Thunderheads

Let’s talk about the weather.

The summer in New York seemed different this year, powerful in an old way. Most days the air sat thick and hot on us, the sky a lens held above us by a boy who hasn’t yet begun worrying about himself as cause.  And the storms. We look out from pretty high windows now, and we have a clean view north and west over and up the Hudson, which is where our weather comes from. Over and over we watched the ecstasy of meteorologists on the Weather Channel appreciating red running across the radar, the lines thick like wire once twisted up that someone gave up on trying to pull straight again. We watched the radar-red fronts menace in, watched the sky turn the color of a bruise. The heat made for huge thunderheads, easily ten times taller than anything in this city of tall buildings, including those two we remember being taller than they were. Many times we saw the clouds come down below the building tops and pretend to be ghosts chasing each other out to the ocean. It was all enough to make a person think up gods just to give them what they want.

I like watching weather from closer up, sure, but I still find myself missing the Western Kansas sky, the one that comes all the way down to you. I miss the weather talk, too.  Most conversations in the Midwest still begin and end with the forecast, even though few conversationalists these days are farmers whose livelihoods hinge on the character of the climate. To someone passing through, such talk probably comes across as casual and irrelevant, an avoidance of communication instead of a species of it. But it’s not hard to account for its persistence and prevalence: All that sky makes for storms that seem bigger than the planet. Fronts can be spotted easily 50 miles off, and though they always move faster than they look (as giant things do), they leave a fair amount of time for theory and speculation. And it’s more than theory. Kansans have learned to know the quickest ways to their basements. When they mention rain at the post office and the restaurant, it’s a form of the oldest and most basic social cement, like prairie dogs passing around a warning about a hawk.

But now fall. In New York the summer storms have gone in favor of darkening mornings that spin to clear sky blue. The poets got it wrong: Fall makes a poor stand-in for the onset of the end of something. To my mind, it’s hard to think clearly in the summer — to think at all really — but when the air cools, thoughts and what they’re about can become further apart. We locate our sleeves and begin wondering about our jackets; doubts about gods reroot. September brings back an interest in the inside of things.

What’s your weather like?

Father's Day Performance

The Boy working the keys with his best pal

Father’s Day this year began, as it should, with kid crafts (and not, as it shouldn’t, with broken arms).  The Boy took a cast-off ribbon he found in the park (award-bestowing culminations are happening everywhere and for everything these days) and affixed a paper “Best Dad in the World” medal of his own making.  Q built an elaborate paper card with four origami frogs each sitting on either a blue (for water) or green (lily pad) paper pop-up.  It was so elaborate, in fact, that she had to show me how to properly remove it from and return it to the handmade envelope.  My lovely wife got me an envelope too, but I was able to easily remove its contents, which were four tickets to the Blue Man Group, a show I’d been meaning to book for us for a while now.*  I gave myself a bike for the holiday, and after the initial giving, the kids and I went out for a ride while my lovely wife stayed in to make her killer apple-ginger biscotti.

The biscotti was for the kids’ music recital later that afternoon. Q and The Boy have been taking piano lessons since September, and their teacher puts on a show every other year in which each of his students, regardless of age and ability, performs a piece. Their teacher teaches a little differently, at least differently than how I learned. He doesn’t assign scales or finger exercises or pages of A Dozen a Day. He focuses mainly on getting his students to like piano (or guitar or whatever), which means having them set about learning songs right from the first lesson, and songs they already know and like.  Given Q and The Boy’s level, the selection has been fairly predictable:  “Hot Cross Buns,” “This Land Is Your Land,” “Happy Birthday,” but also “Yellow Submarine.”

Both kids have taken to the piano surprisingly quickly and well.  In the beginning, the teacher thought Q might be too young for a full half-hour lesson, but he, like most, underestimated Q’s ability to sit and focus.  She worked her way through several simple songs and went on to learning chords.  For the recital, she was to play a version of “Heart and Soul” with her left hand moving through the four-chord progression (C - A - F - G) while her right played the melody.  If the piano has clichés, this song is one of them, but it’s a little tougher to play than it sounds (no right-hand notes fall on the same beat as the F chord, e.g.).  Her teacher had a fair amount of faith in her to give her this song to play for her first public performance.

The Boy’s piece, a selection from “Spinning Song” by Albert Ellmenreich, was even more demanding. It’s a clever composition with several theme changes in just a few lines, difficult sounding and showy in the way that prompts parents to put up YouTube videos of their prodigies racing through it with feet swaying from the piano bench. The Boy mastered the notes pretty early (to his teacher’s surprise and delight), and he slowly increased the pace until he could put the parts together at a respectable clip.

They were both nervous about the recital in their own way.  The Boy had over-practiced.  His execution of his piece took on some quirks he couldn’t seem to get rid of, and he began to get bogged down on a chord change that he had been breezing through just days before.  These snags caused him to think about his playing, which is never a good thing to do with a muscle-memory task.  The morning of the recital we asked him to run through his song one last time, and his frustration foiled him such that he had to try to consciously remember the last few notes but simply couldn’t do so.  We had to make him leave the bench before he could convince himself that he couldn’t play that song — or any other — ever at all.  When it was Q’s turn for a run-through, however, she sat calmly at the keys and went first note to last without a single mistake.  After she skipped from the piano to dress up a little for the actual performance, we noticed her lunch sat on the table barely touched.

The recital was staged in a trim and neat United Methodist church in a little New Jersey town about 40 miles outside of the city.  The sanctuary had been converted a concert hall, and not much of the church’s usual function remained visible apart from the organ pipes making a silver fence along the back wall.  The teacher had a house band set up in front of the altar that included a full trap set, a Korg keyboard, a high-gloss grand piano, many microphones on their stands, and several guitars and bases corded to various amps.  We sat in the second pew mainly waiting for Q and The Boy to perform.  We all knew they were scheduled sometime toward the beginning, but we didn’t know exactly when.

Given the teacher’s style and mission, we weren’t surprised to hear covers of Bruno Mars, Coldplay, some evanescent pop numbers we’d heard but couldn’t name, and a whole bunch of Adele.**  About a half hour in, the teacher started to call up his youngest pupils.  There were odes to joy, a phrase or two from the Nutcracker, a “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “This Land is Your Land.”

Then he called up Q.  She took her place at the grand piano, her white dress bettering the shine coming off the giant instrument, and I took my place closer up at the rail where parishioners kneel to video her.  I could see her arms quiver as she positioned her fingers over the correct keys to start her song.  Everything went well until she got a little lost right at the very end, but she managed to find her way out of her music with a solid C chord and then left the bench quickly to applause.  My wife and I know her well enough to read a bit of disappointment in her face.  The Boy was next.  I was a little worried he might not hold up if he made a mistake — but not too worried.  He’s the kind of person who tends to rise to whatever occasion, and he rose again there on the bench in the church.  He played smooth and clean, split a chord once but kept on going. At the very end he started to go back into the melody when he should have moved to the final lines, but he just stopped for a moment, started up again a bar back, and went right on out as he should have, no problem.  A smile began to arrive with the final notes and bloomed as he bowed just off the bench and then came back to us.  I was so, so proud of them both.

We all had trouble sitting for the entire two hours, especially the kids whose flood of adrenaline had crested and receded with their performance.  We snuck out to the fellowship hall between songs to get a head start on the cookies and fruit and punch brought by the families.  The church’s double front doors were propped open, and the day was small-town blue and clear, like the air had just been given up fresh from the grass.  All the kids, freed from anxiety and expectation, ate sweets and goofed with each other on the lush lawn, even tolerating a few pictures by and with the adults.

Both kids enjoyed the whole thing — or at least they said they did.  Q denies that she was nervous at all.  (She is so capable at so many things that she can struggle with admitting that she struggles sometimes.)  As we pulled away from the church for New York, Q said, “We’ll see this place next time.”  The Boy was already reading his book.

This is the paragraph where metaphors and analogies tend to arrive, and, admittedly, I’m tempted to use the kids’ recital to package being a father as a kind of performance.  Though to a playwright or musician, the whole world might seem a stage, it’s not.  Not really.  My family isn’t my audience (thank goodness, because tough crowd), and I don’t aim each day to put on a show in any useful sense of the term.  Much of the time I don’t know what I’m doing father wise other than trying to be decent, an approach that doesn’t seem up to the stakes involved.  Perhaps it’s because in some ways parenting — an embodiment of care so great and old — isn’t like another thing, which is why it’s more often a thing that other things are said to be like.

I do know that I prefer this kind of Father’s Day:  One where I get to see Q and The Boy reveal themselves and then come sit next to me, relieved and proud of themselves and altogether a little larger.  And then we have punch.

Happy Father’s Day, all.

_________________________

*This is the kind of gift I prefer — viz., experience- as opposed to stuff-based.  I’ve also just been thinking about how the kids are now the right age for lots of shows and that we should start going more.  Like usual, my wife is ahead of me.

**I’m constantly surprised at how many slight t(w)een girls choose to sing Adele songs.  They likely don’t have the experience that fuels her music, but, more important, they must underestimate the size and power of her voice.  She’s got a huge, deep instrument.

Science!

My son participated in his third-grade Science Expo last week. Each third-grader was given a blank piece of cardboard and a stapled set of instructions. Students were to come up with their own questions, which they could answer by performing experiments, researching a topic, or giving a demonstration. They then would present their projects in a big poster session in the gym, where parents, teachers, and the other grades could walk through the rows of kids and ask about their work.

The Boy’s project came out of a short video I stumbled across in the usual Internet way of a guy out on his deck dropping magnets down a copper pipe. Like any good magician, he shows his audience the two pieces separately, and then performs the trick, exploding all expectations in the process. The magnet doesn’t stick to the pipe but instead tumbles softly down into his hand.  When it came time for The Boy to settle on his topic, he remembered the video right away and wanted to go looking for the explanation.

The short clip gave us a couple of leads — neodymium, eddy currents — so that’s where we started. The magnets were easy to get off the Internet, arriving in a couple of days in a clear plastic tube wrapped in warnings. The pipe was a lot less easy to come by, oddly enough. Lots of places in town would sell us a contractor’s standard ten-foot length, but we only wanted a foot or so. After much walking and asking around, we finally found a hardware supply in Chinatown with a manager who happily opened one of his own pipe-cutter packages to accommodate us.

Once outfitted, we went for replication. Would our own neodymium magnet float down our own copper tube? Check. Even having seen the video, The Boy and I found the result hypnotic, the pleasant clink of metal on metal, the lazy drift of the stack of magnets down into his waiting palm.

Explanations pair with questions, and The Boy compiled a list of them to answer in his presentation, including:

• Why doesn’t the magnet stick to the copper tube?
• Why does the magnet float down the tube?
• Does the tube have to be made of copper for the magnet to float?
• What is an eddy current?

The idea was that he would answer these questions on his poster, include a diagram picturing what’s going on that can’t be seen, and finish with a list of Fun Facts* about magnets.

We guided him a bit, but he did most of the heavy lifting research wise. Finding information for this kind of thing used to be difficult, but now the difficulty lies in sorting and understanding information. We googled magnet- and eddy-current-related phrases and turned up all sorts of videos and cryptic equations, along with pages of physics and industrial applications, and a few fairly simple explanations. The Boy took notes. We also actually went to our local library (nostalgia!) for age-appropriate books on magnets and magnet experiments, which proved to be a mother lode of Fun Facts.

You may very well be curious about answers to The Boy’s great questions, and though I don’t have my son’s showmanship, I’m happy to oblige with grade-appropriate answers. First off, copper is not ferritic, which means magnets aren’t attracted to it. But copper is an outstanding conductor, and that’s important here. A magnetic field moving through a conductor causes electric currents called eddy currents. All electric currents have their own magnetic fields.  So gravity pulling a strong magnet (in this case, four 1” x 1/8” neodymium stacked) down the conductor triggers eddy currents, which have their own magnetic fields that repel that falling magnet, just as the same poles of any two magnets repel. The eddy currents and their magnetic fields prove fairly weak (again, in this case), which means the magnet’s progress is only impeded and not arrested altogether.

Cool, right?

The Boy insisted (before we could) on writing the text of the poster himself, first translating his notes into an explanation on paper, and then typing everything up to be printed. We spent some serious time in font selection. My lovely wife helped him with the big center diagram, though it was his idea to have a foil-wrapped magnet popup in the center. He was proud of his work, and he had good right to be.

The day of the Expo, he carried his equipment and excitement to the gym himself. It opened to parents shortly after the morning bell rang, and my lovely wife and I flooded in with all the others to check everything out. We went by The Boy first, of course, and he was all set up and ready to perplex passersby with his “Magnet Mystery” (his poster’s title). He performed his demonstration for us just as he’d practiced — first asking what we thought would happen when he dropped the magnet down the copper tube, then asking for predictions about the same magnet going down a cardboard tube, then explaining all the forces at work that confounded those predictions. Q soon came by with a pack of her classmates (all grades visited throughout the day) to listen to her brother, and he enjoyed the audience. He was truly great.**

As were so many of the kids. We know lots of families now, and we took our time hearing The Boy’s friends tell us about mass and gravity, geysers, rainbows, penguins, great white sharks, milk carton turbines, and on and on. The girl set up right next to The Boy talked through a truly unsettling experiment on the effectiveness of soap v hand sanitizer, one that involved a UV flashlight that revealed the dirt on your hands right then and there. For my part, I managed to discomfit a kid with a nice display on color vision by asking her since different creatures have different color experience what she thought the real colors were.  “I dunno,” she said, looking up the aisle and anywhere else but at me.  Sometimes I wonder why I don’t end up eating all my meals alone.

Aristotle writes that all persons by nature desire to know.*** It can be an oppressive statement if you think about it — the need to explain nagging and persistent, like an itch. And there’s so much to be known. Spring bloomed suddenly, some afternoons have been pushing 70º already, and the early warmth and wet air have produced glorious morning fog.  Fog occurs when the ambient air reaches saturation, forming water droplets that reflect light, limiting visibility to at least 5/8 mile.  Copper: Chemical element name Cu; Atomic Number: 29; melting point: 1356.15K.  Celestial bodies lie in space like balls on a rubber sheet, curving space and time around them.  The body a machine, describable and flawed.  A second is equal to the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. Consciousness is an instance of consciousness of. F = ma, except when it doesn’t.  The Boy is an isotope of my wife and I; the recipe for his making written in a billion proteins.  Q hums sweetly while brushing her teeth (though she’ll deny it) — this a fact like any other.

Anyhow, thanks to The Boy, at least one mystery is explained enough.

_________________________
*Nearly every third grader’s poster included Fun Facts, where “Fun” means something like Related But Random and Interesting.  The science teacher probably suggested including them as a way to fill white space, which, given that this is likely the first public opportunity these kids had to present a poster, must have seemed positively Antarctic to most of them.
**Dare I say he was magnetic? I do dare say so, at least in a footnote.
***The opening line of his Metaphysics, usually translated as all men desire to know, but he’s dead enough to be forgiven this oversight. Also, perhaps no one better encapsulated this desire than Aristotle himself.

Body shop

I start my 22nd session of physical therapy, as I’ve started the 21 others, by paying upfront.  I pretty much have myself and pickup basketball to blame for my broken wrist and the surgery to right it, but many people coming here to come back from their injuries are in the middle of legally faulting someone else, and who knows when those suits will result in costs being covered, so they insist.

After I put the receipt with the others, I hang up my coat in the odd little closet* and go back to whichever of their two rooms has an open seat. This office specializes in hands, arms, and shoulders, and it’s nearly full, as always. Most people spend many weeks in physical therapy, and I recognize almost everyone. The Belgian high-school girl who hurt her finger playing varsity volleyball pokes neon-colored putty to work her grip. The two female cops sit together as usual, cracking each other up with cop-speak jokes and comparing workman’s comp attorneys. The young guy with two phones comes later, talking to a series of people while a therapist sends electricity through a muscle in his forearm. I haven’t seen the woman with the plastic-surgeon dad in a while, probably since she can get cortisone shots at will.  Once, after I had become a regular, I actually found myself saying to a stranger next to me whose shoulder was being unbandaged: “What are you in for?”

I find a place in the room where each seat has a wooden TV-dinner tray next to it, rickety as the limbs leaning on it, and with the obligatory lithograph of Escher’s hands drawing each other to life, which almost makes literal sense given its context. The other room has old elementary-school desks for tables and a framed closeup from Michelangelo’s Sistene Chapel ceiling, the really famous part where God reaches out to Adam’s limp (injured?) hand. The entire place has an oppressive level of metaphor density.** The woman who works me over twice a week asks how my wrist feels, and I say “fine” because, like all questions of this sort, its answer is pure ornament. She’s good at juggling patients, has to be, and she lays a big blue bag of heat on my hand to loosen it up and returns to someone else in the other room.

Sessions are like getting your hair cut, only your hair is broken and it hurts. My therapist and I have been through so much small talk in two months that I have a fuller picture of her than most of my coworkers and neighbors. I know that she plays mahjong with her friends twice a month and that she picked up the game pretty quickly from her grandmother. I know that her husband is finishing up his MBA and has an enviable ease with foreign languages. (I know that his grandmother is a surly Holocaust survivor.)  They’re childless but thinking sometime maybe eventually. She’s left handed and is forever after whoever borrowed her special scissors. I know where she and her husband are each from originally and what they’ve done more or less every weekend for the last two-and-a-half months — something I no longer know about myself.

After she returns and removes the heat, I do some wrist curls with a 5 lb. weight, then squeeze an old gripper thing 30 times. Once I’ve limbered*** up a bit, my therapist bends my wrist. Hard. We do what she gamely calls a “strong stretch” that usually involves me looking away and down from the hurt while she applies her full body weight to my hand and aims for 90º flexion. I try the Zen thing of detaching myself from the material experience. I cycle through pictures in my head. My arm as cold dough that grows more pliable as its folded and rolled. A car door iced shut overnight finally coming free. An iron bar glowing orange on an anvil, throwing sparks at each hit, but taking shape. The Tin Man choked with rust, already with a heart but needing oil and an adventure to discover it.

The idea of physical or occupational therapy, the purpose, arises out of the fact that adults cannot be trusted to properly harm themselves after injury. Expertise is involved, too, of course — bodies can break in so many ways.**** Each of the three times the cast came off my son’s arm, he was unleashed back onto the baseball field and into the schoolyard and the swimming pool, without need for therapy. His body is a riot of growth, which helps with recovery from just about anything, and he (like most kids) can easily forget hurt. Adults, though, generally have vivid memories of pain and tend to convert it and anticipation of it into suffering. We quickly restrict or retire hurt limbs, which in turn leads our bodies to slowly give up on them. After I hurt my wrist back in May, I wrapped and iced and defended it for several weeks to give it time to heal itself, but time instead eroded my range of motion. And then the surgery and the pins and surgical screw and the nine-week cast all conspired to fix my hand straight.  Now it has to be bent further than I want it to if I want to come back.

The Zen thing doesn’t work. My wrist pops and smarts like hell but won’t stay past my best angle reached a few weeks ago. My PT reminds me, again, of how I came in, with flexion and extension of basically 0º, to make me feel better about where I can get to now, which is 50º and 60º respectively. It occurs to me that the old saying really should go, “Time fixes all wounds,” with ‘fix’ smuggling in all its senses.

All the effort going on in rooms makes them stuffy, and my PT cracks the window near my seat.  The days have gotten glorious, and I’m glad to welcome in the loud warm air of 57th Street. I think of Q and her classmates running in the schoolyard, waiting in the 60° morning for the bell, how they shed their coats and become their bodies.

We’re all done, she says.  See you next week.

_________________________
*I’m fascinated by this closet, possibly unhealthily so. It seems to contain roughly twice the space of the waiting room it’s off of, and its bar is stocked with weirdly thick hangers, like bunch of taupe hotdogs bent into triangles.
**Example: The Michelangelo print is even from before the restoration, meaning it has visible cracks running across the arms of both God and Adam.
***One thing I learned while writing this: The word ‘limber’ does not, lexicographers apparently think, share the same origin as the word ‘limb’. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘limb’ can be traced back to Old English’s lim, which means strong. The OED says that ‘limber’ probably entered the language much later (around the 16th or 17th century) and may have the word ‘limp’ as an ancestor. I know, right?
****The Wikipedia page on “physical therapy” makes for good reading. Assuming what’s there is mainly true, PTs in the U.S. were first called “reconstructive aides.” It says that the first American PT school was at Walter Reed Army Hospital in response to injuries incurred during World War I, and the first professional organization, founded in 1921, was called the “American Women’s Physical Therapy Association.” Though this approach to convalescence can be traced back to Hippocrates, modern physical therapy cut its teeth on war and polio, and was almost exclusively performed by women.

Father's Day Break

Father's Day weekend in New York this year was just beautiful, all early summer sun and soft breeze, some of the city's best days. The grandparents (my mother and father) were in town to see Q and The Boy going about their usual business; being half the U.S. away has meant that my parents haven’t just been around our kids that much in a non-holiday context.  It was a good time for them to come:  We had much on our usual schedule, including the culmination of The Boy's big second-grade project on birds,* Q's final gymnastics class for the summer, and The Boy's last baseball game of the season.  And since this was the wrap-up weekend for gymnastics and baseball and (more or less) school, there would be medals and trophies and a much higher tolerance for holding still and smiling for photos.

We managed almost all of that — until The Boy broke his arm for the third time.

Okay.  I was across the neighborhood with Q on the Saturday before Father's Day when I got the call, but here's what apparently happened: The Boy was riding his new bike in the park, the one with a larger frame that better fits his larger frame.  He’s fast on this one, but he knows the area well, so we let him speed up ahead and circle back. The park paths were full of pedestrians, and when he came up behind a large group of them, he rang his bell, but they didn’t make room.  The Boy swerved onto the shoulder to go around them, but the wide-set bricks caught his wheels and channeled him right into a lamppost at pretty much full speed.  He tried to catch himself on the way down, as anyone would, and snapped the big bone just above his right wrist.  Things could have been worse, of course.  He could have fallen into the street and a passing cab, could have had an end of bone jutting up through his skin.

When Q and I arrived running from the playground, I could see the fall in his wrist.  He could see it, too, having had some experience in this area,** and sobs of pain and knowledge were roaring out of him.  This was obviously emergency-room worthy, and my wife and Grandma took Q and The Boy’s bike back home while I flagged down a cab to New York Presbyterian Hospital, the one with the Best Pediatric ER according to a few Important Industry-Related Magazines.  The Saturday evening traffic was light, thankfully, but the pain and our thoughts of the coming cast made the ride seem interminable.  Having become a part of the story, even the driver tried to console The Boy as he ached out of the cab at the ER entrance.

By the time The Boy had made it through the paperwork and diagnostic X-ray phases of the ER, my wife had arrived.***  The grandparents were looking after Q (or perhaps it’s better to say that she was looking after them) so that we both could be with The Boy.  In a sense, I suppose, they got what they came for—to help mitigate the unplanned jags of life.

The fall had kinked his arm, and the pediatric orthopedist needed to set it straight.  The nurse first aimed two light doses of morphine at his pain while we waited for the on-call doctor.  Then for the procedure itself, a doctor informed us in calm tones (and asked us to acknowledge via signature of being so informed) that they were going to “moderately sedate” The Boy, which, worse case, might cause him to “lose his will to breathe.”****  We were also informed (this time in a signature-independent way) that though he wouldn’t remember anything, he would still be somewhat awake and might very well cry out when the bone was maneuvered back into proper position.  Given the option to stay for the screaming or step out, my wife and I decided that we’d look over the bulletin boards in the hallway and start thinking about ways to shift much of our summer around his cast.

It didn't take long.  By the time we successfully distracted ourselves, they had The Boy's reset arm hanging by his thumb and were wrapping it in quick-setting blue fiberglass.  He was still sedated, head and eyes rolling.  He didn't seem to recognize us or even know we were there, though later he would report seeing his mother and two of everything else.  There wasn’t much to do but watch everything work on him, and since it was getting late, I offered to go home to put Q at ease and to bed while my wife saw the visit through.

My first Father's Day in 2003 wasn't supposed to be my first Father's Day. The Boy entered this world a perilous two months early at New York Presbyterian and then kicked himself into a hold on life at its Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. That first month my wife and I walked 68th Street so many times, as often as we could, new parents to a strange being with a confounded future. I was surprised to find how much that same trip back downtown, eight years later, felt like walking on a bruise.*****

The Boy returned home from the ER with drugs still lingering in his blood.  Q, worried and sleepless, went with me to meet him and my wife in our building's lobby.  He hadn't eaten for more than nine hours, and he had thrown up in the cab the little bit of ginger ale given to him by the nurse.  He wasn't walking well, and I carried him, wet and unexpectedly stiff, from elevator to home.  I hadn't held him in that way for some time.  We wrestled off his shirt for a quick bath; he still had a monitor relay stuck to his chest.  He hadn't come back into himself yet, his body unable to remember the step into his own bathtub.

As I helped him dress for bed that night, his new right arm heavy and foreign, he said, “Sorry, dad, you have to do everything for me.” I can't think of a more unnecessary apology; I would make myself a house around him.

It's been five weeks since the break, and his arm will return to him in two days.  We have a trip to the beach already set for the coming weekend and still over a month of summer left to use any way we choose.  I tell this story not to demonstrate that Every Day is Father’s Day or that fathers are made by their sons, though both may be true.  I tell it only to cast these days right, to fix them in the proper shape.

I hope you all had a happy Father's Day.

_______________________________

*I always found birds boring until The Boy brought home all his fine work. Now, I must admit, I'm slightly more interested.

**Did I mention this is his THIRD break?

***Funny story.  The hardest part of an ER visit, I think, is always waiting for the hospital to cycle through its procedures, and I was doing my best to be supportive and comforting and to speed things along.  Luckily, The Boy was moved through the early steps and rooms fairly quickly, including radiology — the cold, cavernous room with the amazingly articulated ray gun.  So we’re there, and the tech gets The Boy positioned as best he can given the pain and current range of mobility, and then the tech and I stepped behind the leaded glass for the zap of radiation.  Just as he moved to take the picture, I leaned back against the wall, accidentally hitting a red muffin-sized button reading “EMERGENCY SHUT OFF,” which killed the giant machine and the controlling computer.  The tech said he’d never had this happen before, and he had to go get help to reboot the room, unsure of how long it would take.  There was talk of moving The Boy elsewhere for x-rays, given what could be a long wait.  I wanted to page a specialist in stupidity to give me a huge shot of something painful right in my eye.  After just a couple of minutes, though, they were able to get everything up and running, and I managed not to get in the way for the rest of the evening. Well, it's a funny story now.

****Possibly annoying note: For us (and not for, say, dolphins), regular breathing arguably doesn’t depend upon the will.  Sure, I can hold my breathe (will myself not to breathe) and can breathe more deeply or faster if I choose.  Just plain breathing, however, requires no willing on my part. Losing the will to breathe, then, sounds exceedingly ominous to me, something super important but poorly understood.  Yes, I’m deflecting here — even now — in my own way.

*****I also was to leave for a week-long conference at Harvard the Monday after Father's Day, which meant taking the Amtrak to South Station in Boston, and then the Red Line in to Central Square, a groove I wore smooth over ten years ago when I was commuting weekly, alone and lonely, to a Harvard teaching job.  The whole thing was like going down a memory lane of misery.

Losing stories

I heard very recently that my aunt, Alice Good, died a few Sundays back. There was a certain amount of surprise involved:  Not so long ago, she was being treated for what everyone thought was persistent and nasty arthritis when a full-body scan revealed her body shot through with cancer. She was right up to her 80's and wasn't interested in fighting it with the usual poisonous methods. She decided to let the disease run out, which it quickly did.

I'm sad, of course, to know that she's gone.  As I said just recently, Ree Ree (as we all called her) was one of my father's aunts that he grew up with as a sister, the one with the powerfully big laugh that fixed her forever in my childhood mind.  But some time ago she moved down to the New Orleans area and I set up a life in New York, which means I didn't see her with even the infrequency of some of my other relatives who stayed around Bourbon County, Kansas.

Though I'm not exactly sure why, Ree Ree was someone I wanted to get to know as my older self.  Looking back from the height and distance of my current age, I can see that she spoke to me, reasonably, as an aunt speaks to a child — always with big joy, forever blessing my heart. But over the years, I have picked up bits and scraps of a harder life, or at least a life with more angles than I can now plot, some of which my father subtended.  Now she'll remain for me as she was for me so many years ago. I love her like that, always will, but I wonder what stories she would tell the mid-life me, the one familiar with loss and grief and the pleasures of parenthood. Perhaps stories about my father coming into himself, the sun just over his shoulder, the parent I know now a shadow out in front of him. Many of those stories are lost and will stay lost.

When family members go, even distant ones, I also find myself wondering about how they could have participated in my kids' lives, and vice versa.  I'm proud of Q and The Boy, not so much of their accomplishments,* but of how they conduct themselves between the tests and the trophies. I think that's why we talk about being "close" to those we know well, as if emotional and physical distance maps 1:1.

Knowing the disease and her peace with it, my father, Uncle Larry, and Aunt Peg went down to New Orleans to be with her not long after they heard.  She slept much of the time, my father said, but she talked with them and knew they were there, which was the point.  My father told me about the drive down, about how the closer they got to the gulf, the hotter they all became.  When they finally reached Ree Ree's small town, they met up with her son, who greeted them with cold beer. Dad said he had forgotten how good a cold beer tastes on a hot day.

It's funny what turns out to be the best part of the story.

____________________
*which, of course, are many and notable

Aboutness

I’m a hoarder of sorts, always have been, which means my coats end up being seasonal time capsules.  When the weather shifts, I finally go through the pockets.  I’m sure to find at least two grocery lists that will get me to thinking about the meals those ingredients became, and the lists themselves will likely be on the backs or folded sides of kid drawings depicting stick me doing wondrous things with my stick son and stick daughter.  Usually I'll turn up a wrapper from a piece of Chinatown candy, something delicious with an unknown fruit printed on the foil, and maybe a back up train ticket for a commute I no longer make.  Twice I came across kazoos.

Most of my pocket loot comes from my daughter Q.  She finds beauty and meaning everywhere and then asks me to hold it for her.  Walking in the park, she’ll spot a stick shaped just like a ‘Y’ and want to make a gift of it for her mother.  Or there will be a chunk of asphalt, pleasingly shaped and flecked with some mysterious crystal (in all likelihood broken glass), that I will end up carrying around for a couple of days, me handling it like a totem in my pocketed fist until we both have forgotten enough about it.  I hold on to this stuff longer than I need to, I suppose, because it’s a way of holding on to Q’s way of thinking about the world, her way of appreciating things.  Simply putting my hand in a pocket takes me back to times spent with her at moments of discovery and the making of thoughts.

No one really knows how thinking about something actually succeeds — how a thought gets a hold of what that thought is about.  It seems rather important to know how this works, since it’s the getting hold of things that makes for true and false beliefs and makes knowledge at all possible.  It’s also what makes my thoughts about Q different from my thoughts about stones or justice or ‘Y’-shaped sticks.

For the curious and the philosophically inclined, the first part above has to do with the puzzle of representation and the other is about content.  People have been thinking about these puzzles for a while now, though not as long as one might think.  There are all sorts of theories, of course — some rather compelling ones — but they all have their flaws and disappointments.  Some believe words get to be about things as a function of use (use a word enough for a job and its job becomes the use). Others contend that some words, names in particular, get tied to their bearers through a chain of users and uses that extends back to the birth of the name, a baptismal aboutness relation born and raised like (and usually with) a child.  One view holds that the two are born together — that language is a knife that sculpts the world out of the coarse block of experience. A few believe that this is just a thing that minds do, that brains are made such that they just can have states about other things, and all other bits of aboutness — words, maps, paintings, the gestures made in complicated traffic — are merely inherited from brains.  I used to cheer for the view that aboutness was a matter of resemblance, that language does its job by picturing what it’s about, but I grew to believe that this approach just replaces one mystery with another.  In virtue of what, after all, does one thing resemble another? 

Much of the mystery comes from the fact that to think about something, we must have a particular way of thinking about that thing, one way among many, but the world by itself does not suggest who is thinking about it and how.  The Greeks’ Hesperus (the morning star) and Phosphorus (the evening star) turned out to be a single planet, Venus, but ask and they’d deny that Hesperus is the same as Phosphorus.  The stars are what they are, but our thinking about them makes for its own universe.  We can usually get from ways of thinking to the things themselves, but not from things to the way we think about them.

Rummaging around recently, I came across (among the tissues and wheat pennies) a collection of small shells, about five of them.  Each a perfect, polished scoop of rainbow, I can see why Q had them end up where they are.  They come from the beach in California where my wife and her sisters released their mother’s ashes into the ocean.

We went there in part because of a joke. Once when talk of what to do with your body was only hypothetical, Ba Ngoai said she would like to be cremated and her ashes mixed into the Pacific Ocean so that she could swim back to Vietnam. "You can't swim," Ong Ngoai reminded her at the time. Everyone laughed.

The Pacific coast lacks the angle and anger of the Atlantic. West Coast beaches tend to be gentle and long, the waves cresting far out and then unfurling lazily on the land. I remember that there was a stripe of sand made into a mirror by the wet, and Q and The Boy immediately rolled up their pants and walked out onto their reflections.

It was my wife's idea to cut a hole in one of Ba Ngoai's handbags for the release, and my wife's younger sister carried it down the steps from the parked cars.

"Hold this," my sister-in-law said. I obliged. It was heavier than I expected. She removed her boots and tights.

"I can carry this, if you like," I said.

"That's okay, I'll do it."

"It's up to you; it's your mom."

"That's not mom," she said with a warm smile. And she was right.

The hole in the bag worked for a while, but there was a surprising amount of ash, and the three sisters took turns scooping out what they could until their hands were black. The substance was finer than the sand. But even their handfuls weren't enough, which I found fitting given the size of Ba Ngoai’s life. My sister-in-law went into the cold waves nearly to her waist, and, after a quick glance up and down the nearly vacant beach, she upended the bag and let loose the rest. She then hopped her way out of the surf, the late-afternoon sky over the water bluer than anyone's idea of it, and Q was there to greet her. They looked to each other and then took hands. Q, thankfully unfamiliar with grief, skipped every now and then on their way back to the car, pausing to give me a few small shells to keep. My wife and The Boy together drifted further down the beach and looked out past everything for a long time.

As you read this now, you somehow reach out and grasp them, and only them, even those who now lie beyond our hands. No one really knows how this works.  But it does.

This is what I have found, what I ask you to hold for me.

I put the shells back into my pocket.

In between

Note:  This post is part of a larger writing project, "Dad Stuff," about, as you might imagine, dad stuff.  To read more posts related to this project, see posts with the "dad stuff" tag.

We spend this Thanksgiving as we traditionally have — that is to say with each other at our own table and with way too much food. Since it’s just the four of us, we really don’t need to cook the full-on meal, but we’ve ingested enough tradition over the years that we find ourselves making lists and standing with over-full baskets in long lines. Besides, Thanksgiving has grown into an all-family thing in our house. We now trust The Boy with a real knife, and as a result, he has become the emperor of stuffing. He’ll cube as many loaves as you put in front of him until all the bread in the house mounds in the silver bowl next to his cutting board. Q loves to do just about anything in the kitchen, loves the mysterious alchemy of cooking, particularly now that she nearly doesn’t need the step stool to reach the stand mixer. She and I make the machine make the pumpkin pie; she and my lovely wife whip the cream for the top. All of us eat it after we've eaten too much already.

For much of my childhood, tradition required that we spend Thanksgiving in Southeast Kansas* with my father’s side of the family. The five-hour-plus drive from our house in southwest Kansas** always seemed covered-wagon long, mainly because my brother and I disputed property lines in the Buick back seat the entire way. All of us we were happy, then, to see the end of the trip and everyone who inhabited it. And there were lots of inhabitants to see. My father and his brother were essentially raised by their grandparents, brought up working the farm alongside their own children (my father’s aunts and uncles, my great aunts and uncles), nine of them counting my father’s mother, as brothers and sisters. It’s as confusing as it sounds, made more so by my father’s referring to his grandfather, Luther, and grandmother, Lucy, as “dad” and “mom,” and to his own mother as “mother.” (My father almost never called his father anything — at least in front of me. Pretty much everything I think and know of my paternal grandfather I’ve pulled from and put into two unbendable black-and-white photographs: a handsome man in a hat relaxed against a boxy car; an older but still handsome man in a high-backed chair with kids just off the arms.)

The aunts and uncles who were brothers and sisters to my father made for a colorful collection of people. I knew them at these Thanksgivings more or less like I know them now, which is to say by their nicknames and natures. The youngest, Larry, was just a eight months older than my father and was called “Lute” by everyone. He flew huge C-5 cargo planes for the military, the biggest they have, so I suppose it was fitting that he piloted those big meals. Thanksgiving was usually held at his family’s grand, historically registered house, the one with the built-in intercom system that it actually needed. (My same-age cousin Joe and I would be up in his room on the fourth floor, building or breaking something, until we were conscripted into chores through the intercom; that thing always seemed to be for receiving orders, and we were forever being called to the front.) Peg, whose real name, Margaret, I didn’t learn until well into high school, ran a company in Hutchinson for years that ran power lines up and down the state. Tom was usually there, moving smoothly about like someone in the FBI, which he pretty much was. He favored mirror aviator sunglasses, which I suppose he should given his line of work. I later discovered that he was a Cold War style expert in Russian. Tom’s nickname was “Black” because of his complexion, but I don’t remember anyone actually calling him that. I do remember everyone calling Alice “Ree Ree,” including me, because of trouble my brother and I had pronouncing her name years before when we were new to talking.*** Growing up, her brothers and sisters called her “Injun,” again due to appearances. She had and has a huge laugh, a powerful lever able to lift anyone who hears it. Donald — Doc, Docky — had a similar-sized laugh and spirit as Ree Ree, but everything about him was shot through with craziness. He dusted crops in his plane and drank fairly heavily, and more than once at the same time. He would brag to us about all varieties of strange meats he was busy curing in his home-built smokehouse, and though now I’m as likely to concoct stories for kids’ delectation as much as anyone, I still believe that Doc may have been telling something like the truth. There was Jerry, whom my father called “Cruit,” as in “recruit,” the word clipped as short as Jerry’s hair. Jerry still lived and worked the farm where they all grew up — he and his wife Beverly, herself an official Master Gardener, who could grow anything. I remember Grandma Jane, my father’s mother, was there for many years with her cigarettes and lovely mysteriousness, then she was someone we missed. And there were all sorts of affiliated husbands and wives and cousins filling out the various geometries of the house. My father had been the anchor of the group in many ways and for many years, and it was a marvel to see why it was needed, to glimpse how they could drift when left to themselves.

Tradition had it that after everyone was too full, the women gathered in one part of the house, cleaning up and talking to each other in ways they would recount bitterly for years. The men, left to themselves, played cards. Eventually being invited into these yearly games meant a great deal to me. The money exchanged in these events stayed exchanged, which meant they were for real, adult. The pots often became sizable, certainly more money than I’d ever seen, and this was when money was a thing you could see often enough. Dad was a good poker player, and he could and would usually disabuse players of whatever they brought to the table, including my brother and me. And dad never returned our kid-sized stake with some parental lesson about fools and their money. Nope — the lesson was in the losing and the staying lost.

We played dealer’s choice, and along with the studs and the draw pokers we would play “in between.” It was a simple game, but one high in drama and stakes. After everyone anted up, the dealer would take turns giving each player a run at the pot by dealing him two cards. The player then decided how much to bet that the next card dealt would fall in between his first two. If the card was between, the player took the amount bet from the pot; otherwise the pot grew. The round ended when someone bet the pot and won. Every now and then, a player would be dealt a pair, which meant doubled chances for luck and loss. Often enough (particularly several Schlitz into the evening) someone would feel like gambling and bet the pot on a tight spread — an 8 and a Queen, say — and the whole table would tighten and lean in, anxious for luck in one valence or another, then snap back into laughs when the dealer turned over a deuce. I loved that I could participate in that kind of adult attention, even direct it somewhat when the deck came around to me.

The food we make for ourselves is good. As we eat, the four of us take turns saying what we’re thankful for. It turns out that we’re thankful for family, for each other, for books, and for LEGOs.

After we package leftovers, we go for a walk to give ourselves a reason for pie. November evening in New York still counts as fall, even this late into it, and it’s cold but not unpleasantly so. Though older now, the kids still marvel at the park at night when the familiar edges to everything get redrawn by the dark. My wife and I wish that we could make Thanksgiving back into a day with family, and it’s time that Q and The Boy learned how to properly shuffle a deck. But work and school and distance make quick trips tough, at least for now. In the meantime, we play what we’re dealt, in between traditions.

 ___________________________________
*Yes, Southeast Kansas, capital letters and all. It's its own place, one where tradition requires that you curse as you cross the Bourbon County line. And, yes, Bourbon County.
**A place undeserving of special caps.
***Don't ask me how "Alice" could be ever be pronounced "Ree Ree."

World's Best Dad?

Father's Day was a treat this year, as always. With the help of my lovely wife, Q and The Boy conspired to make a special breakfast for me that included sneaking out for coffee from a local shop where I go to treat myself. ("We're going to get the MAIL now, dad," Q announced in a particular vigorous attempt at misdirection, as they left early that morning.) My lovely wife made cinnamon rolls from scratch, and I made four or five or more of them quickly disappear — a luxury of these special days is not having to keep count. The kids presented me with lovely drawings, nicely framed, telling me what they appreciated about me, and my lovely wife gave me some nice shirts. I am well loved and loved well, is what I'm saying.

The Boy's tennis lessons have ended for the time being, so after the morning's surprises he and I went out to the park to hit baseballs while Q went to yoga. Then we all went to Yankee Stadium for the afternoon's game. Though it happened on Father's Day, the game was really for The Boy's birthday. It was his very first major league game, and what a game it was — punishing heat, a grand slam, a rain delay, a brief appearance on the jumbotron, a Yankees win. He loved it all, especially the wildly overpriced fan/spritzer thing shaped like a baseball, and I enjoyed sharing it with him. Q made it until the fifth inning before the seats far too hot to sit in and the slow pace got to her, and she jumped at the chance to leave when my wife offered it to her. But though I gave him a similar offer, he wanted us to stay all the way through Sinatra's "New York, New York." On the subway home, we even saw a guy with a hook for a hand, which somehow completed the day for me.

A few weeks ago I was paging through one of the thousands of catalogs we get from a place called Oriental Trading,* an outlet that specializes in bulk orders of craft and party supplies. If your kids have left a birthday party recently with a goody bag, I bet that at least some of the disposable dreck** dumped out on the couch has come from Oriental Trading.

Anyway, times being what they were, I saw lots of opportunities to pick up some chintzy stuff of the No. 1/World's Best Dad variety. Q was sitting beside me, so I casually asked her if she was going to get me a "World's Best Dad" mug (or whatever) for this Father's Day. No, she said. Didn't she think that I was the World's Best Dad, I asked? Nope.

Okay, but here's the interesting part: She's right. I asked her why she thought as she did, and she said that she really didn't know all the dads in the world, but even so I probably wasn't the best one. And, you know, I can't argue with that logic. Come to think of it, there are and have been quite a few dads,*** and, though I think I'm a decent one, odds are that at least someone is better at the parenting thing than I am.

It's an odd claim to stake anyway. I'm not sure what makes a best parent, though I have some idea of what makes for better and worse ones, and I'm not sure that if I did know, I'd want to be one. Why would I want to deny my kids the chance to improve on what I did and could do for them? (Or would the World's Best Dad realize this and make noticeable, lesson-worthy mistakes?)

In any event, I love being a father, and I love thinking about being a father. And if I've learned one thing this Father's Day, it's don't ever ask your kids how you're doing.

Happy Father's Day, all.

________________________
*I would very much like someone to explain the existence and history of this place to me. Not only is the company named "Oriental" Trading—an adjective that has long since stopped being acceptable geographically or racial-sensitivity-wise—it's located in Omaha, NE. I've been to the, um, Orient, and I've been to Nebraska, and one does not make a person think of the other. Also, Oriental Trading offers quite a bit of Christian-themed merchandise (e.g.), which doesn't really honor the majority traditions of most Far Eastern societies. All this adds up to one big ball of why.
**I'm looking at you, balloon-powered race cars.
***Abraham, e.g., or the Big Man Himself (if you're into that sort of thing)? Tough competition, admittedly.

Birthday Break

My 39th birthday came and went last weekend. It was fairly uneventful for me, which is the way I like it. It was, unfortunately, much more eventful for The Boy. A week ago, he and his babysitter came suddenly home from his best friend's house with his arm held still. Apparently he fell while climbing around and down a bunk bed and landed on his left wrist. Now I'm no doctor (or at least no doctor that counts), but I could tell that his arm looked, well, wrong.

We left pretty much right away for the hospital. We rode nearly silently in the cab, his streaked face now dry, me trying to say something both soothing and believable. He'd been through this before more or less, and I assumed that he was thinking about what this trip likely meant. Which is to say a cast. Given our terrible experience with Q at NYU Med Center, we went back to the source this time — New York Hospital, where Q and The Boy were born.

It was the right choice. Whereas the folks at NYU looked at Q as if she were some kind of foreign object, New York hospital has a pediatric ER, with a waiting room (in which we barely waited) decorated with animal murals and a real fish tank. After checking in with a nurse (and not some grumpy lady behind bullet and largely soundproof glass), we were taken back to a bed to wait for an examination. As we sat on the gurney, a young woman came in to ask if we wanted to watch a movie while we waited. This ER had a waitress. The Boy and I settled upon The Polar Express, and by the time we made it home about five hours later, we had pretty much seen all of it. There were questions asked over and over by different doctors — "Did you ever black out?" — several x-rays that appeared magically on screens right after the beam switched off. He had, it turned out, a buckle fracture, and the bone needed to be reset. They used what they called "conscious sedation" so that he wouldn't be completely under while they realigned the fracture, but he wouldn't remember the procedure either. It all went quickly and without problem.

We went home tired and with his arm in a cast. (No purple this time; we weren't given a choice.) We also weren't given a lot of information about how long he'll need to keep the thing on. (We'll find that out next week.) We do know that his summer contracted in an instant — no more bike, scooter, beach, or pool. No tennis or soccer or basketball. Take it easy in the sandbox and on the slide, though he's probably better off staying away from both. Bathe, fittingly, with the arm in a trash bag. A week has passed, but he still says, every now and then, "I wished I didn't do it." He didn't do anything, of course. It's just one of those things.

So that's a bit of context for my birthday, which, like I said, was much nicer for me than it was for him. I'll spare you many of the details, largely because some things I keep just for me. But I do have to share a bit of my great present from the kids. Q and The Boy (with a solid assist from my lovely wife) made me a book about them and me. On one page, for example, Q said:

I am, in fact, on the tall side, and, if I do say so myself, good at giving slingshots. Note: Q colored the picture and wrote "100" herself.

And The Boy reminded me, among other things:

Such a simple idea, this book. I have it here by me now, close, where I like it.

I'm not sure when it was exactly (maybe around 27 or so?) when I entered the middle stretch where birthdays don't seem to signify much of anything. At both ends of a life, they mark successful survival, which is certainly worth celebrating (with presents!). The middle is a little mundane, which is just fine with me.

Then again, thinking about that cab ride to the hospital last week lets me see a bit of how my middle-stretch birthdays matter. I'm still a puzzle to myself in many ways — and can't see what there is for me even a month out from now — but each year I get a little better at being a solid thing for the kids to lean and climb upon. I can be the person who gets The Boy to thinking how cool beds with wheels are and the one he looks to before the drugs take him under. And I can show Q how to twist the cutter on the counter to make a clean biscuit, which is the same as showing her how to make things to be proud of. (She figured out on her own how tasty the raw dough is.) Then I can be the one that she can be proud to.

There are other things, too, but some things I keep just for me.

Happy Father's Day

In our house, we tend to praise each other with food. And so it was on Father's Day, when Q and The Boy together carried in a tray with homemade cinnamon rolls, juice, hot coffee, a crisp white napkin, and a flower they sneakily picked from the park moments before. As I held the tray, Q combed my hair* while The Boy scratched my back with a backscratcher we've had hanging behind the bathroom door for something like forever. I brought the wonderful breakfast spread out of our bedroom to the table, though, so that I could sit by both of them as we all dismantled the sweet rolls.

Later, my lovely wife made delicious enchiladas while the kids and I were outside on the swings in the light rain. After we all ate too much for lunch, we took in Pixar's "UP" in 3D.** Which, by the way, was one of their finest films, and that's saying something. It was a wonderful day, just the kind I like.

I love being a dad. Among other things, I get to be the fixer, the assembler, the tosser-in-the-air, the paper airplane maker, the highest shoulders upon which to sit. (It does help, of course, that I've got a fantastic wife and two swell kids to make my role so much easier to realize.)

Unlike so many other roles (jobs, e.g.), I will never stop being a father, long past the years where I'll embarrass them and then won't again, past their own marriages (should they have them), past their parenthoods (again, should they have them), past when I'll need plates brought to me, past me. All along I will be proud.

Happy Father's Day, all.

_________________________

*The hair combing was The Boy's idea. Not sure where it came from, but I must say that I rather enjoyed it.
**Unexpected bonus: The heavy, black-framed 3D glasses made us each look like Martin Scorsese, particularly (for some unknown reason), Q. Probably has something to do with her being about the same height as him.

Bring back the tough dad? Did he ever leave?

Mensroom
Originally uploaded by dmealiffe

My lovely wife recently passed along a Wall Street Journal piece by Kevin Helliker called "A Father's Tough Love." In it, Helliker writes about how his father's stark, tough treatment of himself and his four brothers looks from a distance. Helliker's father as he describes him was pretty manly — a butcher who also firmly ran a newspaper delivery business before and after long hours of cleaving meat — and he embodied the distant Midwestern father of the times. Helliker writes, "It was a style that placed Dad at a certain distance, that required him to scoff at scraped knees and hurt feelings, that often cast him in the role of bad guy."

This style has (more or less) become less acceptable, and Helliker collects reasons why that might not be a good thing:

"The whole culture needs the father back," says Lila Kalinich, a Columbia University psychiatrist who served as senior editor for the book [The Dead Father: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry]. "Fathers substantiate law and order. Fathers can create a sense of womanliness in daughters and bring the male children into manhood."

Hmm. I'm not sure what Kalinich means by "womanliness" or "manhood," and I do wonder how Helliker's father would have treated a daughter. (As I understand it, tough dads of this sort had deeply distinct double standards for parenting girls and boys, and girls were treated so differently because they were believed to be so much weaker and more vulnerable than boys on just about every score.)

Compare Helliker's sentiment with that expressed in a Father's Day speech by the current Democratic nominee for president. Here's Obama speaking of fathers' duties:

The first is setting an example of excellence for our children – because if we want to set high expectations for them, we’ve got to set high expectations for ourselves. It’s great if you have a job; it’s even better if you have a college degree. It’s a wonderful thing if you are married and living in a home with your children, but don’t just sit in the house and watch “SportsCenter” all weekend long. That’s why so many children are growing up in front of the television. As fathers and parents, we’ve got to spend more time with them, and help them with their homework, and replace the video game or the remote control with a book once in awhile. That’s how we build that foundation...

It’s up to us – as fathers and parents – to instill this ethic of excellence in our children. It’s up to us to say to our daughters, don’t ever let images on TV tell you what you are worth, because I expect you to dream without limit and reach for those goals. It’s up to us to tell our sons, those songs on the radio may glorify violence, but in my house we glorify achievement, self respect, and hard work. It’s up to us to set these high expectations. And that means meeting those expectations ourselves. That means setting examples of excellence in our own lives.

The second thing we need to do as fathers is pass along the value of empathy to our children. Not sympathy, but empathy – the ability to stand in somebody else’s shoes; to look at the world through their eyes. Sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in “us,” that we forget about our obligations to one another. There’s a culture in our society that says remembering these obligations is somehow soft – that we can’t show weakness, and so therefore we can’t show kindness.

But our young boys and girls see that. They see when you are ignoring or mistreating your wife. They see when you are inconsiderate at home; or when you are distant; or when you are thinking only of yourself. And so it’s no surprise when we see that behavior in our schools or on our streets. That’s why we pass on the values of empathy and kindness to our children by living them. We need to show our kids that you’re not strong by putting other people down – you’re strong by lifting them up. That’s our responsibility as fathers.

(You can read the whole thing here or watch him deliver the entire speech here.)

My own father was from the older school (punishment wise and all), but I didn't live in fear of him. Which is to say that toughness isn't synonymous with gruffness, and kindness isn't tantamount to weakness. And toughness has never gone out of fashion, just its expression. I'd like to think that my wife and I teach Q and The Boy strength not through physical intimidation (of either our children or others) but rather in our expectations of ourselves and of others.

We'll see how well we did, I suppose, when they look back.

A father's day

It's been a full day, as most are. June weekends have been stuffed, and this one was taken over for the most part by The Boy's fifth birthday party (more about that later no doubt). Today was a little different, a time for recovering and for Q and The Boy to bring out the drawings and gifts for me that they had squirreled away in the closet. I think they enjoyed keeping the secret as much as what they kept secret, and I relished the theater of it all. My lovely wife also went to the kids when they both fell out of bed earlier than usual this morning. Now that's a Father's Day present.

Here's a story that fits this day nicely: Last weekend we went to a birthday party at some good friends of ours who used to live in our building. Their daughter was turning three, and, along with cake and too much great food, we knew there was going to be swimming (they have a pool) and a large inflatable castle water play thing that Q and The Boy would love. These friends left our building for an expansive house just north of the City, so we packed up our swimsuits and towels and car seats and set out for the rented car.

First, the car was late. We were supposed to get our car at 1:00 p.m., but the good folks at Zipcar called to say that the renter before us was running behind and would I like to cancel my reservation (at no charge) or take it late? Not going was, of course, not an option. At 1:30, then, I went down into the parking garage to retrieve the little Mazda as my lovely wife and the kids waited up on the sidewalk. I drove up and parked in the garage's opening to strap in the kids and load up generally. Now, we're more or less car-ride rookies, and odds are better than even that Q will throw up at some point during the trip. (She knows this, too, and usually claps her hand over her mouth just as I set her into her car seat.) Wouldn't you know it, Q did throw up right as I was fastening the belts, before we'd rolled an inch. Okay. So we took her out along with the bag with the beach towels, and we sacrificed one to clean her up. As we were swapping her dresses (my smart wife always packs extra everything), an SUV pulled up behind us wanting to exit the garage and honked. We scrambled back into the car and drove off, glad to be on our way.

As we were almost out of the city, Q asked for her Big Blanket and Little Blanket, which is to say she wanted her comfort blankets that she's had since, well, the dawn of her time. My wife looked to the back seat for the bag of blankets (and swimsuits and towels and flipflops and sunscreen and ...), and realized that instead of it sitting on the floor beneath Q's swinging feet it was sitting on the sidewalk just outside the parking garage in downtown Manhattan.

So we faced a choice: (1) go back for the bag and miss most if not all of the party, or (2) go on and start repairing the psychic damage suffered by a little girl whose parents left a big, irreplaceable chunk of her life on a New York street. We opted for (2), given that the bag might very well have been taken by the time we got back to the garage anyway.

To Q's credit, she (unlike my wife and I) didn't freak out. As I went into reassuring mode, my wife called the garage to ask if the attendant could walk up and check for a bag. She did get a hold of him, but he said he couldn't leave the booth for another fifteen minutes or so and that she should call back. About thirteen-and-a-half minutes later, my wife called again, and it turned out that the bag was still there (and still full of stuff) and that the attendant had it next to him in the booth. Deep, collective sighs ensued.

Could he keep it there until we brought the car back that night around 7 p.m.? Well, he told us, he couldn't say for sure — his shift ended at 4 p.m. and all bets were off after that. Sheesh. Okay, we made it to our friends' house, and as we rolled to a stop in their driveway, Q threw up again, this time all bright red juice all over her new white dress. My wife took them both into our friends' house, borrowed swimsuits for them both and left them to get wet with the other kids as she borrowed their washing machine for Q's seat cover and dresses. This was at about 2:45.

At 2:47 I got back into the car and drove the 30 city miles back to the parking garage for the bag. There was no choice, really — we couldn't risk re-losing Q's blankets. And but so I did make it back to the booth in time and back to the party (another 30 city miles) by around 4:30. I arrived in time to sing "Happy Birthday" and down two pieces of cake on a princess plate. At 5:30 we retrieved the fresh laundry and the exhausted, exhilarated children and went home with all our possessions plus two new goody bags full of wonderful stuff.

Things all worked out, then. And now I have a story to tell and a reputation with Q and The Boy: The Boy now has (another) reason to think of me as forgetful, and Q has concrete evidence of what her dad will do for her. Not a bad trade off, all in all.

Okay, so this post is getting a little long, but I want to exit with a poem by Timothy Steele that I recently ran into. It reminds me of how I've spent and spend much time these five years as a father, and the lines themselves arc and move just like Q.

The Swing
by Timothy Steele

She shrieks as she sweeps past the earth
And, rising, pumps for all she's worth;
The chains she grips almost go slack;
Then, seated skyward, she drops back.

When swept high to the rear, she sees
Below the park the harbor's quays,
Cranes, rail tracks, transit sheds, and ranks
Of broad, round, silver storage tanks.

Her father lacks such speed and sight,
Though, with a push, he launched her flight.
Now, hands in pockets, he stands by
And, for her safety, casts his eye

Over the ground, examining
The hollow underneath the swing
Where, done with aerial assault,
She'll scuff, in passing, to a halt.

Happy Father's Day, everyone.

(Note: Here's the blog header at the time of grandpa and The Boy from a few years ago



.)