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Dressed up Larkin

This summer, a great job offer fell into my lap. Just like that: a gilded box, dropping from the heavens and landing right smack in front of me.

Turns out the box had been sent by someone I knew from — of all places — the playground. A fellow father I'd met on three successive Sunday mornings last spring, each of us with toddler in one hand and New York Times in the other. The kids played, the dads talked. We exchanged contact info.

A few months later, he called. The company he worked for, a big national corporation, was looking for someone to write op-ed pieces and speeches for the CEO and other execs. Had I ever considered putting on suit and tie and getting a real job?

"The vile temptation does arise now and then," I said, "but I've always managed to resist."

Still, when he asked me to come in for a chat, I did, and over the following weeks I chatted some more, with him and other company officers. At the end of it came a full-time job offer, with a salary almost twice what I currently make, plus a benefits package roughly the size of the Cleveland phone book. It's hard to exaggerate how alluring this is to a freelance writer. For decades you've had to fish far and wide for your own paycheck; now, every two weeks, someone will deliver fresh tuna and salmon right to your plate.

Should I take the job? Molly and I conferred endlessly. There were numbers to consider, impressive numbers. Health-care benefits, bonus options, 401Ks, childcare subsidies. On the other hand, what about my commitment to writing stories and novels and essays? What, specifically, about the book I'd just begun writing — a book, in fact, about midlife fatherhood? Should I just give that up? I agonized. It's hard these days to know how to balance money, time and family. Throw art into the mix and you really have a mess. These weren't just apples and oranges, but kiwis, basketballs, and goldfish.

Before Larkin, I had always readily traded security for freedom. But when you have a child, the picture changes. Molly had just gone part-time in her job, too, and as a result we'd lost our health insurance, which meant paying for it out of pocket, a major ouch. Before my job offer materialized, we were already tightening our belts a little bit. We weren't worried, just paying attention. We knew we'd muddle through.

Then suddenly all this money was potentially there. Strange, how the chance to have more makes you suddenly feel you have less. I was a freelance writer, fifty years old and with no job security, accustomed to figuring things out as I went along. Suddenly that seemed more precarious than before. Even irresponsible. How much "security" did we need for the future?

That depended, of course, on how things turned out. In my gloomiest thoughts, there was a worst-case scenario, in which Molly and I turned out to have already peaked as earners, health insurance remained elusive, the market continued to demolish our investments... and ten years down the road, we suddenly found ourselves coming up short — with me turning sixty and Larkin still not yet in high school.

That was scary. But could we, should we, make a decision today based on a perfect-storm scenario a decade ahead?

I wasn't Nostradamus, or a statistics-and-probability wizard either. Just an artist, husband and father trying to reckon his responsibilities and his desires. Predictably, my first instinct was to try to have everything, to take the job and do the book. But this would mean working round the clock, and on weekends too. No more stay-at-home Dad, no more ever-at-home Dad.

"I don't want you to take this," Molly said, "if it means we'll never see you."

So in addition to all those big numbers in the job offer, I thought long and hard about another big number: the hours. Hours put in at the job, hours spent — and not spent — with Molly and Larkin. I recalled the lyrics of a song my friend Gary wrote for his garage band: Time will get you through the times with no money/ Better than money will get you through the times with no time. I pondered all I'd miss, not having afternoons with Larkin in the last two years before she starts school. Afternoons like the one at the park recently, when we were walking with the sun low on our left, and she started walking sideways, in order to be able to watch her shadow as she went. "Dada," she said, "do this with me!" She grabbed my hand, and the two of us went loping sideways, hand in hand, watching our shadows cavort in tandem and laughing as we went.

I'm not saying that such pleasures settle the job question definitively. But I am old enough to know that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. No, not the job; the girl. Time with her comprises a benefits package impossible to match. And so in the end, I sucked up my courage (my idiocy, some will say), and said no to the offer. The gilded box flew back up into the heavens, and I went back to my writing desk.

Who knows how it would have worked out? Ghost paths diverge from our lives, tracing alternate destinies we would have followed if we'd made this or that key decision — personal or professional — differently. Speculating about them is fascinating, perhaps, but in the end it is moot. "You have enough money, you have your family, and you have a book you want to write," one friend pointed out to me. "Why would you want to be someone else?"