Milkman Dead and Leaving Home

"I just know that I want to live my own life. I don't want to be my old man's office boy no more. And as long as I'm in this place I will be. Unless I have my own money. I have to get out of that house and I don't want to owe anybody when I go. My family's driving me crazy. Daddy wants me to be like him and hate my mother. My mother wants me to think like her and hate my father...Everybody wants something from me, you know what I mean? Something they think they can't get anywhere else."

--  from Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Reading these words from Milkman Dead struck a resonating chord with me; not because my parents hate each other, but because this was how I generally felt about my friends and home when I decided to leave Kentucky and move to California. If I had stayed home I would have grown up with the same expectations, experiences, and worldly outlook as the people I had grown up with. I would have been drawn down to the same level of career aspiration. I would have been eating at the same restaurants, listening to the same music, wearing similar clothes. All those feelings and expectations one has at 18 years old would have changed very little by 38 or even 58. That's life in a small town.

Moving to California gave me the opportunity to figure out things on my own while being influenced by people and a culture far different from where I grew up. That was exactly what I needed. I wanted to submerge myself in a world of new tastes, new food, new night life, new politics, new music, new expectations, new grades of success, new struggles. Like Milkman, I didn't want to be my old man's office boy anymore. By "old man" I mean everyone I grew up with as well as my family. I had to get out of that house, out of that city, out of that half of the continent and go somewhere where I could make a fresh start and stretch my boundaries.

I became my own man in California. I became an individual. I arrived here as a wide-eyed boy fresh out of college and have since found my own voice. A voice and inner confidence that is much different than what it would have been had I never left home. I sometimes wonder what the 40 year old Jason would look like if he had never left Kentucky. Would he have been pushed to go to graduate school? Would he have felt comfortable searching for achievement that surpassed many of his peers? Would he have learned to shake off unwarranted humility that keeps some people living in a station well below their true worth to society?

Leaving home is a right of passage for young people. Not everyone can do it to such a degree as moving to another state but for those who can, the rewards are amazing. Just ask Milkman.