of particular note was a trip to the cinema together for the premier of Apocolypse Now. The movie was released in 1979, which meant I was 11 (I still see a bald, heavy-set Marlon Brando in my nightmares). No, I am going to bring up my boys differently.

As I think about my parenting choices recently, however, I realize I have quite a lot of my parents in me. Sure, the boys are living their lives very differently than I did. But they should be - they live in the center of one of the largest cities in the world. My first 18 years were in a town of 6000 people. And while I won't be duped on grading scales, I have found myself more interested in seeing the boys have fun, rather than hitting the books hard (believe it or not, in England you hit the books rather early). But where I notice the greatest similarity to my parents, dad really, is in my desire to shape the boys' interests around my own. By the time Ranen was two, he knew every coffee chain in London and what treats are available at each (I have a bit of a latte fetish - he can recite from memory the selection of muffins at Starbucks and Costa). And for some time, he genuinely enjoyed watching me play my Sony PlayStation. By now, he has gotten the joke and insists on getting some of his own playing time with FIFA 2009 (a soccer game, of course). While I allowed Ranen to constantly listen to dismally boring nursery rhymes, with Gideon I am certain not to repeat this mistake. He will never learn "Piano man", a song that Ranen insisted upon repeatedly playing during our three hour drive to Cambridge some years back. Gideon loves music--- my music (if you don't believe me, check out the video below - Ranen, Gideon and Dina dancing to a song from the Kooks). Who cares if Gideon will be the only kid in nursery that likes the Stone Temple Pilots. Humpty dumpty is overrated anyway.

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In the end, I guess I have learned that despite living the past 22 years away from Scranton, I really can't take the Scranton out of me. More important, I realize, I shouldn't want to.

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A Scranton Boy in Chelsea

P.S. For those Scrantonian readers, a new hamburg joint just opened up around the corner--sounds like a touch of home, heyna?? (For those not from Scranton, hamburg is the food, not the city in Germany.)