FOREWORD

A MOVIE ACTOR TELEPHONED me a couple of years after this book was published. We had never met, but he knew my son had gone crazy and then recovered. His own son was going crazy, and he was in need of advice. He asked how my son was, and I told him Mark had just graduated from Harvard Medical School. He said, “Some remission!” I said, “We were lucky, and I certainly hope you will be lucky, too.”

That was the best I could do back then. That is the best I could do right now. Put another way: Some people survived going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Others didn’t. The turbulence is really something.

My son Mark’s most unsociable performance when bananas, and before I could get him into a Canadian laughing academy, was to babble on and on, and then wing a cue ball through a picture window in an urban commune in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was only then that his flower children friends telephoned me to say he was in need of a father.

God bless telephones.

Mark’s dear mother Jane Marie, née Cox, now dead, a Quaker and, like Mark, a graduate of the Quaker college Swarthmore in Pennsylvania, would often tell him that he was supposed to save the world. His college major had been religion, and he had not yet considered becoming what he has indeed become, a pediatrician. One seeming possibility before he went nuts was that he study for the Unitarian ministry.

He was then twenty-two, and I myself was a mere spring chicken of forty-seven, a mere thirty-two years ago. By the time Mark and I went in a hired car from the house with the busted picture window in Vancouver to what turned out to be an excellent private mental hospital in nearby New Westminster, he had at least become a jazz saxophonist and a picture painter. He babbled merrily en route, and it was language, but the words were woven into vocal riffs worthy of his hero John Coltrane.

While we awaited Mark’s admission in the front lobby of the Canuck loony bin, which, one has to say, had the therapeutically unfortunate name “Hollywood Hospital,” Mark dug both hands into a big bowl of sand and cigarette butts. When a male nurse appeared to greet us, Mark started painting a picture with his filthy fingers on the bosom of the man’s white uniform. The nurse couldn’t have been nicer about that.

So Mark eventually recovered his sanity, as, so I am told, the movie actor’s son did not.

And I recall now a time when I pondered buying from a gift shop a pretty object sacred to believers in a faith I knew nothing about. Only kidding, I asked the woman who waited on me if she thought it would bring me bad luck if I treated it disrespectfully. Only kidding, she replied, “That depends, I would think, on how many hostages you have given to fortune.”

I found her answer so unexpectedly eloquent and poignant that I supposed it to be a quotation. I have since looked it up. It was written by Francis Bacon, and reads in full: “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.”

Indeed, indeed!

Last summer I was sitting on the back porch of one of seven hostages I gave to fortune. This was right before sunset, so all shadows were long. We faced a pleasant but featureless meadow, not all of it his property, bounded by darkening woodland several hundred yards straight in front of us. And this former hostage, this pediatrician, this saxophonist and painter and writer and chess player, and father of two grown sons, said our children, meaning America’s children, were in those woods.

Mark Vonnegut, MD, who had to take a lot of pre-med courses before he got into med school, said the children would have to cross that unmarked meadow before they could join us on our porch as grownups. He said new technologies had removed all guide posts from the meadow, so it was no longer a simple matter to decide what to do with a life. And there were moreover landmines between them and us.

I said, “Doc, you were so crazy a third of a century ago. How come you’re so obviously OK now?”

And he said, “My case was a mild one.”

 

KURT VONNEGUT
April 30, 2002
New York City