True Ancestor

20

Oldest Daughter (left) and Middle Daughter, preparing to see the Art Institute's new Modern wing.

Middle Daughter turns 20 today.She is one of those rare individuals whose child-self shines through her adult self. As a child, she was dreamy, distracted, funny, very loving, resolutely happy. As an adult, she is still all those things. To have known her for 17 years is to have watched her grow lovely translucent layers -- a sweet onion of a human being.

Middle Daughter is perceptive -- so perceptive, it seems, that it's sometimes painful to her. She sees her own foibles and everyone else's, too: she can forgive others very easily, but not herself. As a child of divorce, she learned to mediate between worlds before she even understood that that's what she was doing. Never one to be forced into taking sides, she simply interpreted one "side" to the other, moving between parental realms with a diplomat's tact and a ballerina's grace.

Middle Daughter has a restlessness, a hint of reckless abandon about her. You sense that at any moment, she could throw everything over and be living in a DP camp in Zimbabwe, giving tetanus shots and reading stories to refugee children. Or traveling across India with someone she just met. And even as you interpreted this seismic life-shift to curious friends and judgmental relatives, she'd suddenly be back in college, double-majoring in economics and social work, earning all A's and still managing to follow Phish or Dave Matthews across the country.

Last night the extended family came to our house to fete Middle Daughter. It was a scene of hilarity and mayhem. On a beautiful, breezy summer night, Middle Daughter was surrounded with love (and repeatedly startled by the whoosh-BOOM of Gabe's potato cannon firing instant hash-browns into the office park behind our back yard), partially hidden behind a brown-glass forest of beer bottles, as the 20-something cousins (with only a little help from the elders) polished off all the Leinenkugel the state of Wisconsin had brewed in the past week.

Sadly, my aged and revered parents, who spent the weekend with us, were unable to stay for the party. My mother did a gainer with a half-twist off the back step of our patio, landing firmly on her rump -- the only place on her with enough padding to forestall serious damage. A little shook up but fortunately not seriously hurt, she and the Old Man returned to my sister's city abode yesterday afternoon. This morning, I asked the Old Lady whether she shouldn't go see a doctor. "Well, I'm a little sore," she said, "but what are they gonna do: put my ass in a sling?" Her sense of humor has suffered no fractures. Nor, thank God, has any other part of her.

Middle Daughter was kind of enough to duck out of the festivities last night and call my mom, see how she was, and tell her she was missed at the party.

In toasting her, I told Middle Daughter that she and Oldest Daughter were tied for "second most important woman in my life." What else cold I say? The One True Wife gifted me not just with Gabe, but with two remarkable girls -- as different as could be, as close as any siblings -- two people who taught me to parent, called me on my bullshit, forgave me my moods, are remarkable big sisters, and who know how to party.

Middle Daughter is bursting with potential, intelligence, love, wit, wisdom. Middle Daughter is mercurial, whimsical, philosophical. Middle Daughter is 20. Time -- and so much else -- is on her side.

Happy birthday, dear Middle Daughter -- and many more.

--T.A.

When Father's Day Actually Means Something

Oldest Daughter and Gabe. Photo: Youngest Daughter. Driver: One True Wife.

I put no store (if you'll pardon the pun) by Hallmark holidays. But yesterday was the kind of Father's Day that really did remind me what an honor it is to be a father and a stepfather.

We convened for an early cup of coffee with dear friend and faithful reader Starry and members of her husband's family, who were in from various far-flung locations to spend time with the husband's father. The One True Wife and I were eager to catch up with Starry but we were soon folded into this large and friendly group, featuring Milo, one of the cutest children I've ever seen. And to be named after the hero of The Phantom Tollbooth! What a cool role model.

A few lazy and generally unproductive hours followed. I was given wonderfully stylish shirts by Oldest Daughter, who knows I never buy myself anything stylish, and who wished me a "Happy Not-Father's Day." Then my aged and revered parents came to spend part of the afternoon and have an early dinner. Oldest Niece came by, as well -- a gorgeous and hysterically funny young woman who will be attending a new business school program this Fall at the University of Tel Aviv.

I'm very lucky to be born into a wonderful family, and wound by matrimony into another: the One True Wife's entire clan, which lives within a 20-square-mile radius and loves nothing better than spending time together. If I need refuge from this cozy clannishness, I have my own family of five siblings, and parents who are wonderfully physically and mentally sound at their age (they just celebrated their 67th wedding anniversary). Part of what makes being a father special is being able to still be a son. And to be a son in front of one's children. And having fatherhood both magnified by and diminished to proper perspective in the web of two large families.

At dinner, we regaled each other with myth and legend from those families; Gabe read from a hilarious family biography he had written as part of a school project. To be able to see ourselves through his eyes revealed a lot -- mostly, how observant and articulate he can be when he's not watching TV.

After a delicious dinner of fish tacos and fruit salad, I drove the parents to rendez-vous with my sister #3, while the rest of the family did the dishes (my customary chore, from which I received a blessed reprieve). Then the children and I adjourned to the local driving range -- even Middle Daughter, who finds swinging clubs at round objects to be a very strange activity. Much hilarity ensued.

Then we stopped at Dairy Queen, and ended the evening (along with the Wife) at the fabulous basement theater of my sister-in-law and her husband, where we sat in electric massage chairs, ate ice cream and watched Slumdog Millionaire.

The world is a vast and remarkable place. And so is the Family.

--T.A.

Getting Beat

Gabe is now faster than me. His hands and feet are bigger than mine. We are both a little stunned by this development.

He is better than me at everything physical that we both love to do: running, throwing, hitting, imitating people; his upper braces are off and his lower braces come off next week. He's a good writer, too. For a school project, he was bluntly funny about the poor quality of teachers: "If you put all my teachers in a group and threw a rock in their direction," he wrote, "you'd probably hit a bad teacher."

At a little over 5 feet 4 inches, and still shy of his 14th birthday, he's taller than I was on the eve of my 16th birthday. He seems totally at ease in the world, with enough humor and self-deprecation to survive the sudden handsomeness that adolescence has bestowed, and despite the approaching kingship of being an 8th-grader in a middle school. He's a good athlete, but not a stellar one. A fine student, but not a competitive one. His ease extends in all directions.

I could be wrong about this ease of his. But I doubt it. It's just possible that he's a straightforward, confident kid, living his life. May he stay straightforward and confident, long after I'm gone.

 

We are both a little sad that I can't compete with him anymore; our athletic arcs intersected only briefly. But there is nothing as exhilarating as that sadness. Gabe is a kid who makes me glad just to be around to watch him grow up.

--T.A.

The Younger

For nine months, my days were filled with, defined by, people who were half my age, or less. Suddenly, they're gone. I feel old again.

The funny thing is, it's not hard to be with them -- a) because I'm immature, so I fit right in, and b) because they remind me of my daughters (more mature, in many ways, than I -- certainly more mature than I was at their age).

But today's maturity is so -- I dunno -- immature. People who are in their late teens or early twenties have seen so much, done so much, sampled so much; but it's sampled from sanitized and digitized life-drives. Sometimes their lives seem to me like one big iPod, where if you don't like the song, the class, the interaction, the drug, the sex -- you just push a button and begin a new experience. They've played every sport, but never in pickup games on the street. They've been to every continent, but only on organized tours. They are aware of everything, but think that's the same as knowing everything.

The most indelible sense-memory I have is of sitting in the back of a fairly large lecture hall, with about 200 students arrayed in front of me, and the glowing forest of electronic devices, the snackety-snack sound of keyboards beneath the droning professors, the multiple screens on the PCs and Macs, upon which students took notes, checked e-mail, chatted, listened to music.  When I was growing up, the world was a ghetto. Now it's a playlist.

And yet, for all that curmudgeonly complaining . . . I love my fellow students. I am so in awe of their humor, their bursts of vulnerable humility, their hysterical senses of humor about their own neuroses, their desire, their insistence on seeing and doing and learning and being as much as possible. Theirs is a much more cynical world, but they are, somehow, much less cynical than my generation was. Having been reared in the shockwave of the (first) Kennedy assassination, under the mushroom shadow of the Cold War, and coming of age during Watergate and Vietnam, there was nothing for us to do but proclaim that everything was bullshit, even if you didn't believe it. My colleagues in the classroom, perhaps because of their fluency with accessing information, seem way less inclined to willful self-deception.They know everything's bullshit. They find it funny, challenging, stimulating.

On the other hand: the Internet turns everything into instant history. Relatively recent history -- Kruschev, Mickey Mantle, Elijah Muhammad, Flannery O'Connor -- may be buried forever beneath the new, lost to them in the landfill of contemporary noise.

This I'll say for them. They've been trained to learn, and their brains are learning machines at the peak of their function. They absorb information the way a thirsty plant sucks up rain. They're good, very good, at what they do.

I miss them.

--T.A.

Reflections on a Year in School, or: Confessions of a Symbolic Analyst

To realize how pervasive the model and the rhythms of the academy have become in our society, you really have to go back to school. At least, I did.

Now that I've finished a year in graduate school -- my first in almost a quarter century -- I can newly appreciate how the academic calendar, the culture of deadlines and tests, the schizophrenia of "work hard, play hard," the sacred self-absorption of the young, the free-floating molecular communities of people with similar interests -- all this comes to us from the university, and its ancient connections to the cathedral school, the village church, the symposium, the "Greek system."

Perhaps I'm finally returning to what I was trained to do, bred and brought up to do: read and think.

Here's Robert Reich in his book, The Work of Nations:

"Symbolic analysts solve, identify, and broker problems by manipulating symbols. They simplify reality into abstract images that can be rearranged, juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists, and then, eventually, transformed back into reality. The manipulations are done with analytic tools, sharpened by experience. The tools may be mathematical algorithms, legal arguments, financial gimmicks, scientific principles, psychological insights about how to persuade or amuse, systems of induction or deduction, or any other set of techniques for doing conceptual puzzles."

I spent most of the year around people who had not been out in the world much -- although some had been out in it a lot more than I have -- and the rhythm of the academy was, to them, the rhythm of life. The fluent analysis of symbols was the yardstick by which they measured themselves. The deadlines set by professors and enforced by the academic calendar defined their seasons.

But so did a lot of other appurtenances that simply didn't exist when I was there age: PCs, iPods, cell phones, social networking. They stayed in virtual contact, building and maintaining friendships primarily by means of electronic digital technology rather than in person, enabling them to become more efficient but also making face-to-face contact kind of fraught, ambiguous -- uncomfortable.

The ability to tie together disparate ideas from different disciplines is the work of the computer, but now young brains are wired to harness that power and potential. Mine isn't, yet.

But the brain is sizzling with new neural connections and new ideas.

Which I'll have to share later.

--T.A.