"People Never Notice Anything"

 Yesterday was our last trip to Ben Hurd’s. The kindly old Christmas Tree farmer, so much like a Santa figure himself with his white beard and unaffected friendly manner, died sometime last year, leaving the acres of Christmas pines, the two gigantic holly trees, and the porch with its focal stove as an item on his will to be bequeathed to the California Highway Patrol for whom he worked before turning to Christmas trees.

I reread The Catcher in the Rye around the holidays and still had Holden’s admonishment “people never notice anything” in my mind as I took my kids through the familiar rows to pick out a tree one last time. Before having children, I never bought a Christmas tree; it seemed odd to me that anyone without children would waste money on such an unnecessary item. When Gina and I celebrated our first Christmas together in Buenos Aires, I was disinterested in the subject enough to make her call home wondering if I was even planning to do anything on the hallowed 25^th. This feeling of course being exacerbated by being 1000s of miles from home in a place where Dec. 25^th is the official beginning of summer.  

As a kid, my parents didn’t go anywhere consistent to pick up a tree in fact, try as I might, I can’t remember buying a single tree with them. God. I can remember cereal commercials from when I was a kid, but I can’t remember buying a Christmas tree? What a bad trick of my middle-aged mind. 

Maybe we all remake our memories of Christmas when we have kids. We build up our own traditions, decide the ratios for the standards: Santa, cookies, décor, etc. For example, as a kid, throughout December, my mom was frequently baking cookies. They’d be on the table for anyone who wanted them. When my grandparents came over at some point during the season, my grandma brought cookies, too. For us, Christmas had a lot to do with the baking and eating of cookies. But, this isn’t really something I’m that interested in doing with my kids. Baking stresses me out on a good day, and with kids helping the mess gets unwieldly quickly. So, I ask my mom for cookies as my reoccurring present. Hers taste much better than mine anyway. 

I like to see Christmas lights on houses, but I’m not going to put them up myself. I have a hard enough time doing the spider webbing for Halloween. It’s not like it’s an altogether Grinchy Christmas around here though. We have some traditions. One of which is to listen to a “Christmas Raps” LP from the 1980s that I found in some bargain crate when I was younger. We put it on while we decorate the tree. While I carry on another time-honored tradition, that of the dad largely absenting himself from these festivities to clean up the house. While my mom and I would put up the lights, or put on the ornaments, my dad was usually in the kitchen doing the dishes or something. I often wondered why he didn’t participate in the direct way my mom and I did; now as a dad myself, I understand: from the dad perspective, it’s impossible to see a task that needs to be done and not plunge into it. With the kids occupied, it’s the perfect time to clean up the kitchen—which is constantly on the verge of collapsing into a chaos of dishes, overflowing trash, and little pieces of this or that on the floor that my 9-month-old daughter will put in her mouth. I can participate in Christmas from over here, listening to Christmas Raps and occasionally taking a picture. But for now, let’s get to work on these dishes. 

The one tradition that I never absented myself on was picking out a tree. Our first child—my oldest daughter— was born in November, so probably one of the first things we did as a newly expanded family was to buy a tree and when we did, we went to Ben Hurd’s. 

…

It doesn’t snow here. Maybe one morning every other year has a very light dusting that disappears by noon. My kids, who are barraged with Christmas images of ice and snow, sledding, snow men, etc. think of snow in a mythological sense and wonder aloud why they should be deprived of it. I try to explain to them that while snow does have some very beautiful aspects, it is a biproduct of a kind of miserable cold that they would not like, given as they are to not wearing enough clothing to adequately prepare for any temperature below 60 degrees. Of course, I was the same when I was a kid. All kids, for whatever reason, can’t stand the idea of a single superfluous article of clothing. When we get older, the situation becomes opposite. The kid’s thought: “Better leave that sweater at the playground, I don’t want to have to drag it around” becomes the adult’s: “better bring that sweater, I don’t want to be cold.” Of course, kids have smaller capacities for hauling stuff around. I felt so encumbered by a sweater in my arms when I was younger; it was like being shackled to a radiator or something. Now, I just put it in my backpack, or throw it in the backseat. Along with the kid’s extra clothes, I’ve usually got half a suitcase in tow when I go anywhere.  

In coastal California, it rains in the winter. To my wife, Christmas is a cozy day in from a drizzling rain. To me, there is nothing Christmasy about rain except maybe very early in the morning, when it’s still dark outside and you can’t see it, but you can hear it clattering all over the place in the dark, making oily pools in the streets filled with distorted Christmas light. No sun has ever risen on a rain-scape that I’ve appreciated much. They have too much grey in them to excite any sense of appreciation in all but the parched desert dweller, iridated with a lifetime of sun, looking to extinguish some of it and hydrate.   

After my daughter was born, and we went to get a tree. I was probably imaging a muddy fern-crowded forest with a couple of scraggly trees. Nothing to compare with the classic Christmas image of snow-dusted holly berries, the bright scent of pine on a cold breeze and, familiar sound of snow being stomped off from boots when people came in to pay for their trees, and the absolute magic of a hot drink when it’s that cold outside.  

Ben Herd’s Christmas Tree Farm not only met my pessimistic expectations, it confirmed them. A clearing in a redwood forest. Ferns and mud all over, with scraggly trees. How could these farmed trees complete with the sequoia giants just a few feet away standing 100 feet tall and absorbing every last particle of nutrient from the soil? And yet, dammit if that place didn’t come to feel as Christmasy as Christmas Raps and the Pogues “Fairytale of New York” to me! As much as I appreciate the ideal Vermont scenario with snow, and brave green trees in the face of it, and draft horses or whatever, Christmas, at least the only part of it I’m really involved in, has become a fern crowded, muddy clearing the redwoods.  

Maybe the first time we went, it was drizzling, with a low fog crowding the small trees and beading them with moisture and so it appears that way in memory. A fire going on the front porch, a place to dry off, have a cup of hot cider and chat a bit with the proprietor and whoever else was buying a tree that day. In reality, I think the last bunch of years we’ve gone, it has been a beautiful sunny day with a steam rising from the wet ground and the trees to refract the light into rainbow beams pointing to all the sacrosanct trees—scrawny as they may be. It didn’t match the traditional Christmas scene, and it wasn’t even necessarily cozy—as it could be in the rain—but it was beautiful, recalling spring rather than winter when everything is thawing out and waking up. The place, no matter how late you arrived in the day, always felt like it was just waking up. 

The only thing that snagged on the picturesque scene was the people who came wearing clothes for the ski resort: pompomed ski caps, overstuffed coats, snow pants on the kids for god’s sake! It’s 60 degrees out here! But I guess, for some people, that’s how they make a winter, that’s how they make anything, put on the right clothes and there you are. But, being from Michigan, wearing a knit ski cap in 60-degree weather will never look anything but absent-minded to me.  

So with Ben gone. This year the farm was volunteer-run. From what we picked up on, no one is likely to want to take it over. It’s not a very lucrative venture. Tend to a crop of trees all year to sell at $50 a pop really only works when you’ve got a retirement income to supplement.  

My son kept choosing trees and then being on the verge of a tantrum if we didn’t pick that one; there was tree guys up in one of the redwoods, 100 feet up sawing down branches yelling to each other in Spanish. My daughter wanted to know when she’d be able to get the cookie they give you at the end, and then, once we finally picked out a tree and sawed it down, we discovered we didn’t bring the required cash to pay for it, so I had to drive 10 minutes back down the mountain to a grocery store to get cash back. By the time I got back, I just felt flustered, and, we had somewhere else to get to anyway, and off we went, leaving behind that first really established Christmas tradition, according to old Holden Caulfield, not having noticed anything.

That night, I had to ask my wife, she’d been going there since she was a little girl, and she’d returned to take her own children there. I wondered if she weren’t feeling a little sad, a little emptiness after her last visit. But while I was in the middle of asking her, our nine-month-old daughter woke up crying. My wife sighed, rolling over to pick her up. “I don’t know,” she said, “It’ll probably hit me next year.” And I went to sleep thinking about Holden Caulfield and what he would’ve been like with kids of his own and what he would’ve had to say about noticing things after calming tantrums, making assurances, and having to leave to get cash to pay for the tree. After you have kids, you sort of just farm out the noticing to them. They’re going to do so much more with it anyway. 

We went home, put on Christmas Raps, dug out the decorations and ornaments, and I went over to watch from afar; capitalizing on the momentary distraction to wash the dishes. That might seem callous, but it’s the best place for a dad, watching, appreciating, remembering. And now that the tree’s up, I’ve been noticing the coming and going of these parking lot tree sales, a paltry string of lights, a wire cage of trees. There’s no atmosphere, no warm drink, nothing to even look at, hell, they probably even pick your tree out for you. I may not notice anything, I may have passed the torch to the next generation, I may be saddled with conflicting ideas about what Christmas even looks like, but there’s no way I’d buy a tree from a parking lot. That must only work for the people with enough imagination to wear ski caps in warm sunny weather. 

I guess we’ll have to create a new tradition next year. I’m in favor of getting a permit and driving up the mountain and just sawing down our own damn tree. If we drive up high enough, there might even be snow.  

Merry Christmas.

Skating to Buck the Trends

 On Halloween, trick-or-treating with the kids, we passed a pumpkin with a “6-7” design. I figured it was some inside joke for the people in the house, but my wife told me it was an inside joke for young people in general. Only confirming what has been a burgeoning thought for a while now, viz. I have no idea what the world’s youth are paying attention to. Yes, the collective adult world has been baffled by the fad of “6-7”, so I’m taking convenient example and, yes, it’s very old of me to use this example, but, like “6-7” itself, it’s just a device to get to something more meaningful.  

Rather than use my complete lack of understanding for this phenomenon as a litmus for my increasing obsolescence I have held onto it and have seen it become an appreciation of the place I have worked to get to since I was twelve or so, a place most youth aspire to: total detachment from fads. I guess this is a place most adults find themselves either by design or by accident sooner or later.  

The coincidence is that when you achieve the lofty, detachment that young people work hard to affect, you lose a good deal of your conversational fodder which is what allows one to connect to the world at large. I used to get together with my peers and discuss everything going on in the world, from singular things like “6-7” to politics with global consequences. Gradually, very gradually, I’ve stopped consuming the media which—I didn’t realize—was my primary source for this conversational material. Without the news, without TV, hell, I don’t even watch movies anymore, I’m left with a world that only seems to change in the physical. A new bridge is built; I can’t miss that. A building is torn down, and I see something change, but the everchanging effluvia of the world, I’ve managed to mostly tune out, and when I do have chance to talk with people without a directive driving the conversation—which isn’t often—I don’t have much to say. 

However, back when I did have “something” to say, it was almost always a complaint anyway. Almost always just a rejection of whatever was being discussed and then a reiteration of my manifesto that provided the basis for this rejection: “it’s all just manufactured crap; there’s a great deal of pain and suffering in the world, and what are we doing about it by consuming this tv show, or thinking about this superfluous topic?” But at least when I talked about this, I could speak from authority, because I still knew what was going on in the world enough to reject it. Perhaps this is the requirement: you have to demonstrate understanding of the world you are complaining about, otherwise, you are just crochety, and give the impression that everything just upsets you. 

But having kids changes the effect of the world; it makes it nearly overwhelming, even in its smallest aspects. I used to get bored. I used to feel sad. Since having kids, I’ve completely lost both of those responses to the world. I always feel a little overwhelmed by the stimulus coming at me, which I guess is why I’ve had to mute so much of it. And the profound emotional responses I used to get have either been suppressed or have dissipated for having become irrelevant in my day-to-day life. I no longer wonder what I’m going to do with a Sunday afternoon—I just hope I can squeeze a little gardening in between the trips to the kids’ section of the library, the playground and playing Candy Land. Usually, the only thing I manage to do is stand around in the garden and look at it. I no longer wander around at night and feel like a 19^thcentury romantic poet because I’m asleep or trying to get to sleep by 9pm. 

But this change in my relationship to the media of the world to the concrete has wrought some interesting changes, things that I think I lost after early adolescence when I stopped using my imagination as much and started consuming a lot of media. I’ve noticed the same change in my wife, too. While I don’t pay attention to the news, or modern music and celebrities, I’ve become more aware of my responsibilities in the place I occupy in the moment, ie. where I’m standing and who I’m standing there with and my responsibility. 

…

On my way down to San Francisco to catch up with a friend, I stopped at the Ukiah skatepark which has a nice little bowl section. When a ramp is about three feet or so, I’m able to do things fakie as well, so I was having a lot of fun the more warmed up I got. I keep a pair of skate shoes in my car and they were rapidly falling apart the longer I skated. I was also wearing a pair of pretty tight jeans. I don’t like them that tight, but that’s how they came in the mail, and I wasn’t going to bother returning them. So, I probably looked strange to all the kids there, old and out-of-touch, scarecrow shoes and pants, but I was having fun and I had almost no time limitations. 

A kid, probably about 12 or 13, joins me in the bowl section. Since it’s just the two of us, we’re taking turns and watching each other skate. He’s got a good fakie stall—I don’t know what it’s called—and his 180s are slapping down really nice each time. So I complement him. 

“Dude, you’ve got those 180s down! The slap sounds great when you’re popping them every time! Like textbook!”

He thanks me and says how fun they are. I know, I like 180s, too. But damn if I can get them to pop like that every time. But I’m having fun doing fakie to 50-50 which is something on larger ramps I can never get back on the transition from. 

We’re taking turns skating a while, but it’s a big park and so, to keep my momentum going, a few times when he’s skating, I skate away to another section. At some point I hear his mom—or whoever she is—say from her bench something about him not “breaking open his head” or something. I figure she’s just telling him to be careful, normal mom stuff. But then it sounds like she’s really kind of berating him. I don’t know, I’ve got my headphones on, and I don’t want to be nosey. So I’m barely hearing all of this go down.

She keeps yelling and eventually they leave the park and return to a customized school bus in the parking lot which looks like their home. It’s painted a flat gray and has a trailer with some crap on the back. I see a lot of school bus homes in Northern California, and none of them have been customized for aesthetics, but this one looks particularly drab, uninteresting and messy. Between songs on my headphones, while I continue skating, I can hear the mom yelling at the kid after they get back to the bus. I hear him mutter responses, but he never yells back, probably because each time I hear him respond, she yells even louder. When I pay attention to what she’s yelling, it’s obvious she’s a little crazy:

“If you were to fall and bust you mouth! and I had to take you to the dentist! and they prescribed you antibiotics!, I won’t be responsible! for the nuts who would attack the dentist for prescribing antibiotics!”

Or some kind of crazy shit like that. I’m listening to this go on and on, and I keep thinking about the kid landing those 180s so textbook and the smile on his face when I noticed and I start feeling mad. The yelling starts to feel like it’s aimed at me and I’m skating less and listening a lot more until I start thinking, “I can’t be a witness to this bullshit.”

I skate a bit more, but I’m trying to come up with a plan. I need to do something to communicate this kid’s worth to him. I need to tell him I see him. I see his potential that his crazy mom is paranoid, or bi-polar or something and doesn’t know what the hell she’s ranting about. As I keep skating, I can hardly focus because I’m thinking how important it is for me to tell this kid that he’s good. That he’s important, and capable of the same greatness as everyone else. All the while, I can hear her yelling. The bus isn’t leaving, just sitting in the parking lot. The worst thing is that there are other people at the park. Not just skating, but playing tennis, exercising, etc. Other people hearing this yelling, who are just ignoring it or figuring it’s none of their business. Do they know there’s a kid in there for god’s sake? Do they know it is a kid on the receiving end of this paranoid rant? Someone who’s got a life ahead of him, a long path through the world who is being influenced by this shit. 

I go out to the car, just across the parking lot from the bus and change my shoes, slowly, trying to decide what to do. I don’t want to have a confrontation with this woman. I’m all sweaty and shirtless from skating, who knows what it might look like to the casual passerby, but I’ve got to do something. I finish changing, hop in the car and drive right up to the bus, roll my window down and start shouting to the kid.

“Hey kid,” I start, wishing I’d asked him his name earlier. “Hey kid, you’re a great skateboarder.” I think I started with this because his mom seemed to mainly be interested in yelling at him because he was skateboarding, or wanted to skateboard, but then I started in on the more general. “You’re going to be great some day. Keep skating; you’ll be great some day. Don’t let her get you down. This won’t last forever.” By now the yelling coming from the bus and risen to a frantic volume and pitch as it was directed at me. But I didn’t pay it any attention.

“Kid you’re going to do great things. This won’t last forever, you’ll be out on your own soon. Keep skating, you’re going to do great things.” I was babbling now, just yelling a message of positivity, hoping he could hear it over the screeching which was coming from the bus, but the rage I heard in her voice made me feel like I’d beaten here and her spell on the kid. It reminded me of a cartoon when the protagonist gets their confidence and shouts down the antagonist and the antagonist, realizing they’re beaten, can only scream in futility. It felt like that.

Back when I was more caught up in the world, when I paid more attention to the news, and trends in music and fashion, I would’ve been upset to hear this kid get yelled at, but I don’t know if I would’ve considered it my business to respond to it. Now, it’s like I don’t have an option. I’m there and I’m thinking of my own kids and I just react. 

So, most of the time I don’t know what to talk about, and I don’t know what profound personal feelings I still have to delve into, but maybe without all this excess filter, I’m more inclined to just act. Which I prefer over knowing what’s being discussed in the news, in social media. The world is right here, happening around me and rather than holding it at a distance and inspecting its products and byproduct for meaning, I can stay out-of-touch and just tell the young people that they are important and that I believe in them. Hopefully, with more practice, my message will gradually become more coherent. 

 

 

The Inspiration in Obsolescence

I met up with a friend last Friday night after a lot of back and forth about whether we should meet up. Neither of us really very interested in denying ourselves the sleep that we would’ve enjoyed rather than hang out but, at the same time, aware that we need to maintain friendships and, well, have a life separate from work or home. 

Despite our reluctance, we managed to have a decent time meeting up at a bar that serves tea and mostly seemed to be hosting an older crowd that night. As I age, I am becoming increasingly disquieted at finding myself at college-age events. The students, who until recently seemed like slightly younger peers have suddenly become children. No matter how I screw up my eyes when I look at them, they live in a world different than mine, and though I don’t warrant the same attention from them, they see the same otherness in me. I have aged out beyond the extent of their imagination. Because they cannot imagine being me—42, three kids—I can no longer remember being among them. And we when we interact, I smile a lot more than is necessary, hoping that will get me seen even though I know it will probably only more firmly place me into an invisible category for them: strangely eager old guy. 

My friend and I sat at our table, drinking immuni-tea. I haven’t had alcohol in over a year now and most people my age are more than willing to skip the beer. No one with young children who is over the age of forty wants to wake up remotely hung over. Saturday morning, you want to be at the top of your game so that when the kids start to tantrum in public you don’t accidentally raise your voice too loud, or so that when the tears come over an everyday injustice, you don’t react too callously, or too “I-told-you-so”.

In our booth, sharing the bitter tea, we talked a little about books, a little about music, but sometimes when I talk about these things now, my old passions desert me. I can’t work up the diatribes I once could. I could sit down with someone who professed an absolute adoration for Crazy Town or Barenaked Ladies and I probably couldn’t work up the indignation I would’ve felt about this before. I might not even be able to make myself care.

Even more frightening, I can get lost in my speech. Unless I’m telling a story, I can forget my point and start babbling, just grabbing at words to try to find my way back to my point. I keep talking but my mind is screaming “what are you saying? You don’t know what you’re saying!” My increased sensitivity to talking too much, or interrupting people only exacerbates this.  

I used to pontificate; I used to hold forth, discourse at length on subjects which interested me and, especially those which bothered me. I can remember telling people how wrong they were in their personal tastes on things. I wasn’t completely serious, I had fun with these conversations, but my opinions flowed thick and fast borne on a steady current of beer breath and cigarette exhalations. If you weren’t with me, I was willing to listen, but I certainly wouldn’t flag on my rebuttal. These days, the person who thought “Come My Lady” was a good song, could probably knock any argument down from me down immediately, if I put up any fight at all. 

But now that I’ve got my tea what I really like is dipping into past revelries with anecdotes—like any other elderly McDonald’s patron with the rustling newspapers and the cheap coffee at 7am. In my senescence, I’ve realized that most of my opinions are only feelings that are not substantiated and, therefore, undebatable. But the stories of being arrested by the Armenian military, of sleeping in an Uzbek brothel so sick I could barely move, New Year’s Eve in Prishtina, skinheads on the Chicago El at 2am, and, especially all the stories produced by the heady foment of punk rock, alcohol, and teenage discontent at growing up in a small blue collar town about an hour west of Detroit. Most people I meet here have had none of these experiences, so I can talk about them without fear of censor and I become more confident in the telling, which impresses my listenership into something like attention, or at least momentary tolerance.

Listen.

“Fuck this shit, this Prison City shit. We’re getting out. This place is bullshit.”

That was a song by the band Disease I played bass for at 16. We used to sing those lyrics with varied attention, varied commitment. They were terrible lyrics after all. But when we were angry at the shared place of our birth, we sang this song as imprecation rather than just angst. We leveled the words at specific instances, people, situations which, we reasoned, would’ve been avoided in another place, another time. 

At 16, Jackson, Michigan was a terrible place because it had no model of a future that we could aspire to reach. No one’s parents reflected our youthful curiosities, and there were no yuppies, or anyone in their 20s or 30s around who were successful in their creativity. If they were creative, it was something they engaged in when they were at home; it was never something anyone was paid for, or held as a profession. 

Much like conservative places the world over, my hometown was only populated with children and adults; there was no substantial group of searching, questioning, curious young people in their twenties and thirties sitting around Dolores Park on a Saturday idly watching the world go by and making plans to impact it some day.The twenty somethings in southern Michigan, at least back then, were emigrating.

Yet, we knew, growing up in proximity to large university towns and, later, the urban poles of Detroit and Chicago, that there were ways out there to redeem our creativity, this jouissance that we screamed in chorus in basement shows, that we danced out on muddy garage floors, that we roamed through when let out of school in our long walk/talks across town ranging in thought and distance. We knew there could be a place for it, it just wasn’t where we were. 

We didn’t dull it with alcohol, we tricked ourselves into believing we were making satisfactory use of the creative force when we drank. When drinking beers on a Friday night, sitting around the park, talking about what had happened that week, or dreaming about the future felt important, like we were constructing something. But in the morning, nothing remained, and we spent the week building it all back up again. We wrote new songs, sewed new patches, planned zines that no one ever made, drank bottomless diner coffees and sketched on napkins. We dissipated all this energy over the weekend screaming into a microphone—unrecorded—or packed into a stationary car on a January night singing along to The Misfits only the glow of our cigarettes betraying our expressions in the dark. 

But back then, o how I was understood, o how I was appreciated for the loud-talking, interrupting, obnoxious kid that I was whose catchphrase was “I haaaaate that!”. My face did not yet have the musculature for an ingratiating smile. I hadn’t eaten the fruit that would force me to see how few people cared about my opinions and I reeked of them, belted them out at the slightest provocation. Ah god, I was so sure and so supported and so contra-bullshit. 

And as annoying as I could be, my friends were my ardent supporters. They saw something in me despite their parents’ objections. And it was obvious they enjoyed my company. For the last ten years or so, I have very rarely felt sure of anyone’s approval. When I speak to anyone now, I must always weigh my words, for I am always being judged by the content of my conversation. Am I being entertaining enough in my speech? Am I being thoroughly intellectual and supporting my conclusions? I feel this current to conversation that must be maintained, and its maintenance is exhausting. I’m always on the verge of dropping the ball and earning the disapprobation of my interlocutor. “Ugh, that guy? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about! Ugh, that guy? He just blabs on and on.” I never felt this when I was a kid with my friends. I talked, they listened, or they talked, and I listened. That’s all there was to the exchange.  

As a result, I maintained a comfort with them that is almost physical. When we are together, maybe once a year, I find myself wanted to lean on them, put my arm around them, be wrapped up in them and protected by them as I once was. 

We have maybe two hours a year to reunite, but they are times I relish because, once together, we can go back to being understood as we once were, we can talk in the off-handed way we once did without worrying about judgement, even without the beer. 

And as I get older, and I feel more detached from the world around me, I find myself thinking more and more about the place that I once declared so brashly to be “bullshit” because all my friends stayed there together, still despising it, but knowing that it was important for their identities to stay twined with that force. The lack of validation kept them creative. They are not employed in traditionally creative sectors, but they have remained profoundly creative because they never tried to sell their creativity; it was never anything with any market value, but rather something vital. They still work all day, go home, put the kids to bed, and then they paint, write songs, sketch, doodle. I don’t know anyone else who makes time for these things. 

When I struggle to find time to meet with new friends; when I feel alienated by the place I have found myself in, I go back to these memories, these friends, and I imagine meeting with them every Sunday morning, having coffee and just talking without direction, just taking comfort in each other’s presence and being revitalized by it. And I understand why immigrants go back home when they are old, why they return to that which they left behind, which they likely held in contempt, because it was the same place that once gave them the confidence to leave, whereas all subsequent places were indifferent to their coming or going. Only the first place can ever say “go ahead, go see the world; I’ll always be here because you can only have one place you are from.” And likewise, those friends will be the only people who remember who you were when you were first filled with the divine afflatus of adolescence and can still restore this feeling for you even, and especially, when you are old because they never knew the you who misplaced confidence, or bumbled through opinions. 

…

Back in the near-present,  my friend and I continued our conversation after the tea had run out and even into the street while I unlocked my bike. I have been fortunate to make new friends—even if I find it difficult to make time to meet with them—because I had such great friends when I was young. They created a paradigm for friendship which may not be easily satisfied, but continuously provides me with good people willing to listen to my stories, even if my arguments are not as potent as they used to be, even if I get a little confused. I can only hope continuing to talk and listen will keep my conversational ability sharp enough for membership with the early morning McDonald’s crowd when I make retirement. That there will still be a place for my talk, and still an audience gracious enough to receive it even when my opinions become nonsensical and removed from all real-world context because, I will still have stories which, as time goes by, only get richer for their increased obsolescence. Perhaps it is what we disdain in argument that we appreciate in stories. If that is so, clear a seat for me on retirement row; I’ve got some whoppers. 

Skateboarding in Samsara

Last week, I had a minute to call a friend—I’ve had a few of these moments lately, driving like 18 miles to work, I’ve gotten used to ensconcing myself in the car, like someone dropping into a couch after a long day. You jerk open the door and enter the temporary room, sealed off from the world. There’s the radio, but after driving for the last couple of months, I’m on to the patterns in the radio. It was only made to be listened to in 3-minunte doses and its repetitive nature is frustrating, but not to the point of accepting silence in its place. If I haven’t had the foresight to put on music of a podcast before getting into my moving lounge, I can’t do it while in transit; the process of searching, picking through results, and selecting them is too complicated while moving through traffic—though I have risked it a few times. 

So, the phone it is, and while the drive isn’t really long enough to reconnect with the people I’d like to, it has allowed me to leave the bubble of my routine, if only for that moment while so deeply ensnared in it: the commute. 

My friend and I were talking about kids; now that we both have them, we are not the same people, and so any conversation brings this to the fore as we struggle to retain something of who we were when we first met, to convince the other that we haven’t changed that much, to convince ourselves. But it’s no good. We are different people. So my friend said, “when you have a kid, they become a part of you, they add on to you. You can’t be the same when you are with them, and when you are apart from them, you can’t go back to the way you were before they were in the world.” It is a somewhat complicated idea, but it goes along well with the idea that when you have a kid, you have broken off part of yourself, to walk around freely in the world—something I thought about a lot after having kids when things I used to enjoy seemed no longer worth the effort, or even confusingly uninteresting. 

Kids change how you orient yourself to the world. But, for the first few years at least, you think “when I have some time to myself, I’ll get back to being the ‘me’ I was before them.” That is, I’ll go back to going to shows, skateboarding, taking long walks around new cities, even going out with my friends at night, but you can’t because without that piece of you that is your kid, you no longer feel whole when engaging in these activities; you feel like part of you is off somewhere else and you—the you standing in the sought after moment— is a little more of an automaton than it used to be. 

I have also come to feel more comfortable as an older male with my children. I am a dad, and I like being seen this way. Other than the time I take on weekend mornings to write and skate a little, I live for the benefit of my family, or try to. It is weird when I am in the world alone and people perceive me as just “a guy”. I want to tell them that I have kids. That I am more than this. I suppose this is why men are stereotypically known for having wallet photos of their children that they like to show people. I work with students, many of them young women who I feel might be slightly distrustful of me, of suddenly finding themselves alone in a small office with me; I feel the photos of my children help to mitigate this. They see that I have kids and probably realize that my head is full of shopping lists, Little League, and skinned knees or something. They don’t have to worry I will try to hit on them.

So, I have lost the ability to really lose myself while going out at night, but there are still a lot of similarities in my life. As the breadwinner, I’m out of the house at least 40 hours a week, and because I have to absent myself for work, it’s easier to ride that momentum and continue certain volunteering efforts as well. On Saturday mornings, I help to clean up the local bike path, every year I organize a Coastal Clean Up, and occasionally I’ll attend some kind of meeting. 

My wife, on the other hand, is at home all the time. She is always watching the kids. Even when I am home, and she could have a break, it is hard to get out of the habit of overseeing the household and its functions. I am not entirely to be trusted; I don’t even know the correct place for the towels in the linen closet. And why should I? My regular working process takes place in an entirely different world. 

My wife told me the other day that the order, by descending happiness, was something like:

• Married man
• Single woman
• Married woman
• Single man 

She said she thought of all her aunts who don’t have kids, live more or less, at leisure,  and thought that there was some truth in this—even though it was just some clickbait absurdity. 

I sang the Carter Family song “Single Girl Married Girl”, in which the lives of each are compared through warbled lyrics like “single girl goes to the store and buys, married girl, wears just any kind”. When my wife and I didn’t have children, we sang that song to each other jokingly, but I was immediately stung by how true it had become. I am out in the world, feeling awkward without my children, but given my work schedule, and sleeping, (roughly 40 and 56 hours respectively) and the time I carve out for myself, let’s say maybe 6 more hours, so 102 hours. A week is 168. There are 66 hours I am with my kids. My wife, on the other hand, is always with them. She sleeps with the baby, right now she is waking up and making them oatmeal, even when the older kids go to school, she spends a significant amount of time in transit, back and forth to pick them up and drop them off. Even if she didn’t have a baby with her, there wouldn’t be much time to get involved in anything that required any amount of focus and, of course, the house always needs to be cleaned, the laundry always needs to be done.

Meanwhile, I am driving around talking about how strange I feel without my kids, precisely because I am away from them more than I am with them! Precisely because I have this time to muse about having children shows that I have not been changed that much by having children. I am different, sure, but my daily life has not been altered in the way it has been for my wife. 

Even while I write these words, I am at the café, I woke up at 5:30 and didn’t want to sit around and wait for everyone else to wake up, so I just drove over here. Would my wife have this same luxury? If she woke up and drove off, I would wake up very disoriented and, truthfully, I would wonder how long she planned on being gone for with a bit of irritation. Because I am always gone anyway, I figure, what’s another couple of hours in the morning on my day off? Especially when it helps me get back in touch with who I used to be. 

For the past year or so, I’ve been taking one morning each weekend to write and skate a little. It may seem unnecessary, but through these activities, I feel revived, I feel like I reclaim a little of what brought my joy and defined my nature before I had kids, when I was only an individual, without pieces of myself loosely orbiting around me. 

The writing—as you can see—doesn’t always go well, but it allows me to revisit old stories and recast them, audit them and make something new of them. It also allows me to arrest pieces of the present from their marshalled routine, hold them up and say “wow!” in a way that I just can’t do when I live them. And, what can I say, I also like drinking my coffee somewhere new; on clear days—which are rare—you can see the mountains from the café windows. I’ve seen some great sunrises stream over my little café workstation. 

And then the skating. Waaaaaaay back when I lived in San Francisco (the second time), Mikey and I used to meet to skate the West Oakland park on weekends and Jason called us the “geriatric skate club”. That was fifteen years ago. God knows what he’d say now, but contrary to making me feel old, skating is the only thing that makes me feel like I’m moving away from death and decrepitude. Rather than remind me of my mortality, when I get out there, get comfortable and start hitting the ramps as fast as I can, it’s like going back in time. When I’m able to land tricks I previously couldn’t, it’s like I’ve stolen them from fate, like I’ve gone back in time to make them happen.

Any Buddhist will tell you—or anyone with profound religious convictions—that trying to fulfill yourself is an empty pursuit. Striving after accomplishments, only makes us hungry for more accomplishments, sitting down a minute to scroll through social media, only makes us want to continue scrolling, eating that piece of cake, only makes us want more cake, well maybe not right this minute, but eventually. And all of these things are hollow. They’re just moving us down the conveyor belt toward death, just passatempi until the inevitable. The only way to break out of this cycle is to stop seeking any kind of fulfillment and become comfortable just being.

I see the logic in this. Yes, most goals feel hollow after they are met. Yes, the second donut isn’t as good as the first, but dammit if skating well doesn’t actually make me feel better, not through a sense of accomplishment, but just through a sense of enjoyment. When I skate, I enjoy the feeling of adroit movement over surfaces, the quick lift of going up a transition, the feeling of conveyance when you hit a rail and slide effortlessly over it and the brief freefall of riding off a transition and being pulled quickly toward the ground, only to come back up again—skating is kind of like playing with gravity. And doing it doesn’t make me feel a lack, it makes me feel a fulfillment, almost especially because I am older and not that good at it. I’m really just good enough to enjoy it without further attainment.

I try to make it home before it’s too late, but I get caught up and before I know it, it’s 9 or 10am and the kids have been up for hours. My wife, if she was ever going to get a break, should’ve gotten it this morning, but I was out pursuing that which is not even a pursuit. 

Single girl, single girl
She's going just where she please
Oh, she's going where she please
Married girl, married girl
Baby on her knees
Oh, baby on her knees

Skating is also the sole activity from my previous life that doesn’t feel fraudulent or lacking without having my kids be with me. Mikey came up a few weeks ago from the city at my invitation to go to a show. I tried to get into the music, but the bands are always taking themselves a bit too seriously, and the breaks between sets are hard to navigate. I don’t seem to know when or how to break off conversation with new people, or I read too much into it and imagine that, as these young people talk with me, they don’t even see me; when I’m without my kids, I seem to encounter a hesitation in people I strike up conversations with. Like, many of them would prefer to not be talking with me, or are looking through me even as they speak to me. 

Toward the end of the show, there was a tap on my shoulder, and a hoarse whisper in my ear. The band was playing, so I was completely incapable of hearing it—especially now that I’m older and have trouble differentiating background and “foreground” noise. The person tried again, but, without any context, I couldn’t even guess what they were trying to tell me. Then, I guessed it, and they affirmed my guess and with rather curt gesture of two hands spreading air: ‘move away from me’.

I had my back to this person. We were in a room about 20’x20’ with probably 40+ people. The band was playing, everyone was ‘dancing’ and, yet, I was being asked to move away. It was so unprecedented, I could only shake my head and take a tiny step closer to the person on the other side of me. But it made me feel sad, it made me feel like I didn’t belong. When I skate, there is no one to make me feel this way. No matter how bad the skating goes, I enjoy it. 

After the show, I came home and couldn’t sleep. Mikey got the extra room, so I slept on the floor in the kids’ room. I lay there trying unsuccessfully to sleep, just aware of my kids’ regular breathing, these pieces of me lying there comfortable in the darkness, dreaming their dreams, beginning their own constructions of the world, largely informed by the work my wife did getting them through each day, shepherding them to sleep.

Meanwhile, across the hall, she likewise tried to cross the night, getting as much rest as she could, intermittently waking to feed the baby and soothe her back to sleep. Of course I was at my happiest state, I thought. I had both worlds. I could go to shows, be dissatisfied, or go skate, and improve my mood, and then go home and be part of a family, be reabsorbed as someone with a purpose, a responsibility. No wonder then that a single man is lowest on the score of happiness (according to the clickbait graphic I gave earlier), as they age, they continually feel the push of the world against them, but with no refuge, as I was now enjoying on the floor of my kids’ room. A single man must continually confront their increasing irrelevance. My single male friends, like Mikey, all embrace this, they are creative and have found relevance in these creative pursuits. But my relationship to creativity has always been a bit more fickle and, I suppose, I seek to belong more than I am willing to acknowledge.   

I heard my infant daughter wake up and cry, and my wife roll over to soothe her, and I thought about the cost of my comfort, as I so often do, even if I have no idea to mitigate that cost. In the Buddhist sense, at least my wife is much closer to enlightenment than me. From her position, she is able to see the bones of the world, she can strip it down to the bedrock and face it, while I still cover it with as much distraction as I can. 

The difference is that, to me, children are just another aspect of a busy life. I love them, they are a part of me, but they are one facet of many in my existence. To my wife, they are existence. They strip away from the illusion of anything else. Is it any wonder then that women should be less happy once they have been thus “red-pilled”?

I think of this, waiting for sleep to come, but it never does. And about 5am, at the first light, I get up from the floor to meet the new day and go back to work, on to the next distraction. 

Parent/Child Communication Strategy

I have this memory of sitting in a Japanese restaurant in Disney World’s Epcot Center, with this thin, pathetic feeling weighing on my lap while my dad fumed over my reluctance to eat tempura.

It could’ve been a different dish, but the idea is the same: we’d been having a great time when suddenly, it was time to eat. While my parents, being adults, who’d cultivated an appreciation around eating, had looked forward to this portion of the day—had been anticipating it while I was riding Space Mountain for the third time—I had been completely oblivious to it. As a kid, eating was something totally perfunctory like going to the bathroom; when the urge came, you just did it. No reason to get worked about it beforehand. 

Sure, if there was ice cream or and meal with fries eating could be made enjoyable, but it wasn’t something I had cultivated any appreciation around now. 

Ramped up from the overstimulation of the amusement park, I wasn’t very interested in focusing my attention on a plate of something I didn’t recognize as food—southern Michigan, where I grew up in the 1980s and 90s wasn’t exactly an epicurean wonderland and the only non meat-and-potatoes-centric food I’d ever known was Mexican or Chinese. 

I don’t know what I said, but likely, I claimed to not be hungry; my hope secretly being that when my parents received the report that I wasn’t in need of food, they could consent to abandon the restaurant plan—an honest mistake— and return to the much more attractive amusements of the park which was, of course, right outside the doors of the restaurant!

It didn’t go this way, of course. I remember being yelled at. I remember feeling small and sad and wondering what I’d done to deserve such shoddy treatment when we were supposed to be having fun—when we’d been having fun all day. The change had come so rapidly, how could I, at six, have seen it coming. 

The only answer was that my dad was too quick to anger and showed his anger too strongly. For thirty-five years, I’ve carried that memory around with me as an injustice. Never imagining how I could share any part of the blame because real empathy generally comes from experience; how are we to know what it is really like for our parents until we have become parents ourselves? 

I’m not sure if everyone’s memory works this way, but mine was, until recently, very reluctant to find any fault with my childhood self. I fully acknowledge that from 10 to 17 I was hard on my parents, and no longer innocent, I was just as culpable as anyone else, even as much as an adult when I knew very well that I was doing something wrong—which was often. I wasn’t always able to help it, but that’s not my focus here. 

Until about 10, I looked upon myself as an angel who was only seeking to understand the world in this beautiful, wide-eyed way. If I was yelled at, if anyone was even upset with me, they were to blame. And I’ve carried instances of this around with me—like the above—as examples of how no one has a perfect childhood. I never felt I deserved to feel my dad’s anger. It was a heavy-browed, smoldering kind of anger and it scared me. My mom’s anger was something lighter, more exasperated and her efforts to hold my behavior in check never left any psychological marks. I assumed it was only natural that someone should tell me to stay in my seat and that it should be my mother. But when my dad said it, it came out differently, and I was afraid 

I now have angelic children of my own, all well under 10, who have led me to understand exactly how their behavior can cause you to raise your voice in a Japanese restaurant, yes, even while at Disney World, even while trying to have a fun day and create beautiful memories. Where I once dismissed my parents’ disciplinary actions as hasty and impulsive, I understand now how much restraint they had employed to keep from yelling at me a lot more than they did. 

In my memory, our good time had been interrupted for this boring, adult interlude of silk screens, lacquered wood, and bamboo. I sit still and am told to choose something from a menu which is incomprehensible to me. With no pizza, burgers, or fries, I don’t know what to order. My parents agree that tempura is something I will like. Ok, fine tempura. When it arrives, it is unfamiliar. I don’t know what it contains. I have never seen a food item that looks like this. I don’t want to venture to try it. My excitement after having been in the park all day is obscuring any hunger I may feel and yet I’m being forced to eat this unknown stuff. Feeling pushed into a corner, I turn to the only defense I have, I refuse hoping that this rough detour from galivanting around the park will soon be behind us and we’ll again be under the glowing lights, laughing, smiling, looking for all the world like a commercial.

To my parents the scenario was very different: being in charge, the entire experience to them was much more banal and exhausting. Parking, hotel, ticket purchases, transportation to the park, where to go once in the park, lines, and, importantly, proper care of their six-year-old and eight-year-old kids in 85-degree weather under a full Florida sun all day, including hydration, rest, food and sleep. Add to this that there are two parents who might not always agree on the best way to go about this, and each decision becomes something in which four opinions are introduced, four opinions which rarely coincide and have a tendency to annoyingly overlap, each ignoring the other (Imagine all the following lines overlapping each other a bit):

PARENT 1: “Ok, let’s take a break in the shade over there.”

CHILD 1: “Can we get ice cream?”

CHILD 2: “But we just took a break!” 

PARENT 2: “We’ll get ice cream, but then it’s time for a break.”

CHILD 2: “Awww, man!”

The decision to eat was likely late in coming—though it was summer, I remember it was already dark. We’d probably found an activity which everyone had been enjoying and, considering this was my parents’ aim in spending a large sum of money on the trip, they were loath to disrupt the moment which had been their very aim. But, the kids had scarcely eaten a thing all day, and they’d been out in the sun, and, well, they’re getting a little whiney—probably time to eat. But where? At this hotdog stand? Maybe the kids will eat that, but it’s more junk, and they had junk for breakfast (Here I can hear my mom (in the past) and my wife (in the present) saying, “all they’ve eaten all day is pancakes!”) “Ok, ok, then where? Hey, look there’s a really nice place that’s got _______ (insert parent’s favorite dish) right near here…what’s that? The kids wouldn’t eat that? Oh yeah, right, ok. Well, forget that.”

Without kids, my parents would never have been tromping around an amusement park all day. They’d done this solely for the benefit of my sister and me. And now that they had an opportunity to find a bit of enjoyment in it—say in eating something they liked—that, too, had to be forgone for the sake of the kids who would not be interested in eating such fare.

Meanwhile, my sister and I are yanking on them, pleading with them to get back in line for another ride, distracting them from making any decision, raising their blood pressure and cortisol. Before kids, my parents had come to greatly appreciate the act of finding a restaurant, now it has become stressful, and they wonder if it is even worth it. This makes them feel like they’ve sacrificed a part of themselves, and, potentially, will make them feel obdurate about enjoying at least one thing in spite of their children’s wishes. 

Finally, they arrive at compromise. It’s a bit of a long shot since the kids haven’t ever eaten Japanese food, but the parents are hoping that their kids will somehow understand that this is a unique situation and not everything is burgers and fries. Also, they might be hoping that their kids will evince some kind of cosmopolitan tendency, some kind of juvenile refinement and just eat the damn food.

Now they at the table in a crowded restaurant. They have committed, but they are having their doubts about this decision. The kids are squirming. They aren’t even looking at the menu. They are looking around, as if for the exit. It doesn’t help that, outside, the rides are all lit up and the music is blasting, and a costumed Mickey and Goofy are actually beckoning from a window and when the parents try to wave them away, or at least show that, “look, the kids just need to get something in their stomachs” that the costumed characters, probably just teenagers with chips on their shoulders about similar restaurant scenes wiggle their fingers in their ears and shake their rear ends.

The food arrives and, predictably, the kids won’t even look at it. The goddam tempura was $54! The kids have no idea how lucky they are to be eating at this restaurant in the park. When I was a kid, my parents would’ve smuggled in smooshed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and we never would’ve been in Disney World in the first place, we would’ve been at the county fair. These kids don’t know what they’ve scoffing at. I’m working my fingers to the bone so they can have a great childhood and now they’re bouncing up and down in their seats, making a scene. The other parents, whose kids are all very quietly eating their tempura—Jesus, look, that kid’s even got a napkin tucked into his shirt!—The other parents are all staring. They’re all thinking, “what brats those two shmoes are raising! Just another family that our taxes will end of paying for: free school lunches, unemployment, and probably jail, too.” 

The parents’ food has also arrived, it looks good. Hell, it is good. They’re trying to enjoy it, realizing that they’re actually really hungry after walking all over the park all day, and this moment off their feet with a good meal is exactly what they are in need of. The kids have decidedly turned up their noses at the food and, for lack of any distraction, are now on to begging to be allowed to go back to the rides. They can’t understand for the life of them why, if they are done eating, the whole family can’t all just get up and leave. “What are we sitting around all these kimonoed waiters for? Pirates of the Caribbean is right over there and, look, the line is really short right now!”

The parents try to just ignore this and salvage a scrap of enjoyment from their meals, but the incessant beseeching to return to the park is wearing on them. The kids think maybe the signs of change they detect might mean their parents are going to relent. In reality, it means their dad is getting close to losing it.

Let’s not overlook that the parents are now unconsciously trying to bolt their meals and, semi-consciously, they are aware that this rushed way of eating has become their norm. That this whole process has already been shifted to accommodate the kids (ie. sped up) and now the kids are demanding more accommodation. They are demanding to do away with the practice of eating altogether, at least when in amusement parks.

The little boy, with the sugar and artificial dye from cotton candy in his blood making sitting still almost impossible especially in this boring setting which, after the unprecedented sights of the day, decides to have a look under the table and realizes it might be temporarily diverting to slink all the way underneath. Why, it’s sort of like a cave down there, like from Pirates of the Caribbean. The other parents, hell, even the waiters at this point, are watching the kid sink under the table and thinking “wow, can you believe what some people let their kids get away with!” The dad, no longer able to bear the whole scene hisses “get up!” through teeth clenched around a California roll he hasn’t tasted. The boy, hearing the warning in the voice, scrambles to get up, hits the table with his back, knocks over the goddam water carafe which why the hell do they always have to bring one of those things over at a table with kids!? It’s like an invitation to disaster.

Everyone in the restaurant sees. The table is flooded. Good food is ruined. Water drips from the white linen tablecloth and, without thinking, the dad bellows some kind of warning at the kid, something which is more the product of embarrassment, hunger, irritation, and resulting brain chemistry that has been pushed and pushed until it boiled over. The words aren’t important. It’s the way it is said. A mother, who is infinitely forgiving, would never behave in that way no matter how irritated, but the dad, less patient, has now revealed something of his true character forcing the kid to wonder, for the rest of his childhood and well into his adult life, whether his dad, who could act in such a way could possibly love him. 

Thank god I had kids of my own so I could understand how one could feel such irritation and such boundless love at the same time. One does not preclude the other, hell, they almost go together, which would make no sense to me if I hadn’t experienced it. 

…

And so I try. I clench my teeth and try not to let too much anger into my face when my own wide-eyed and innocent kids, unable to focus on the meal, knock over the water, or the silverware while digging around under the table, but I know it’s not likely that I’ll respond in the right way every time. I can only hope that they’ll be a little more insightful than I have been, and it won’t require their having children of their own to understand how much I love them no matter what I say or do in a moment of vacation irritability.  

I also consider the possibility that perhaps some institutions—for example going out to eat—are best reconsidered. The time has passed when I could’ve brought my children bodily into my adult routines with me (and now that there are three, they’d mutiny anyway) and the luxury of eating in a non-fast-food restaurant is really best left to those with a bit more awareness of what their limbs are doing. Hell, even as an adult I knock the water over sometimes. 

Screen Door on a Battleship

 I have no acumen for mechanical labor. It’s strange to say, but I don’t have the patience for it. With written work, I find it easy to get started with a cup of coffee and start writing, reading, revising—and I enjoy using my own language no matter how dull the nature of the work. Even work reports can shine with unique phrasings, or even adroitly used punctuation. And at the end, you have something you feel a certain pride in, something which is representative of your ability. 

But working with gears, hinges, drills, drywall, and nails gives me anxiety. When the desired outcome isn’t achieved instantaneously, I resort to forcing things. I meet resistance and I keep pushing, which, of course, is how things get broken. And when the thing is broken, you’re worse off than before. Not only is the drawer, door, or light fixture still non-functioning, but now something new, something expensive, is lodged in there as well. 

Maturity has managed to curb most of my frantic impulses, but with kids, I know not to leave a job incomplete—as my wife often urges me to do. With the door still off the track, the screen still not in the window, the faucet still in pieces, I can’t pack up the tools and leave one more mess, one more incomplete in this house of incompletes. At any moment, there is laundry to put away, trash to take out, dishes to unload, toys, strewn around the backyard, art supplies dribbling down the sides of the table, and there’s no food to make dinner, there’s also no room in the kitchen to make dinner; it’s been taken over by unpaid bills and other random junk that’s arrived in the mail and hasn’t made it to the trash which, again, is overflowing. 

In this situation, to leave something undone, something I’ve probably been looking at all week, is the most obnoxious of failures. Even if I am only trying to leave it undone for a moment to collect my thoughts, the moment I leave the task, my son will look at me with his big eyes and ask, ‘now can we play superheroes?’ A simple request I’ve been flatly refusing while I went to the store to buy the required items, cleared the area for work, and got all the tools out (often in several trips because I never know what I need). I can’t bear to refuse such an earnest request again. Who knows how many more times I will be asked before an assumption is forged by my repeated refusal—an assumption that I am perpetually unavailable. Even if this assumption isn’t formed, how many more times will my kids even be interested in playing with their dad who lives in a different world than theirs?

So, the grout, the dining room table, the toilet tank must be repaired NOW, while everything is out, while there is opportunity to clear one space in the larger chaos of this house, while it’s so damn close to being fixed if I could just get this little plastic thing to move oh-so-slightly to the right *snap!* Dammit!

…

Yesterday, I hadn’t worked on my new bike yet, so I was a little anxious about changing out the tires—the back wheel has an extra chain tightening bolt I’ve never had before—but after eons of fixing flats at the side of the damn roaring highway in the dark—the tires of a bike are one mechanical thing I’ve become pretty comfortable with, and I was almost impressed by how quickly I got the job done with everything fitting back on right, with just the improvement I’d been hoping for. But then, there was the screen door. 

Doors—what is it with doors? I’ve only owned a house for about two and a half years and I’ve replaced everything with a hinge in the place excepting—thank, god!—the garage door and probably only because we never use it. The knobs on all the doors have been replaced, they’ve been locked from the inside and had to be picked open with a bent paperclip more than once; my son, when he was a toddler, locked himself in his bedroom and the door had to be smashed down to get it open and, most recently, the locking mechanism froze on the front door. I had almost got the thing off the hinges when I realized a could just break the old lock out. 

Every one of these repairs was an anxiety-inducing mixture of children barely restrained from the working area, tools, small, loseable pieces, vague printed instructions and Youtube videos on a grease-smeared phone screen which showed the whole job coming out easily simply because of one small difference. How anyone could enjoy this kind of work is utterly beyond me, but then again, people like to take things apart to see how they work—the very idea gives me acute anxiety. If it’s still working, I don’t even want to see where the batteries are let alone start pulling out the guts of the thing. 

When we moved in, we had a screen door on the sliding glass door to the deck. It was rattley and bent, and it didn’t move as smoothly as I would’ve liked, but it was fine. Then, as with all screen doors, one evening, when visibility was low, someone tried to walk right through it, mistaking the light through the reticulate network for the real, unadulterated thing. The door was so badly bent, so rattley stuck that the best course of action was to pull it off and toss it. I had to bend it up something fierce to get it to fit in the trash for weekly pick up. 

When you break something in your house, you have the idea that a newer, nicer screen will someday replace it, something shining and even noble, bravely sliding along its hinges to slam the aperture closed; you don’t expect to spent $100 to secure a similarly rattling, stuck, flimsy-looking screen, but that’s what you’ll get. At least if you’re me. 

And it’s a process to get to that undesirable point: pack the reluctant kids into the car, stand around the hardware store looking for someone, feel overwhelmed not by the selection, but the lack of selection—why not order it online? My god, is there anything I’d have less desire to do than spend an hour or two searching for screen doors that fit my frame online!? So, I take a gamble and just buy one. We forgot rope, so we throw down another $10 to buy some and, of course, it turns out to be much easier to just put it in the car and balance it on our heads. The whole family driving around town and running other errands, lifting the screen door up each time and positioning it just so, like a jerry can being balanced for the walk home in Africa.

Back home, the screen door is carried to the backyard while children run around and through my legs. The door is balanced against the sliding glass door for about five seconds before it’s knocked over when someone mistakes it for a functioning door and tries to open it and nearly crushes the blueberry bush which has already lost several branches to errant footballs and other backyard missiles.

The written instructions seem to basically say that the door should just be put in top-first and that the wheels which guide the door along the track will sink into the door until they’ve cleared the jamb. Maybe it’s just wishful reading, but it looks like I just need to force the thing in here. From the top, I can’t see what’s going on the bottom. I try to use my foot. Ha! I call my wife, who’s inside feeding our infant daughter. The previously eating baby goes into a chair and, deprived of her nourishment for so inessential a task begins, rightfully, to squall. The other children, attracted by the commotion, come over and peer directly into our fitful struggles to get the wheels up into the door to clear the track. Despite all the encouragement, no amount of force seems to want to move the wheel over the tiny groove in the door and, possibly to cheer us on, my son starts pressing the “radio” button on his electric motorcycle which plays the same obnoxious faux-pop sample over and over. So, there’s a crying baby, tinny ambient “kid’s” music, directions, questions, and a feeling of failure all competing for my attention.  

In my frustration, I slap my hand down on the deck, and my son asks, “why did dad slam the floor?” and, of course, I feel like a total idiot for not being able to hold back my frustration for one more crucial second because, after my wife shepherds all the kids upstairs and I am left alone to think, the wheel easily pops into place. However, perhaps as punishment for my outburst, no amount of screwing with the door (literally unscrewing, moving, and screwing the screws which control the track portion) will induce it to roll smoothly along the track. It bucks, it jerks, it teeters nearly as much as the previous broken door and, of course, this reveals to me just how cheap and flimsy the thing looks, skittering along its track, much like the door we’d intentionally ripped out and stuck in the trash months before only to squander $100 to reinstate. 

In the end, I just spray the hell out of the door with WD-40, roll it back and forth a bunch of times, and hope that repeated use will erode whatever is making it stick like that, but, very likely, it won’t be long before, some warm evening, when the sun is setting at just the right angle, and the crepuscular world is twittering with bird song, and releasing the perfume of the lavender which is all but taking over out there, someone will be too overcome by the beauty of such a world to heed the flimsy impediment of the screen door, or perhaps will unconsciously choose this moment to topple the artificial barrier between themselves and such a harmonious scene. Either way, it won’t take much to render the door unserviceable given that it wasn’t put on correctly in the first place. Then, with the bent door removed, all of us with sigh with relief and not having to jerk an extra door open every time we want to duck outside and escape the chaos within. In this moment, the cycle will begin again. We’ll spend six months talking about getting a screen door, and then a precious six minutes cramming the thing onto the track to solve the problem and hold one small aspect of the chaos at bay, if only for a moment. What else can we ask for?

YA Fiction for Forty Year Olds

  

Yesterday, while I was out, my wife asked my kids what they wanted to do tomorrow. My daughter was excited about a treasure hunt, but my son proclaimed, and I can only imagine loudly, “play with dad!”

I don’t know what I’ve done to merit this interest. I’m lousy at playing. When I’m not losing interest in the game and bugging the kids to do something else, I’m having to cut short the game, or pause it to make a cup of coffee or something. 

I enjoy playing with my kids—I’m glad that my son has picked up on this—but I don’t think I’m good at it, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before this realization hits. But reading with them? With enough library books, I could do that all day. 

As a reader, as an English major, I’ve been into reading with my kids since they were babies. From repetitive board books to the present-day YA graphic novels, there is nothing so enjoyable to me as coming home from the library, settling into the couch to explore new stories and characters together. 

My kids, unaccustomed to iPads or even much television, enjoy reading (or being read to), as well. For six and four, their endurance to listen to their dad narrate book and after book is impressive. They can sit there for hours just listening. And when I finish a book, they hand me the next one eagerly asking, “can we read this one now?”

When I go into the bookstore, even if I can sneak away for a moment, I don’t even bother looking at the rest of the store, I just hang out in the kids’ section, helping to steer the purchases into things I want to read as well. When we go to the library, I’m the one making almost all the selections, saying things like, “hey, look, the author of Smile has another book!” or “all right, a new Babysitter’s Club!”—Books which would’ve been anathema to me when I was my kids’ age have been transmuted into exciting worlds I may have missed out on earlier but I’m still able to catch up on. 

The sole catch is that the most common moral of these stories doesn’t have the same urgency or even relevancy for me. A surprising amount of these stories develop a sense of inferiority in the protagonist which is resolved in one of two ways. 1. They eventually discover what they good at (usually with the help of supportive peers). Or, 2, they have a glimpse of a talent, a heretofore unconsidered ability, that helps them understand that they are still developing; they have time to figure it out. 

I’m 42 years old. The idea that some unexpected talent should suddenly manifest itself is a bit ridiculous even at my most optimistic. Especially given that I consider myself a fairly adventurous person. It’s not like—as so often happens in the books—there is something I enjoy doing that I’ve never allowed myself to fully explore. Everything I’ve ever had the slightest inkling in, I’ve had a period in my life where I’ve gone after with unadulterated attention—like a dog chasing a ball. 

When I first discovered that I could bike across town at about 13 or 14, and that I enjoyed it, I started doing it all the time. For the rest of my young adult life, I eschewed cars and rode a bike everywhere. When I discovered I liked long-distance hiking. I hiked the entire Appalachian Trail. When I discovered I liked reading books, I switched my major to English and spent countless hours in diners and cafes late at night poring over 19^th century novels, making all kinds of senseless annotations in the margins. When I discovered I was interested in other cultures, languages, modes of living, I lived abroad for several years, and, really, I thought I would for the rest of my life. Sometimes, it still seems odd, accidental, that I live in the US now. I was never “good” at any of these things in the sense they present abilities and talents in books, but I enjoyed doing them, and I wonder now if that was enough. 

Simply, the moral of YA books is entirely misplaced on someone like me—not because I am old, but because I never developed any particular talent, though not for lack of trying. What I hope is inspiring/comforting my kids—making them feel as though they can be themselves and find strength in that—continually serves to remind me that, well, I don’t have my whole life to look forward to, that I’ve made all the decisions that the books are poising the readers for. 

So, I examine the choices I’ve made. Is there anything I neglected while rushing around in my youth? Were there any opportunities I missed? Should I have stayed a certain course longer, or cut another off more quickly? I can very easily say “no”, but that’s really because I never ardently pursued anything, at least not when I was younger. As I delineated above, I flitted from interest to interest almost as soon as they presented themselves as possibilities. I did not focus on becoming, say, a professional athlete and then, after countless hours of practice when I should’ve been eating/sleeping/socializing/studying, met with intense disappointment when I didn’t make the final cut, though I was close, so close that I reevaluate the championship game over and over as though I could go back and change it. No. Nothing like that. Nothing at all like that.

And the thing is, I’d recommend this ADD-influenced mode of living. If I could summarize it into a plot for a kids’ book, I would. Something like, “it’s a crazy, multifaceted world out there, kids. Why get too bogged down in anything? Why even worry about trying to be particularly “good” or “successful”? Just let life blow you where it will” –I’m not sure this “Tales from a 42-Year-Old Nothing” would sell well, however.

Constantly reading about the precipice of adulthood, I have to consider my formative years in high school, when I, too, was part of a social clique—though thankfully not a mean-spirited or exclusive clique—and made all kids of bad decisions. I read about kids forming meaningful relationships, and avoiding the associations which might mean social advancement, but would not permit them to be their true selves. It is tempting to lament my reckless adolescence. To summarize it as only leading me down a path where I have not learned to really focus on anything, or develop a solid character. I didn’t learn discipline by wanting to win the championship game, or get into the best school, but, I guess, I did eventually learn it, only when I realized that everyone else had it and it was something I would need. 

Rather than single-mindedly pursuing a goal, I did a bunch of disparate things which have led me to be the kind of person who likes making things more than buying them, reading more than watching TV (though reading YA graphic novels is probably on par with watching Game of Thrones as far as my mental development is concerned), riding a bike (or skateboard) more than driving, etc, etc. I might not be particularly good at anything, but I enjoy the things I do, no matter of half-assedly, and, at the end of the day, if my four-year-old son’s most anticipated event for the next day is simply playing with me, I can’t have screwed up too badly. Even if that playing, too, is something I’m not particularly good at. 

Windows and Figs

 There’s an abandoned house in our neighborhood. Who knows the reason. The siding has either disintegrated or been smashed off the back of the house, revealing the insulation panels beneath. From the front other angles, the house looks fine, It even looks like someone lives there because the neighbors use the driveway for their extra car. It’s not a scary-looking empty house. It must be a rental with a mowing contract, because someone still comes by and cuts the yard. The apple tree in the back yard still blooms and fruits. If it weren’t for the hole in the back and the long stillness around the place, it would be just another house: a focal point in routine for a small group of people, the place of constant return. 

The kids and I peeked into the windows the other day. I think it’s helpful for your children to see your curiosity outweigh propriety once in a while and—despite age and experience— still remain open to adventure. I pulled them off the sidewalk and said “’c’mon; let’s check out that house.” They of course, hadn’t been expecting this and hesitated while they calculated whether dad was asking them to do something too risky for their comfort (wouldn’t be the first time). But when they saw me cupping my hands to look into the back window—into someone’s house!—their own curiosity outweighed the possible risks.

I think it was the garage we were looking into, but it was clear it had been inhabited, or at least been a place of constant attention and traffic when the house had been in use. By the window, just under where we were looking, there was a padded chair next to an end table with an overflowing ashtray. There was a couch opposite it, and beyond the dull ring of light from the murky window, I could make out the edges of many other unrecognizable objects. The stuff that had been introduced into this garage rumpus room and had been left there either purposefully or not when the tenant quitted the place: a meticulously created museum piece of the life of the poor in the early 21-st century. 

The kids wanted to see it, too. For some reason, now that I had looked in, I didn’t want them to see inside. There was so much stuff and so many shadows. In my quick scan of the room, I hadn’t entirely ruled out the possibility of something frightful in there, something I wouldn’t want them to see. While they clamored at my waist, I took another look to make sure the room was devoid of corpses or obscene posters. But something about the room in the partial light was so nebulous that I couldn’t focus on anything and only saw the same gray tangle that I hoped they would also see. 

I held my son up first, probably because he was making the most noise; he’s also younger and more prone to complaint if he isn’t the first. He attached himself to the glass eagerly, but I had to show him how to hold up his hands to block out the light bouncing off the glass around him. 

I don’t know what he saw. He neither seemed interested, nor disinterested. He looked without moving his head and when I brought him down did not protest, nor say anything. It was like he was having to process what he had seen. All that stuff that belonged to no one. 

I thought my daughter might even be mature enough, or timid enough, to not want a look in, but as we turned to go, she protested and I held her up to the window realizing, with my usual concern, that I felt more hesitation in exposing her to the unknown that I did with my son. Is it because, as a male, I have a certain understanding of the female experience and an innate desire to, like, uphold that understanding? Do I see my daughter’s innocence as something more valuable than my son’s, or is it just that there is something in her personality, something quiet, empathetic, and kind that I want to protect and nurture?

I held her up and could feel the shift as she positioned herself to take in as much of the view as she could. She brought her hands up and leaned into the view while I pushed down anxieties that there was something in that room that I hadn’t noticed. But it was just an inert room. Interesting only for this selfsame inert quality among so many living, moving, functioning homes. 

My thoughts were interrupted by my daughter’s question as we continued across the neighborhood toward the massive fig tree we discovered the other day.

“But why did someone leave all their things?”

I started to tell her how people are evicted. Sometimes they aren’t allowed to recover their things. Sometimes, they just leave in a hurry, or they leave everything behind in a jumble as a protest. But this explanation was eclipsed by the intrusion of a memory and without thinking much, I started to tell her about it. 

“When I was about 16, my friend Jim and I found a house like this: empty but full of people’s stuff, strewn around everywhere. But being 16 and without a place to drink the malt liquor we’d purchased (I left this detail out), we went in. At first, we’d waded cautiously through the ectoplasm of someone else’s life. Even at 16, it was hard not to feel respectfully sad when we came upon a room that had obviously belonged to a small child filled with stuffed animals and fluffy pinkness. But deprived of order, deprived of use, the stuff—even the most personal objects—had become junk. And the more we moved through the house, and the more we drank, our sympathy for the former inhabitants melted away. We began to kick things aside, toss them at each other and soon, we were breaking them.” 

I paused, not sure how to back out of telling such a revealing story. I keep forgetting that to my children, being a hostile teenager is unfathomable. Why would you break the stuff? Why would you be in an abandoned house drinking malt liquor in the first place when you had a home you could go to, when you had a loving family and even your own room with a TV in it you could turn on whenever you wanted? 

Telling my kids stories of my past, I’m continually bumping into the fact that I was a pretty selfish and frequently obnoxious kid who, despite crying when he read Where the Red Fern Grows at 10, probably evinced little else that looked like empathy or kindness until after his 18^th birthday. 

If I hadn’t had kids, I don’t know how much I ever would’ve come to examine my own childhood in this way. I think we are all inclined, as adults, to give ourselves a break when remembering our childhood. Over the years, I have written many times about the experiences I had being young and dumb, but I never took myself to task for it. If anything, I overfocused on what still seemed like injustices done to me. Uncharitable teachers, a father who yelled, a non-verbal sibling who absorbed a lot of attention: I looked everywhere in my memories to justify my actions, but I have never had to confront my own stupidity, my own utter lack of empathy in that way that I have since I started telling my kids stories of my youth, particularly of my pissed off teenage years. 

They understand in the same uncomprehending way I did when my dad would tell me stories of his youthful misbehavior when I was a kid. When I was my daughter’s age, I wasn’t so different from her: a wide-eyed quiet kid who appreciated the difference between positive and negative attention enough to share my cookie with my sister if my mom asked me to. If I had been near an abandoned house, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to go inside and start throwing everything around either. 

In a way, I’m telling the stories back to myself. And it proves a maxim I repeat in my classes to my students that audience perception does a lot for the purpose of your stories. With that little hand in mine, walking through a warm spring evening toward a fruiting fig tree, it is difficult to avoid this aspect of myself that somehow atrophied after adolescence, or—more likely— just manifested as a stubborn selfish streak, albeit less destructive. 

I don’t know what happened to the kid who trashed that house many years ago. We live so many lives and that one was so far back that I no longer have a frame of reference for and, perhaps consequently, I have run out of empathy for, and I earnestly hope I have converted enough of that kid into someone good to be worthy of raising these trusting, intelligent, and  compassionate children who, thank God, have no understanding for the kind of anger and belligerence that hangs on the edges of my resume which can only be somewhat obscured, never completely covered by present-day good works. 

We walked on, leaving the dim, empty house and my memories of being an inconsiderate, angry kid to the shades of evening coming on from the east and, by the time we reached the fig tree, my kids had forgotten all about the story, or at least their interest in it, as they reached out to pluck the strange green and unripe fruit from the spindly tree.

Unripe figs, like most unripe fruit, have no taste and no texture, just empty white pith, but as we each chewed it took us different intervals to realize this, spit out the pulp and run off through the still-blooming azaleas to whatever was next.