Thanksgiving Redux

This Thanksgiving I watched my family fill an empty house. My wife and I have seen our small pack of children slowly move away to colleges and boyfriends houses along with more mature after school activities and weekend getaways, and most of the day now we walk from empty room to empty room, encountering no one but each other. So when my children, mother, brother, in-laws and extended family started to trickle into our house this Thanksgiving, the place felt full again. And it felt good. Like a home.

But, strangely, it also felt quiet. There were the noises of children whining and giggling and knocking over delicate objects, the sounds of adults stacking dishware and calling across rooms to get the correct number of chairs correctly placed at the table, the venerable hum of humans laughing and those few serious heartbreaking conversations about irresolvable family concerns. And yet somehow the house seemed controlled and settled, polite and nicely evolved. Looked at from a different angle you might also say that it was tepid and at times just a little boring.

I couldn’t help thinking about how much blood had been drained from Thanksgiving since I was a kid. My home now is infinitely larger than the railroad-roomed, one bath, inner city boxes in which I grew up, but when we fill it with people for the holidays what goes on is a mere blip on the holiday Richter scale compared to what it was like growing up in a place where the holidays were a time when people yelled and fought and laughed and drank until they passed out. A time gone by where eating was a sport and where we loved so hard that by the end of the day we were all panting in neutral corners.

On those Thanksgivings back then it was expected that the men would play the children - the clowns - and that the children would behave like full grow midget men and women. And the women … well the women were the queens. They controlled the flow of the cooking and food; they told those ridiculous guys where to sit and when to shut up; they threw the kids morsels of food before the plates reached the table and they hit these selfsame offspring with slaps and shrill voices if they started to act too much like those overgrown children whom they had married. All this would go on through the dinner and into the desert, until we were all sated with food and wine and after dinner sweets and then, if we were very lucky, all hell would break loose.

I can still see it clearly forty or fifty years later. It could be any one of a dozen different scenes, all interchangeable, but in this particular Thanksgiving set piece, my grandmother, mother, aunts and various other women relatives are cleaning the table while that group of scheming, clownish men – my grandfather, father, uncles, great uncles and second cousins – are entering the living rooms with their hands full of whiskey tumblers and their minds full of dirty jokes and exaggerated stories that they are going to tell each other. We children are nowhere to be seen, but that is only because we are doing some scheming of our own.

Camped out in an alcove behind a door, just off the living room where no one can see us, are my cousins and I. When that half drunk crowd of male relatives enters the living room, my youngest boy cousin (the one with a pair as big as all outdoors) jumps out and startles my grandfather who spills his tumbler of Canadian Club all over my uncle’s rayon sweater wherein both of the men start to chase the boy back into the dining room and around and around the large table. The rest of us children are given threatening looks by our fathers, but that does not stop us from also running into the dining room to crouch next to the little cabinet where my grandparents keep the liquor. From this vantage point we can watch the chase, and as we do we laugh so hard that snot begins running from of our noses.

In the kitchen the women have heard the commotion and have entered the dining room where they quickly comprehend that my grandfather and uncle will never be able to catch my sinewy jackrabbit of a cousin. My grandmother, who will not put up with nonsense from any boy or man, slips off her shoe and with this killer mule in her right hand, she joins the chase. Before you can say Bugs Bunny my grandmother traps my cousin in a far corner of the dining room, whereby she swats him twice across the back of his head with the sole of her shoe, basically putting an end to this portion of our entertainment.

There will be more of this kind of thing before the end of the day: heated, obscenity-laced arguments that will break out over the card game the adults will play; one cousin locking another out of the house until the exiled one breaks a window trying to get back in: one of the more recently married women sobbing hysterically to her mother because her husband has spoken crudely to her (as if he had ever spoken to her any other way). But for now, the men in the family have all recommenced their migration to the living room, where soon the snoring will be accompanied by the muted sounds of a lowly moaning TV set. The women too are subdued for the moment as they gossip softly and inhale the menthol cigarettes they have lit up now that their husbands are asleep. These women are slowly gassing us children with second-hand smoke as we hide not far from them on the kitchen stairs. But that’s okay, because what we children are doing on those stairs is simply plotting our next attack.

Am I crazy to miss this sort of Thanksgiving tumult - this holiday hullabaloo that was part of every Thanksgivings, Christmas and Easter of my childhood? Perhaps I am. At our house this Thanksgiving the men worked in concert with the women; we helped with the cooking and the setting and the clearing of the table, and if we weren’t doing that we kept the children quiet by playing with them or by reminding them to use their “indoor voices.” It was a picture of moderation where no one ate or drank too much; where we maintained level heads and monitored ourselves to ensure we were the lovely, heartwarming family we had always wanted to become. And while it’s true that nobody got hurt or punished or even swatted with a shoe at my house this past Thanksgiving, I secretly longed for that tiny bit of danger that comes from never really knowing what a truly irrational family might do next.

So here’s to the grandparents and mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and cousins of Thanksgivings past who kept us guessing and on our toes, the clowns and queens who loved us too loudly and yelled too frequently, who napped while the wives cooked and cleaned, and who ate and drank and kept secrets while their children played and plotted and practiced at being midget adults.

Four days ago I watch my family fill our empty house for Thanksgiving, but somehow it didn’t feel quite as full as it used to. How could it? The clowns and midgets and queens have now all disappeared.

Women and Children First

If someone held a gun on a women, her husband and her children and told this women that she had to choose one of them to die, she would look at the person with the gun and say, “I want you to know one thing … I’m really gonna miss my husband.”

Now for those of you without a sense of humor (and you know who you are), let me just say that I'm not advocating gun voilence or suggesting that this sort of thing happens a lot.  I'm just making a point.  Women love their kids beyond reason, and they're not going to let a little thing like their husband stand in the way of the kids' survival.

And just for the record here, I want you to know that I’m actually okay with this. I can see the natural advantages. Facing the chiseled reality of survival, a woman can always find another husband. On the other hand she also knows in that deep reptilian part of her brain that – when it comes to her kids - she can’t be replaced. By sticking around she’s ensuring the survival of the species. So the husband is a dead man. May he rest in peace.

I mean, say what you will about today’s father’s being capable, reliable, talented and every inch the woman their wives are. I’m here to tell you that this just ain’t so, Joe. We are not women. We might be a bit better at raising our kids than our father’s were – it’s not hard to compete against a man who’s idea of taking care of his kids for the night meant having the ten year old make dinner for the four and seven year old while he called his bookie and then took a nap on the couch. But let’s face it, even with decades of society’s unrelenting, forced-march toward sexual equality (with everyone from Sigmund Freud to Dr. Phil training us to find that sensitive little girl inside us while still allowing our inner ape to come out and beat his chest once in a while), not one of us guys could do all the things our wives do for our kids without eventually winding up in a corner swinging a baseball bat at anyone who got too close.

Are you, my fellow dads, going to be able to whip up breakfasts, lunches and dinners the kids will eat day after day after day … while watching over them to get their homework done … while staying up all night with the one who is vomiting into a bucket … while putting your daughter’s bed-head into a French braid … while driving the middle one to karate, the little one to ballet and the older one to the mall to find the perfect mate among that fine crop of mumbling 15 year old boys she has to choose from? Are you going to be able to do all that on your own? On top of that, will you have the endless empathy, eternal patience and rock solid unwavering ability to support your child no matter what, no matter when? In short will you be able to do all the things your wife does to make sure this generation lives long enough and well enough to take their place in the regenerative order? I think not, my manly cohort. If you face the facts of this and think about all that our children’s mothers do for our kids that we could never hope to do on our own, you yourself might even tell the nut with the gun to choose you when he pulls the trigger.

Okay. Sometimes women can take this save-the-child-at-all-costs instinct a bit too far. For instance, when mommy thinks daddy’s been too hard on the kids and mommy suddenly feels like she has to protect the kids from daddy, and then the kids know that they’ve got daddy just where they want him and daddy ends up locked out in the garage, alone, beating his head on the hood of his car wondering what the hell just happened. Well I obviously don’t like that. I don't like it one bit. But killing me to save my wife and my kids I can kind of understand – maybe I just started a book I’m really into or I have a business trip coming up that I shouldn’t miss - but I’ll understand.

Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that my wife and my daughters and my women friends are going to have a really hard time with this idea. And some of my guy friends aren’t going to like it much either.

Well to those women who find this difficult to swallow I say, let’s face it girls, this is a tribute to your gender. You know in your heart that you wouldn’t waste a second before you’d save your kids over your husband. And you also know that’s exactly how it should be. Men can help you make the children and we can coach you with sympathetic Lamaze breathing when they’re being born. We can bring in money and lift heavy things like nursery furniture and warehouse-sized cartons of baby food. We can lend a hand in raising the family and in feeding them and tucking them into bed at night. Heck, we might even be able to watch over the kids for a few days and make sure they don’t get hurt before you get back from your trip (well they might get hurt a little but it wouldn’t be anything that a quick trip to the emergency room couldn’t fix). But if you asked any Vegas odds maker to give you the probability of a kid turning out okay if he or she were raised by their father alone, you’d be looking at odds of a thousand to one … at best. If you think about this, it actually gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “lady luck.”

And to my guy friends out there I would tell them to all just calm down. This is just a hypothetical argument after all. Nobody’s really out there gunning for you. No matter where you are in your fathering, I’m sure your wives still love you and need you. We all know you are important to your family and none of your wives really want to see you die. Just avoid any dark alleys or the homes of any reputed, gun-toting psychopaths when you’re with your family and everything will be just fine.

Children Of Mad Men

Let me set you straight right at the top. This is not going to be about the TV show Mad Men. This is going to be about us. More specifically it’s going to be about those of us who were small children during the time in which the show is set – the 1960s to be exact.

There’s been a lot written about the show. And I watch the show. And I like it enough, if “like” is the right word. If you’ve ever watched it, you can’t help but be sucked in by the overwhelming sadistic sadness in every plot line, the obliviousness to which these chain-smoking, alcoholic characters are headed toward their own destruction, the unrelenting scenes - like something dug out of a time capsule - showing what happened when a privileged segment of society gained nearly unlimited freedom for the first time in its history. It’s like watching two gorgeous, gleaming bullet trains headed toward each other on the same track. You just can’t turn away. And it couldn’t be any more gripping if this gang of white, middle class men and women were to strip down to their underwear and drop acid while standing on the ledge of a skyscraper (which for all I know might very well happen in an upcoming episode). It’s all there – extramarital sex, slow suicide, heavy drinking, marriages crashing in on themselves, money earned obscenely being obscenely spent – and it nearly always ends in a tableau of people eating each other alive.

And yet, because I am not really a voyeur of other people’s pain, I don’t feel I’ve been compelled to watch the show because of any of the above. In fact, I wasn’t even sure why I was so eager to watch it episode after episode, until I realized the following. In the background of most of the scenes of family life are two little children: a boy of about 5 and a girl of about 8. They belong to the show’s main characters and these children are almost always there when we see one or both of their parents at home. At first I wondered why the children were always part of these scenes. They didn’t seem to further the plot in any significant way, and I know that the show’s writers are much too cunning and invested in making us think about ourselves to simply have these kids around as set decorations.

And then it hit me hard. The kids are there because the show is really about them and what their parent’s behavior is going to do to them. And that’s when I realized that those kids are really me. Mad Men is about the next generation - my generation – the one that would be set adrift after being raised by a group of mad men and their wives.

When I realized this, watching the show became like looking at hidden home movies that my parents never dared show us for fear of reminding us what they put us through. There is the eight year old daughter of the main characters mixing drinks for her parents over the course of a long Sunday, and there is that same little girl later that night trying to awaken her mother from a drunken stupor to remind her that she and her brother have not yet been fed their dinner. There is that sad little boy, undersized for his age, lying about breaking the hi-fi and being scolded by his father who has been lying all along about his own past, indeed about his real identity. There again is that second grade girl caught smoking one of her mother’s cigarettes in the downstairs toilet and there is her mother punishing her for this by locking the girl in a closet while she lights up just outside the door. And there again is the boy child yelling about his dinner at the black woman who cares for their home as his mother snaps back to tell him that he can’t talk to this woman like that because she works for her. These kids are doomed. And every time I see them in a scene, I feel doomed right along with them.

We know where these kids are headed. They’re headed toward the same place as the rest of us born in the two decades after World War II. Dammed by our parents’ ignorance and sense of entitlement, we inherited lives of confusion, wrong choices, drug addiction, bad marriages, anger, anxiety and guilt over everything from how much we should eat to how much we should love those who are trying to love us.

And lest you think that the scenes of these children in Mad Men are not from our own lives, I offer you the following from my life and the lives of one or two others whom I have loved. There I am at 12 years old accompanying my father into a neighborhood bar where he will introduce me to some friends of his, including a woman with whom he is sleeping and who is not my mother. There is a dear cousin of mine at 14 years old sniffing glue in a closet in his bedroom while his parents drink happily night after night in their kitchen, a cousin who barely 15 years later will take his own life. There is my innocent wife and her good-hearted sister, joyous young girls really, being abused by their father, a man who had endured the German blitz on London side-by-side with his mother’s abuse, only to prosper and come to America where he would drink heavily, hate mostly everyone and nearly destroy his daughters with his own needs. I’ll stop here. Those of you in my generation all have your own stories. And I’ll bet you all go to bed at night saying the same prayer that I do, “Oh dear God, forgive our parents sins and save us from ourselves.”

Has God heard us? Many times I think not. I still struggle daily with my fears and my guilt over the modest abuses that I have distilled down from my own parents’ more monstrous abuses and that I still, in my darker moments, act out on those I love.

But then sometimes in these later years of my fathering I catch a glimpse of my nearly grown children and I see that God has been listening. My children are strong and they are honest. Most of all they are happy because they understand – in a way that we never did - that the world will not give them everything but it will give them some things. These children of mine seem to know how to love us and to forgive us even though we may have trespassed against them.

Why is this so? Well the Mad Men-watching dramatic side of me likes to think that, because we took the bullet for our kids, they have escaped a bullet of their own. But I know it’s really not that. God simply answered our prayers through our children. After all they were not raised by mad men, and with the help of God we children of mad men have worked to make sure that the madness stops here.

Two Calls

On the day my first child was born I got calls from two different men. The first was from a man who was alive. The second from a man who had been dead for years.

The first call was from my father-in-law. It happened barely an hour after my daughter had been born. He was in Asia on business and had found out about the birth of his first grandchild in a call that we had relayed to him through his wife. News like this travels fast in families – even back then more than two decades ago – and, when my father-in-law called across seven time zones and three continents, the hospital quickly patched him into our room.

I can honestly say I forgot what I said to my father-in-law as soon as I handed the phone to my wife. I was never that close to the man in the first place and even this new generation which we both – oddly enough – had a hand in bringing into the world wasn’t going to change that. That unremarkable phone call was the high point of our relationship. Looking back, I can see how it went downhill from there.

The second call didn’t happen until later that night as I was coming home from the hospital after my daughter and wife were finally asleep. Once I got in the door it took very little time to figure out that another man was trying to get in touch with me. Walking in I turned on a lamp and the light popped like a flashbulb – the room went white with a spark and then again turned suddenly, startlingly black. It left phosphenes of light and the images of furniture and window casings playing across my retinas as if they were photographic paper.

I wandered around the room temporally blinded, not really knowing where I was going until my ankle rammed the bottom step of the bedroom staircase. Falling on the stairs, my knees hit the plane of the second step with a thud that shook the stairwell and knocked down one of the pictures we had hung on the inside staircase wall. I couldn’t see the picture but I could feel it; so I picked it up and groped my way into the kitchen looking for a light I could count on. That was when the phone started to ring.

I grabbed at the sound of the bell in the darkness until my figures touched the receiver, my legs still shivering from the bruises to my knees and ankles. But the line went dead as soon as I brought the mouthpiece near my lips. That’s when I’d had enough and I flipped up the wall switch in the kitchen only to look down at my hand and see that I was staring at a picture of my father.

When someone burning with love for you wants to get your attention, when they demand you answer their call no matter how much you may not want to talk with them, no matter what is unresolved between you or how much you might be trying to crawl out from under them - even if that person has been dead for five years – it’s just better if you answer that call as soon as possible. My old man was dead and he was pissed. He wasn’t there to see his first granddaughter. He hadn’t been able to call me on the phone from Asia or anywhere else. Where my father was there were no phones. All he had to work with were the supercharged, supernatural physics of the hereafter – the air of earth that could be electrified to pop a light bulb, the shove from a ghost he could use to send me careening into a staircase, the phone he could make ring through the will of his rapidly diminishing spirit. My father made sure he got in touch with me that night. He wasn’t going to let another man, another father (in-law or otherwise), take this moment for himself.

I walked back into the front room and hung the photo of my father back in its place above the stairs. I sat on the steps and looked at it for some number of minutes. In the framed photo my father was dressed as a soldier. He was smirking just like I do, cocking his head in those simple, youthful black and white shadows that I will always see when I look in the mirror. I don’t know what he was thinking in the picture. But I know what I was thinking. I was thinking that I would now have to use my own body as the bridge between my father and my daughter. That was really what my father had in mind when he called. He just wanted to make sure I knew that. And then he was gone.

Over the years allowing my daughter to walk across my back to get to my old man has not always been pleasant. Of this, I can assure you. When you take on such as task, somebody is going to get hurt and mostly it will be you. But this had to be done. How else to let the girl know that she is the daughter of an imperfect son of an imperfect father? In the absence of my father, I’ve had to be the one to lead my kids through the darkness and into the light of their history. I really didn’t have much choice in it anyway and it was really the only decent, fatherly thing to do to help them truly see who they are. I think my kids will be happy that I allowed them to use me to cross the river to my father’s humor, his rage, his crazy love. But who can say.

Do I believe in ghosts? Ask my first child. She just happens to be 21 years old today and she can now legally, officially, answer for herself. Ask her if she thinks I believe my father is still around us. Ask her if she believes her long dead grandfather is still with her. The way things have turned out neither of her grandfathers are in her life. But the call could come for her any time now. And when it does, I’m pretty sure she’ll know who’s calling.

The Tattoo

Fatherhood is like that tattoo you got when you were too young to know any better. There are days when you see the wrinkled skin and tiny gray hairs that are curling around that mark on your chest and you wish you could get it burned off with a torch, but mostly you’ve learned to live with it. Sometimes when you’ve had a few too many you actually enjoy looking at it, like a picture of an old girlfriend. And then there are times that you’re stone sober and you know that you’ll never be able to get rid of it but you love what it says about you anyway. For my money, that’s as good a definition of being a father as I could ever come up with.

Here's an example.

My middle daughter is working on getting into college and we’re working on helping her. I say “working on” with genuine sarcasm. My daughter doesn’t really want to go to college right now. We really don’t want to have to pay for it. And most of the colleges she’s applying for don’t really want her – they’ve got too many other kids banging on their door who don’t really want to go - and whose parents don’t really want to pay for it - to care all that much about whether or not they accept my kid. So it’s kind of joke. And it would actually be very funny if it wasn’t the rest of her life we were talking about.

Of course, I’m mostly just exaggerating. My daughter does really want to go to college – she’s just scared of growing up and that’s manifesting itself in teenage apathy and less than stellar SAT scores. My wife and I do want to be able to pay for her college – it’s just that we can’t quite figure out how to squeeze 50 thousand dollars a year out of grocery and mortgage money. And I’m sure many colleges would love to have my daughter, no matter her SAT scores – as long as we can pay the 50 thousand dollars a year in cash. And that brings me back to the tattoo.

Like the tattoo, this exquisite farce of trying to get my daughter into a college is just another reminder of fatherhood. I can’t ignore it and I can’t wish it away. The best I can do is to see her college education as something that is a part of me, something that is because of a choice I made a long time ago. My daughters and their futures are my tattoo and my duty is to accept and defend that which sits on my chest above my heart. It hurt when I put it there and I shouldn’t expect it to stop hurting now just because the ink that mixed in with the blood is fading.

Next weekend, we’ll face our fears of the future and take my daughter to visit a couple of colleges. My daughter will be anxious and non-committal the whole time. My wife will be stoic and encouraging while we walk the campuses. And I will look at the heavily endowed buildings and the state of the art music facilities and wonder how, in the name of all things holy, I’ll ever pay for it.

But when we’re done and we’re on our way back from the weekend and all is well, I might just make the following suggestion to my wife and daughter. Since we’ve come this far, I’ll say, why don’t we stop by one of the cities we pass on the way home and celebrate? We could go to a nice dinner. Or we could spend some time site seeing.

Or better still, since we’ve come all this way, perhaps we could take a little side trip to one of the seedier parts of town where I could find a place to mark the occasion with a tattoo.