He asked more easy and straightforward questions: who my parents were and what they did, what town I was from, whether I had brothers or sisters. It was a great relief, in the midst of such an intimidating situation and environment, to be asked questions I could answer without even trying to think. I kept talking, letting each answer of mine go longer than the last, which led him to even more questions. How’s school? Public, private? Easy, hard? Sports? Baseball, soccer? Tigers, Red Wings? Video games? Friends, best friends, bullies, girls? What do you want to be when you grow up? How do you get along with your parents? Do they often buy Kellogg’s products?
Before long everything tumbled out: how my parents had strict policies against both sugar cereals and name-brand cereals, even the healthy ones; how I had felt drawn to the box in the store anyway; how I had, to my embarrassment now, cried when I lost, which I knew I was too old to do; that very weird follow-up contest that my father had set up for me with the dictionary and the expression he made that I didn’t know how to describe; how I had gone back to the store by myself after school; the bizarre and nonsensical things my parents had said about why it was somehow against our values to redeem the prize; how strange it had felt to be sure for the first time that my parents were wrong, and how frustrated and confused and angry it had made me; the staircase, Tom, 80-20, how the taxi driver didn’t want to let me sit in the front seat for some reason.
After I said everything, he stared at me for a second and paused.
“I can’t give you the prize.”
My mind first went to Tom, warning me that this was a trap.
“Regulations prohibit families of Kellogg’s employees from participating in this contest or claiming a prize,” he said. Then he smiled, and there was—the only time I’ve ever seen this in real life, and a phrase I had never been able to quite understand until now—a glint in this person’s eyes.
“And I’m your father.”
“I’m going to tell you a story. And then you tell me what you want to do.
“Twelve years ago, I was a visiting lecturer at the Steven M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I was twenty-nine years old at the time. I was the youngest Senior Vice President in the history of Kellogg’s. I had called up the school myself and offered my services as a visiting lecturer for one semester. I explained how it was important to give something back to the community, be a role model, to whom much is given much is expected, all that. But that wasn’t it at all. By the way, if I never see you again, and end up teaching nothing else to you—that’s the one thing I want you to have learned from me. People—even good, impressive people—always want something simple and unimpressive. Everything good and impressive that they do in their lives is a result of the impressive path they take to get what they want—not a result of wanting an impressive thing. It’s what brought me here. It’s what brought you here.
“I was really giving myself one semester—that’s only three months—to find a wife. Someone genuine and beautiful and interesting, and someone outside the circles in which I lived. This wasn’t much time, but I was an overachiever, and confident, and I was used to accomplishing major things in very set periods of time.
“On the first day of the first class, I saw her. The reason I was there—I knew that right away. Pale, freckles, hair in a messy, frizzy light poof. T-shirt. Beautiful. Last seat of the last row. She looked like she didn’t want to be there, and she didn’t: it turned out she was a French literature major, and this class was the economics requirement that she had delayed until her final semester because she hated anything that had to do with money. So I wasn’t in the best position to impress her. Which I liked, too.
“There were twenty students in the class, so I was able to institute fifteen-minute meetings with each student individually each week. I scheduled hers last, on Friday afternoons. I was even more taken upon second sight than I was at first. She was brilliant and sarcastic; inner fire, light touch, certain of her values, which I had a sense were better than mine and which I wanted to learn from. I was sold.
“Now, there were two pretty considerable obstacles in my path. The woman was about to become engaged to the only man she had ever dated, her boyfriend of five years, a man she told me she loved definitively. And in addition to that, she went out of her way to make it clear that, separately, she had absolutely no attraction to or interest in me as a person. She emphasized these things a little gratuitously, in fact.” He laughed.