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Solomon Jones finds wealth in his family instead of in...wealth

I JUST SAW my son consume a huge bowl of spaghetti, and as I watched him, my life flashed before my eyes.

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I JUST SAW my son consume a huge bowl of spaghetti, and as I watched him, my life flashed before my eyes.

I thought of the aspirations I had as a child, when watching "Perry Mason" on my grandmother's black-and-white TV convinced me that I should be a rich and famous lawyer. I thought of my teen years, when I believed that my rapping skills would propel me to hip-hop fame and fortune. I thought of my novels, which I know will someday become movies.

Then I looked at the boy, ruthlessly eating my fortune away while casually watching YouTube gags on his iPod.

I can't be mad at him. He's just doing what he has to do in order to grow into an offensive tackle, earn a science degree on an athletic scholarship and win a Nobel Prize.

But I must admit I never imagined it would be this way when I was a kid and thinking about the direction my life would take. Back in the '80s, when I'd sit in my bedroom watching "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," I marveled at how those wealthy people never seemed to have any problems.

I didn't realize until much later that the people they featured never had kids. Now I know why.

If they'd featured kids on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," the little darlings would've had host Robin Leach tied up in the galley of daddy's yacht, force-feeding him saltines while torturing him with Bob Dylan remixes. They would've buried him up to the neck in a sand trap at Augusta and pelted him with golf balls and tees. Worst of all, those kids would've shown America that being a parent when you're rich is kinda like being a parent when you're poor. You've just got more money for the therapy.

America wasn't quite ready for that much truth back then, and frankly, neither was I.

My vision of being a rich and famous guy didn't include a lot of the hard stuff. It simply involved being rich. I always had some vague image of being married with children, but I had no idea what that meant.

I thought my wife and I would be like George and Weezy, owning some company while movin' on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky. But we wouldn't make the Forbes 100 through some labor-intensive chain of dry cleaners like the Jeffersons. No, we'd do it through good old-fashioned ingenuity. And if anyone had the gall to ask how we'd made our millions, we'd take a page out of Smith Barney's book, and have some old, bald, British guy say 10 magic words.

"They make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it."

Had we done things the way I'd planned, I would've earned more than money. I would've earned my law degree and become a rapping, writing attorney, beating modern-day Hamilton Burgers in the courtroom and at the club. Alas, things didn't work out that way, because LaVeta and I didn't care as much about money as we did about each other.

Instead of George and Weezy Jefferson, we became James and Florida Evans. But our "Good Times" never took place in Chicago. Our good times were in our home. In fact, our times were so good we had children - children who are now eating us out of that very home.

Still, I wouldn't trade one day of it, one hour of it or one minute of it, even if it meant being rich.

I'm glad I changed diapers and wiped noses. I'm glad I played catch and told stories. I'm glad I'm here to see my kids get big enough to eat more than I do, because nowadays, when my life flashes before my eyes, there are people in it who love me as much as I love them.

And that's what makes it all worthwhile.