Until I was six years old, I lived at 315 Fourth St. in Jackson, Mi. In those days, I don’t remember seeing my dad a lot. If he wasn’t working, my memory has a difficult time placing hm anywhere in that house or its environs. I might remember him more clearly after we moved because I was older and therefore living a less dream-like childhood with more concrete memories, or it is possible that he was simply around more.
At about eight—I must’ve needed a year to transition after the move—my dad turns up a lot more in my memories. He’s still at work at lot of the time, but, when not at work, I remember him around the house. He is outside doing one thing or another. In the summer, he is cutting the grass, in the autumn, he is splitting wood, sometimes he is working on an old car he bought from the neighbors who had it rusting away in a garage. He is always doing something. He doesn’t come home from work and turn on the TV. If he does relax, he reads, and he reads tomes on Greek wars that would likely put most people who’ve worked a 10-hour day to sleep in a couple of minutes. He does fall asleep in his chair sometimes. He’s only human. But most of the time he’s poring over what he reads, almost alertly, eyebrows moving up and down in visual cogitation.
The point is, the dad model I grew up with was always in motion, always getting something done. Even in his recreation, he wasn’t entirely at rest and was still working toward something.
As a kid, I hated this; it was anathema to my idle childhood. Up until we moved, I spent a lot of time in the backyard with my imagination, and after the move, I continued to explore the forest around our house from which my dad extracted the wood for our fireplace, but, by 10 or so, I had become much more committed to the world I shared with my peers rather than the world I shared with my parents and that world was in places where there were sidewalks, parking lots, things to buy, and lights that came on at night.
It was a world just beyond my reach. True, the house we’d moved to was a two-minute drive to a (relatively) large suburban neighborhood, but as a kid that drive converted into a 30-minute walk on the shoulder of a road with a 55-mph speed limit. I might as well have lived on another planet from my friends.
So, I spent inordinate amounts of time in front of the tv and on the phone. I’d bring the cordless phone up to my room, turn on my little TV, my Nintendo, my stereo and escape into a world that could’ve been anywhere. I often thought about our old house, the one we’d left when I was six, how close it was to everything. Especially as I got older and started riding my bike into town, braving that 55 mph road. If I still lived on Fourth St. I could’ve gone anywhere on bike, or even foot in under 30 minutes. Instead, it probably would’ve taken an hour to walk to the corner grocery store and another hour to walk anywhere past that.
Thus, my dad and I moved into our polarized positions. When we lived in town, I don’t remember him in the yard or around the house doing anything but just being there. Now, he was like a groundskeeper with a large holding to care for, and that care was his recreation. On the weekends, he was always sweaty, coming into the house, wiping his brow with the exuberance of someone really living life.
“Damn that oak is hard to cut!” He’d exclaim or “Damn, we really let that grass get long!” or “Damn, I got get more copper sulfate into that pond!” But he always made these mock complaints with a grin on his face. Like there was no place he’d rather be than out putting copper sulfate into the pond on a beautiful sunny day or using his snowplow on a driveway that snaked about 700 feet through the woods to the busy road.
Often, from my pubescent cave, I’d hear him say, “Where’s the boy?” And I’d roll my eyes, and set my face into a concentrated scowl. When the door opened, and he’d say, “hey, why don’t you come outside and help me with the chainsaw?” I’d say, “Dad, I’m on the phone.” Or “Dad, I’m about to beat this level.” Or “Dad, I don’t want to go out into the merciless sun, or the freezing snow and mess around with a chainsaw. That’s your thing, not mine. Isn’t it enough that I have to live way the hell out here? At least leave me Saturday to pretend I’m somewhere closer to my friends.”
I don’t know if I ever articulated this sentiment, but I refused every time he asked me something. It was my default. Why go outside? In front of the TV, I felt a connection to my peers (in the years before smartphones, we would call each other, turn the tv on the same channel and watch it together, sometimes going a while without even saying anything). If I went outside, I let go of that connection, my Gibraud jeans, or, later, charged mohawk ceased to mean anything and I was just a kid with his dad, stumbling along, uncouth over the snow, under the summer humidity to sweat, to freeze, and what for? So we’d have wood for the winter? So what? We’d have it anyway. If I helped or not, it would get done. The only job I ever went in for was mowing the lawn. After we got a riding mower, I could sit there and, with my discman balanced just so, I could keep the thing from skipping most of the way through Green Day’s Dookie, pretending I was far from the field where I was mowing. I was on my bike, a few blocks from the mall, standing around with my friends, deciding what to do next. But, every other job, unless forced, I would not do. They were too messy, too uncool, and too strong a reminder that I was not independent, or even cool, that I lived in my parents’ world most of the time and only had fleeting moments of escape when someone drove me to the mall or I was at school.
When I turned 18, I moved to Chicago, right to the middle of the city. And because I didn’t want to rely on my parents for anything, and because they were paying both my tuition and my rent, I never spent any money, and a good deal of the food I ate, I got from the dumpster. Luckily, by the next year, I had figured out enough of living on your own to get a job and pay my own rent. But even then, I never had to think about tuition until I went to graduate school.
Somewhere in that transition to adulthood and responsibility, I started to understand my dad’s attraction to work. Rather than cutting up fallen trees in freezing January temperatures, I went to the diner down the street and memorized Italian verb conjugations, applied sociological principles, and read Tom Jones and tried to understand it’s importance in the Western Canon. College, and the work it entailed, became my justification for independence. I was afraid of being pulled back into a world where I was inconsequential, so I studied. And as I studied, I felt my ignorance, and studied more.
I wasn’t an especially talented student, but I was thorough. I made up for the lack of talent with dedication. One summer, I took two 400-level English classes. One class assigned eight novels, the other 12. There were also supplementary readings. The classes were condensed into eight weeks. So, in two months, I read 20 novels. I skipped nothing. Even when I didn’t like the book. I read every single word. For those two months, when I wasn’t at work, I was reading. It wasn’t work the way my dad had modeled, but it felt good. I frowned on my peers who openly admitted they didn’t have time to complete the reading. I thought “you’re an English major; this should be your passion!” Because I didn’t feel this limitation, I began to imagine my life as an academic, spending entire years in the relentless study of words and meaning, returning, with every spare moment to my desk and stack of books, the way my dad had read his tomes on the wars of ancient Greece.
After graduate school and two years of living overseas, I realized I was no longer interested in the cloistered life. I wanted to be out in the world doing things, not reading about other people doing things. I spent the next six years doing things. I stayed out late, I closed the bars, but I always came back to writing about it later. I may have not had a vocation, but I found some comfort in reflecting through words.
Through these somewhat turbulent years—I lived on three different continents, in four different countries—I enjoyed breaking from the academic schedule. Almost every weekend, I relished the idea that I didn’t have a paper to work on and, after work, I could do whatever I wanted. Even years after graduate school, I still enjoyed this freedom. But after a Friday night spent wandering around Buenos Aires drinking Quilmes, or in San Francisco, falling asleep in Golden Gate Park, I sought stability in work and because I lived in small apartments, and owned nothing but a bike and a pile of clothes, that work was limited to writing.
By Sunday morning, I’d usually be hunched over the computer, forcing my mind up, out of the dullness of the weekend, and into examination. As unprofitable, as empty a task as it was, it provided me with a place to put my effort and feel that I was forging a valuable future, that I wasn’t lying down on the job of preparing myself, at some distant point, to be a professional, an academic, or, at least, a serious-minded person.
By then, I was out of danger of being pulled back to my parents’ house and losing my identity. I could no longer become an anonymous ten-year-old striving to be someone, I had too many experiences now to be anything but myself.
Between years spent overseas, I would stay with my parents for a few months, and I enjoyed the feeling of my own personality mixing with, and not being eclipsed by theirs. If I worked with my dad, it was because I wanted to, and I came to feel the recreation in it. I no longer felt like a child kept from the world I wanted to inhabit. I inhabited it, and I was only visiting this place. I felt sure my ten-year-old self on the lawnmower, dreaming of agency, would be glad to look into the future and see that this had come to pass.
A few years later, I found having a kid, no substantial upset to this routine. When my daughter was born, I was still in an associate faculty position, but I put a lot of effort into exploring all my options and I had interviews for jobs in North Carolina and Kiev. We could’ve kept moving, but my wife, understandably, didn’t want to raise a family on the go. It was either stay put and have more kids, or continue the mode of life that had become so comfortable. The former option, being unknown, seemed at once more challenging and interesting.
Raised with the model of constant work, I struggled, but my stubbornness and ability to make work, or even discomfort, a part of my routine, won over. When I first arrived in Armenia as a Peace Corps volunteer, I missed my friends, I missed San Francisco, I missed the whole world I’d known until that point, but gradually, I accepted where I was and stopped thinking “two more years to go”. I did the same thing when hiking the Appalachian Trail. Every day, I woke up and hiked. I never understood how anyone got tired of it. I loved having such an enjoyable task to apply myself to each day. The walking was constant work, but in a very single-minded and even enjoyable way.
It was after my son was born that, for the first time in my life, I met a significant challenge. I could no longer apply myself to a task I had set out for myself, be it writing an article, hiking, making a podcast, applying for jobs, or whatever. I had to be at home helping as much as possible. While I was at work, my wife was caring for both an infant and a toddler. I knew how exhausting this was, and every spare moment I spent at the café working on whatever project I was dreamed up for myself, I was giving her more of that work.
So, I started spending my weekends at home, or as much as I could. As an English instructor, I would often have piles of essays coming in at once that required thoughtful reading and response. I also had to constantly be revising my class to fit the ever-changing needs of my students. Even on the weekends, I had to work, and, like anyone with an associate faculty job, I had another job. Mine was delivering bread which I also did on the weekends.
When I had a lull in work, I tried to be at home, to help with the kids, but, more than anything, I struggled with my inherited need to work, to more forward and accomplish—especially as we were still living on the wages of two part-time jobs, and associate faculty make nothing considering the education and dedication required by their job. The combination of a lousy job, and the need to achieve led to feelings of inadequacy and the need to always be striving toward something more. While I was still in this situation, I always felt like I needed to improve it.
But doing more created problems. When, after grading papers, I took a break to look for jobs, I came home excited about possible opportunities my wife, caring for two young children, had no desire to entertain. If I couldn’t look for another job, how else could I improve our situation? How could I continue to do the meaningful work I’d been raised to do? We lived in a small community, to stay where I was afforded very few options, none of them desirable.
Eventually I got the full-time job, though not the one I’d expected, and to augment that, I even took on another part-time teaching position. And for a time, I became somewhat noteworthy in the district as someone working hard to salvage a department that had been left without a director. Twice they offered me the position. But I had to put the breaks on the meteoritic rise that—had I not had two kids with another on the way— may have been the fulfillment of my effort. I had to learn that you can work too much when you have young children. My dad worked hard to provide his children with every available opportunity. And it was from this hard work that I was able to get launched on my own path to learning the value of this work. If I had taken out loans and hadn’t had help paying the rent my first year of college, I don’t know how it all would’ve turned out. I wouldn’t have come home, but I may have struggled for a long time. I was grateful for that work, but I didn’t know if I could make it fit with my family dynamic. I didn’t know if I wanted to.
Becoming the director would’ve meant being at work all the time and feeling more dedication to the department than my family whom I didn’t want to live apart from. I turned it down. Later, I turned down an offer to return to the university that I had been working toward for a long time. I had a good balance with what I had. There was no reason to trade it in for an unknown, as tempting as it was. And I accepted my routine.
But the old desire to do more is always there. I still prowl the real estate listings, even though I don’t want to move, nor take on the additional expense. I still surf the job listings, even though I often feel like the job I have was created with me in mind, and with my extra energy, I still manage to write a little each week to consider the life I’m living and hopefully render the lessons of it more intelligible for my kids when they’re older.
My yard is small. I don’t have a fireplace to cut wood up for. I don’t have a driveway to plow. But I’ve crowded the front and back gardens with plants, and I continually return to the nurseries looking for something else to put in the ground. It’s not the heroic labor my dad would emerge wiping his brow from each weekend, but it is something my kids are accustomed to seeing me do and it gives me something to cultivate, even if most of that cultivation consists of standing around just watching. I’ve gotten good at watching things grow, there’s a lot of that to be done around here, and I’ve come to realize, there’s really nothing more important than that watching. The real challenge is learning how to stand still for it.
