I read Robbee’s email several times. I came to look at it as a feedback loop of sorts.
It has not always been easy to stay positive through my cancer treatment. When you have a dire medical issue, it’s tough to know how you’re really faring emotionally. I had wondered whether a part of me was acting when I was with other people. Maybe at times I forced myself to appear strong and upbeat. Many cancer patients feel obliged to put up a brave front. Was I doing that, too?
But Robbee had come upon me in an unguarded moment. I’d like to think she saw me as I am. She certainly saw me as I was that evening.
Her email was just a paragraph, but it meant a great deal to me. She had given me a window into myself. I was still fully engaged. I still knew life was good. I was doing OK.
14
The Dutch Uncle
A NYONE WHO knows me will tell you I’ve always had a healthy sense of myself and my abilities. I tend to say what I’m thinking and what I believe. I don’t have much patience for incompetence.
These are traits that have mostly served me well. But there are times, believe it or not, when I’ve come across as arrogant and tactless. That’s when those who can help you recalibrate yourself become absolutely crucial.
My sister, Tammy, had to put up with the ultimate know-it-all kid brother. I was always telling her what to do, as if our birth order was a mistake that I was incessantly trying to correct.
One time when I was seven years old and Tammy was nine, we were waiting for the school bus, and as usual, I was mouthing off. She decided she’d had enough. She picked up my metal lunch box and dropped it in a mud puddle…just as the bus pulled up. My sister ended up in the principal’s office, while I was sent to the janitor, who cleaned up my lunch box, threw out my mud-soaked sandwich and kindly gave me lunch money.
The principal told Tammy he had called our mother. “I’m going to let her handle this,” he said. When we arrived home after school, Mom said, “I’m going to let your father handle this.” My sister spent the day nervously awaiting her fate.
When my father got home after work, he listened to the story and burst into a smile. He wasn’t going to punish Tammy. He did everything but congratulate her! I was a kid who needed to have his lunch box dropped in a puddle. Tammy was relieved, and I’d been put in my place…though the lesson didn’t completely sink in.
By the time I got to Brown University, I had certain abilities and people knew I knew it. My good friend Scott Sherman, whom I met freshman year, now recalls me as “having a total lack of tact, and being universally acclaimed as the person quickest to offend someone he had just met.”
I usually didn’t notice how I was coming off, in part because things seemed to be working out and I was succeeding academically. Andy van Dam, the school’s legendary computer science professor, made me his teaching assistant. “Andy van Demand,” as he was known, liked me. I was impassioned about so many things—a good trait. But like many people, I had strengths that were also flaws. In Andy’s view, I was self-possessed to a fault, I was way too brash and I was an inflexible contrarian, always spouting opinions.
One day Andy took me for a walk. He put his arm around my shoulders and said, “Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as being so arrogant, because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life.”
Looking back, his wording was so perfect. He was actually saying, “Randy, you’re being a jerk.” But he said it in a way that made me open to his criticisms, to listening to my hero telling me something I needed to hear. There is an old expression, “a Dutch uncle,” which refers to a person who gives you honest feedback. Few people bother doing that nowadays, so the expression has started to feel outdated, even obscure. (And the best part is that Andy really is Dutch.)
Ever since my last lecture began spreading on the Internet, more than a few friends have been ribbing me about it, calling me “St. Randy.” It’s their way of reminding me that there were times I’ve been described in other, more colorful, ways.
But I like to think that my flaws are in the social, rather than in the moral category. And I’ve been lucky enough to benefit over the years from people like Andy, who have cared enough to tell me the tough-love things that I needed to hear.
15
Pouring Soda in the Backseat
F OR A long time, a big part of my identity was “bachelor uncle.” In my twenties and thirties I had no kids, and my sister’s two children, Chris and Laura, became the objects of my affection. I reveled in being Uncle Randy, the guy who showed up in their lives every month or so to help them look at their world from strange new angles.
It wasn’t that I spoiled them. I just tried to impart my perspective on life. Sometimes that drove my sister crazy.
Once, about a dozen years ago, when Chris was seven years old and Laura was nine, I picked them up in my brand-new Volkswagen Cabrio convertible. “Be careful in Uncle Randy’s new car,” my sister told them. “Wipe your feet before you get in it. Don’t mess anything up. Don’t get it dirty.”
I listened to her, and thought, as only a bachelor uncle can: “That’s just the sort of admonition that sets kids up for failure. Of course they’d eventually get my car dirty. Kids can’t help it.” So I made things easy. While my sister was outlining the rules, I slowly and deliberately opened a can of soda, turned it over, and poured it on the cloth seats in the back of the convertible. My message: People are more important than things. A car, even a pristine gem like my new convertible, was just a thing.
As I poured out that Coke, I watched Chris and Laura, mouths open, eyes widening. Here was crazy Uncle Randy completely rejecting adult rules.
I ended up being so glad I’d spilled that soda. Because later in the weekend, little Chris got the flu and threw up all over the backseat. He didn’t feel guilty. He was relieved; he had already watched me christen the car. He knew it would be OK.
Whenever the kids were with me, we had just two rules:
1) No whining.
2) Whatever we do together, don’t tell Mom.
Not telling Mom made everything we did into a pirate adventure. Even the mundane could feel magical.
On most weekends, Chris and Laura would hang out at my apartment and I’d take them to Chuck E. Cheese, or we’d head out for a hike or visit a museum. On special weekends, we’d stay in a hotel with a pool.
The three of us liked making pancakes together. My father had always asked: “Why do pancakes need to be round?” I’d ask the same question. And so we were always making weirdly shaped animal pancakes. There’s a sloppiness to that medium that I like, because every animal pancake you make is an unintentional Rorschach test. Chris and Laura would say, “This isn’t the shape of the animal I wanted.” But that allowed us to look at the pancake as it was, and imagine what animal it might be.
I’ve watched Laura and Chris grow into terrific young adults. She’s now twenty-one and he’s nineteen. These days, I am more grateful than ever that I was a part of their childhoods, because I’ve come to realize something. It’s unlikely that I will ever get to be a father to children over age six. So my time with Chris and Laura has become even more precious. They gave me the gift of being a presence in their lives through their pre-teen and teen years, and into adulthood.
Recently, I asked both Chris and Laura to do me a favor. After I die, I want them to take my kids for weekends here and there, and just do stuff. Anything fun they can think of. They don’t have to do the exact things we did together. They can let my kids take the lead. Dylan likes dinosaurs. Maybe Chris and Laura can take him to a natural history museum. Logan likes sports: maybe they can take him to see the Steelers. And Chloe loves to dance. They’ll figure something out.
I also want my niece and nephew to tell my kids a few things. First, they can say simply: “Your dad asked us to spend this time with you, just like he spent time with us.” I hope they’ll also explain to my kids how hard I fought to stay alive. I signed up for
the hardest treatments that could be thrown at me because I wanted to be around as long as possible to be there for my kids. That’s the message I’ve asked Laura and Chris to deliver.
Oh, and one more thing. If my kids mess up their cars, I hope Chris and Laura will think of me and smile.
16
Romancing the Brick Wall
T HE MOST formidable brick wall I ever came upon in my life was just five feet, six inches tall, and was absolutely beautiful. But it reduced me to tears, made me reevaluate my entire life and led me to call my father, in a helpless fit, to ask for guidance on how to scale it.
That brick wall was Jai.
As I said in the lecture, I was always pretty adept at charging through the brick walls in my academic and professional life. I didn’t tell the audience the story about my courtship with my wife because I knew I’d get too emotional. Still, the words I said on stage completely applied to my early days with Jai:
“…The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”
I was a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor when Jai and I met. I’d spent a lot of time dating around, having great fun, and then losing girlfriends who wanted to get more serious. For years, I felt no compulsion to settle down. Even as a tenured professor who could afford something better, I lived in a $450-a-month attic apartment with a fire-escape walkup. It was a place my grad students wouldn’t live in because it was beneath them. But it was perfect for me.
A friend once asked me: “What kind of woman do you think would be impressed if you brought her back to this place?”
I replied: “The right kind.”
But who was I kidding? I was a fun-loving, workaholic Peter Pan with metal folding chairs in my dining room. No woman, even the right kind, would expect to settle down blissfully into that. (And when Jai finally arrived in my life, neither did she.) Granted, I had a good job and other things going for me. But I wasn’t any woman’s idea of perfect marriage material.
I met Jai in the fall of 1998, when I was invited to give a lecture on virtual reality technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jai, then a thirty-one-year-old grad student in comparative literature, was working part-time in the UNC computer science department. Her job was to host visitors who came to the labs, whether Nobel laureates or Girl Scout troops. On that particular day, her job was to host me.
Jai had seen me speak the previous summer at a computer graphics conference in Orlando. She later told me she had considered coming up to me afterward to introduce herself, but she never did. When she learned she’d be my host when I came to UNC, she visited my Web site to learn more about me. She clicked through all my academic stuff, and then found the links to my funkier personal information—that my hobbies were making gingerbread houses and sewing. She saw my age, and no mention of a wife or girlfriend, but lots of photos of my niece and nephew.
She figured I’m obviously a pretty offbeat and interesting guy, and she was intrigued enough to make a few phone calls to friends of hers in the computer science community.
“What do you know about Randy Pausch?” she asked. “Is he gay?”
She was told I was not. In fact, she was told I had a reputation as a player who’d never settle down (well, to the extent that a computer scientist can be considered a “player”).
As for Jai, she had been married briefly to her college sweetheart, and after that ended in divorce, with no children, she was gun-shy about getting serious again.
From the moment I met her the day of my visit, I just found myself staring at her. She’s a beauty, of course, and she had this gorgeous long hair then, and this smile that said a lot about both her warmth and her impishness. I was brought into a lab to watch students demonstrate their virtual reality projects, and I had trouble concentrating on any of them because Jai was standing there.
Soon enough, I was flirting pretty aggressively. Because this was a professional setting, that meant I was making far more eye contact than was appropriate. Jai later told me: “I couldn’t tell if you did that with everyone, or if you were singling me out.” Believe me, I was singling.
At one point during the day, Jai sat down with me to ask questions about bringing software projects to UNC. By then I was completely taken with her. I had to go to a formal faculty dinner that night, but I asked if she’d meet me for a drink afterward. She agreed.
I couldn’t concentrate during dinner. I wished all of those tenured professors would just chew faster. I convinced everyone not to order dessert. And I got out of there at 8:30 and called Jai.
We went to a wine bar, even though I don’t really drink, and I quickly felt a magnetic sense that I really wanted to be with this woman. I was scheduled to take a flight home the next morning, but I told her I’d change it if she’d go on a date with me the following day. She said yes, and we ended up having a terrific time.
After I returned to Pittsburgh, I offered her my frequent flyer miles and asked her to visit me. She had obvious feelings for me, but she was scared—of both my reputation and of the possibility that she was falling in love.
“I’m not coming,” she wrote in an email. “I’ve thought it through, and I’m not looking for a long-distance relationship. I’m sorry.”
I was hooked, of course, and this was a brick wall I thought I could manage. I sent her a dozen roses and a card that read: “Although it saddens me greatly, I respect your decision and wish you nothing but the best. Randy.”
Well, that worked. She got on the plane.
I admit: I’m either an incurable romantic or a bit Machiavellian. But I just wanted her in my life. I had fallen in love, even if she was still finding her way.
We saw each other most every weekend through the winter. Though Jai wasn’t thrilled with my bluntness and my know-it-all attitude, she said I was the most positive, upbeat person she’d ever met. And she was bringing out good things in me. I found myself caring about her welfare and happiness more than anything else.
Eventually, I asked her to move to Pittsburgh. I offered to get her an engagement ring, but I knew she was still scared and that would freak her out. So I didn’t pressure her, and she did agree to a first step: moving up and getting her own apartment.
In April, I made arrangements to teach a weeklong seminar at UNC. That would allow me to help her pack up so we could drive her belongings up to Pittsburgh.
After I arrived in Chapel Hill, Jai told me we needed to talk. She was more serious than I had ever seen her.
“I can’t come to Pittsburgh. I’m sorry,” she said.
I wondered what was in her head. I asked for an explanation.
Her answer: “This is never going to work.” I had to know why.
“I just…” she said. “I just don’t love you the way you want me to love you.” And then again, for emphasis: “I don’t love you.”
I was horrified and heartbroken. It was like a punch in the gut. Could she really mean that?
It was an awkward scene. She didn’t know how to feel. I didn’t know how to feel. I needed a ride over to my hotel. “Would you be kind enough to drive me or should I call a cab?”
She drove me, and when we got there, I pulled my bag out of her trunk, fighting back tears. If it’s possible to be arrogant, optimistic and totally miserable all at the same time, I think I might have pulled it off: “Look, I’m going to find a way to be happy, and I’d really love to be happy with you, but if I can’t be happy with you, then I’ll find a way to be happy without you.”
In the hotel, I spent much of the day on the phone with my parents, telling them about the brick wall I’d just smashed into. Their advice was incredible.
“Look,” my dad said. “I don’t think she means it. It’s not consistent with her behavior thus far. You’ve asked her to pull up roots and run away with you. She’s probably confused and scared to death. If she doesn’t really love you, then it’s over. And if she does love you, then love will w
in out.”
I asked my parents what I should do.
“Be supportive,” my mom said. “If you love her, support her.”
And so I did that. I spent that week teaching, hanging out in an office up the hall from Jai. I stopped by a couple of times, however, just to see if she was all right. “I just wanted to see how you are,” I’d say. “If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”
A few days later, Jai called. “Well, Randy, I’m sitting here missing you, just wishing you were here. That means something, doesn’t it?”
She had come to a realization: She was in love, after all. Once again, my parents had come through. Love had won out. At week’s end, Jai moved to Pittsburgh.
Brick walls are there for a reason. They give us a chance to show how badly we want something.
17
Not All Fairy Tales End Smoothly
J AI AND I were married under a 100-year-old oak tree on the lawn of a famous Victorian mansion in Pittsburgh. It was a small wedding, but I like big romantic statements, and so Jai and I agreed to start our marriage in a special way.
We did not leave the reception in a car with cans rattling from the rear bumper. We did not get into a horse-drawn carriage. Instead, we got into a huge, multicolored hot-air balloon that whisked us off into the clouds, as our friends and loved ones waved up to us, wishing us bon voyage. What a Kodak moment!
When we had stepped into the balloon, Jai was just beaming. “It’s like a fairy tale ending to a Disney movie,” she said.
Then the balloon smashed through tree branches on the way up. It didn’t sound like the destruction of the Hindenburg, but it was a little disconcerting. “No problem,” said the man flying the balloon. (He’s called a “ballooner.”) “Usually we’re OK going through branches.”