So can you ever quit being a quitter?

I was sitting next to the teenaged son of an old friend the other night at a Chinese New Year’s banquet not far from my place in the Bay Area.

Gio was just a boy the last time I’d seen him so I nearly gasped when I saw him walk into the event standing as tall as his mother, both over six feet. He's half-Chinese, half-American, thin to a fault, with inquisitive eyes, tentatively approaching the cusp of manhood. He’s almost 17.

Most of the evening was Mandarin-only and so I was glad to have a crony, this fellow celebrant who grew up speaking English as his first language. We could people-watch together, swap stories. I wanted to find out more about him.

Yet I already I had a surge of empathy for this boy and his younger sister, now 11, who's the spitting image of her mother with her long-haired elegance and poise. I knew their father, who had left his wife and family when both kids were small.

I’ve never been a father, so I really have little idea of how such things happen. But I saw fragility in this young man and felt the sudden urge to scramble atop the precipice of moral high ground in an effort to say something reassuring.

“You’re turning out to be a wonderful young man, Gio,” I began. “Both you and your sister, you’re just special. I’m just sorry that your father isn't around to appreciate the incredible people you’re becoming. He's missing out, that's all I can say."

Gio nodded and thanked me. He said he didn’t speak to his father much anymore and I decided to let the matter go. Instead, we talked about school, how he wanted to study medicine. Too thin for basketball, he was instead trying out for the high school golf team that very next week.

“Wow, cool,” I said. “I played on the golf team in high school and college. You’re going to love it.”

There was instant recognition in his eyes. He talked about how Tiger Woods was his idol and said he was reading his biography to learn how to employ that killer instinct, to do what it takes to win.

“Do you still play golf?” he asked.

The question put me off course, like a shanked shot sprayed out of bounds.

“Um, no,” I said, tumbling from that high ground where I’d had no place being in the first place. “I quit playing a long time ago.”

“Why?” he asked, searching my face for an answer.

I was at a loss for words, which is so not like me. I knew what I wanted to say, but somehow couldn’t.

“Because I’m a quitter.”

*

On my worst days, when I’m being hard on myself, I admit it: “You’re just lame. You quit things.”

I loved playing golf. I was passably good, had played since childhood and had always viewed the sport as a few hours of precious freedom. Just walking off the 10th tee after a long day at work, I’d tell friends, I could feel the stress dropping from my shoulders.

But eventually I quit. I took a job abroad and allowed that new life to upset my comfortable routines. I left my clubs in the closet and later gave them away.

I did the same with cycling. In my 30s and 40s, I loved to hop atop my road bike for a 40-mile jaunt before work, or on weekends. I’d ride with my brother, with friends, or just by myself. At one point I even came to define myself as an avid amateur cyclist.

Then, again, I quit. 

I let my Lemond steel-framed road bike at home to collect dust. It still hangs abandoned on my garage wall in Las Vegas. I gave away another bike to a neighbor whose son had gotten into the sport. When an old Bay Area riding partner suggests that I oil up my twenty-seven-geared beast and head out for a ride, I just smile and say, “Yeah, sure,” never intending to follow though.

Quitting things isn’t always bad. Often it’s even good for you. Finally giving up bad habits such as smoking and excessive drinking is considered a victory of will power. Quitting a job you hated is like a fist pump and earns you back slaps and attaboys from your friends.

But why quit the things you love? Sure, circumstances change in your life. You get married, have kids, take on a demanding new job. Suddenly, you no longer have the time to devote to things that once made you happy.

Is quitting a moral weakness, a failure to see the big picture? Sometimes I wonder.

I used to play tenor saxophone. I began late, in my late 20s, while working as a reporter in Kansas City, a town with no shortage of jazz venues, good music and solid inspiration. I took lessons and even continued playing when I moved to San Diego.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing, like Grover Washington’s smooth jazz. I struggled with chord progressions and abstract fingering arrangements, but I kept up with my lessons. I can remember Saturdays at home alone, putting on a Dexter Gordon or Sonny Rollins album and playing along, picking up the rhythm and notes where I could.

Like the golf course, they were moments of pure unadulterated freedom.

And then, you guessed it, I quit. 

I stopped my lessons, moved on to other things, mostly a new demanding job that left me struggling to find the time to do the things I loved. Or that's what I told myself. And so I caved. I surrendered once again to the demands of a career. Or maybe I was just too lazy to keep doing something that I inherently enjoyed but which did not come easy for me.

That magical instrument ended up in the closet, next to the golf clubs and the bicycle.

One night, years after I stopped playing, my father came for a visit and we sat in my San Diego backyard, the place I used to woodshed and try to express myself in a new language.

Then my father turned to me in the darkness. He didn’t want to talk about journalism, or that front page story or that turn of phrase.

He wanted to talk about the saxophone. About sticking with things.

“Just think how good you’d be now if you’d continued to play,” he remarked.

If I hadn’t quit.

The moment made me want to weep, to evoke the blues in a sad minor key.

*

That night at the banquet, sitting next to the impressionable Gio, I had to admit something to myself, and eventually to him.

Like his father, I’ve been through a divorce. I’d gotten married, walked down the aisle in front of my family and friends, took a vow of unselfishness and exclusivity and longevity. And then our relationship somehow ended in misunderstanding and separation.

The most important relationship of my life to that point.

I’d quit at that, too.

Something compelled me to explain myself, to kneel inside the confessional, and tell this fatherless boy who was trying to figure out what it took to be a man that sometimes we just can’t fathom the reasons we do things.

“Don’t be too hard on your Dad, not right now,” I said. “Maybe one day when you’re older, you two can forge a relationship, if that feels right to you, and he can tell you in his own words why he left. He can do it from a bit of distance and, just maybe, you’ll be able to understand, and forgive him. Or not.”

He nodded, but did not look up.

“But now,” I said, “you have to take care of your mother. She’s the one who stayed. She’s doing the hard work. And your sister. They both need you.”

He nodded again. I touched his shoulder. “It’s not easy.”

It didn’t seem like enough.

“Text me this week and let me know how the golf tryout went,” I added. “And if you ever want to go out and hit a few shots, I’m always around.”

I didn’t want to give up on this boy. 

At that moment, I wished my own father was still alive and that he was sitting at our banquet table, so he could meet this fine young man who was having a such a difficult time finding his way. 

And perhaps more than that, so he could see that his oldest son wasn’t really a quitter.