I've got this kid...

He's one of those kids (and I use the term loosely now) about whom everyone always used to say, "He'll go far!" Well, he certainly did...about as far as you can go before you start getting closer again. All the way to the other side of the planet. My dear firstborn now resides in China. I won't go into the whole story of how he ended up there, but there he is, in Shanghai. Of course when I tell people that, they always say, "Oh how interesting! What does he do?" And that's where I go all mumbly. I don't know how to describe it.

He's sort of in partnership with some other guys he met over the last couple of years there. (By the way, he's all of 22.) They're trying to put together all these various development projects. Construction projects, financing projects, what have you. They're spending lots of time going to lots of meetings with lots of different Chinese officials and businessmen in lots of different cities trying to put these deals together. If any one of them works out, ka-ching! We're talking major bucks. But so far, he hasn't made a dime at it. I guess the short way to put it is, he's a wannabe player. Sometimes I tell people he's honing his world domination skills.

He's really, really smart. He's like a knowledge sponge. He didn't speak a word of Mandarin when he went to China, and now he's totally fluent. People who know him are all convinced that he's going to be wildly successful.

And yet, I still have this vision of him 20 or 30 years from now, a shady-looking middle aged guy with three-day-old stubble and frayed cuffs, scrounging drinks from some young yuppie types, feeding them all these stories about how he used to be somebody important.

It's a mother thing.