My second-oldest grandaughter’s recent high-school
graduation party offered me the opportunity to meet and to reconnect with
members of the many-corridored factions of my family, near-family, and
almost-family. I got caught up with my
ex-wife’s aunts and cousins, whom I had not seen in twenty-five years, with my
ex-wife and her new partner and her old partner, and I was introduced to my
son’s ex-wife’s mother, grandmother, uncles, and cousins. My son’s ex-wife’s husband was not in
attendance. He was stewing at home, in a
fit of pique, because he was late getting ready and my son’s ex-wife, fearing
that guests would arrive at the party with no one to greet them, would not wait
for him. She and my ex-wife and my son
had spent the better part of the previous evening decorating the shelter. He had sat in front of the TV drinking beer. Thus his tardiness in getting ready. “What a douce,” my oldest grandson said, and
I had to agree.
Typically, I enjoy gatherings of this sort, where most of
the attendees pursue walks, runs, hits, and errors of life different from my
own academic filter bubble. I like to
chat them up, and I like to listen—well, eavesdrop would be the more correct
word.
* *
*
As I sat outside park shelter where the party was being
held, bowered from the 90 degree heat by the embracing shade of a hawthorn,
drinking a condensation-beaded Bud-lite that my oldest grandson procured from
the ice-chest of one of his uncles, watching the wind quarrel with the
treetops, thinking that life seldom offers more satisfying moments, my
attention was drawn by the following dialog between my son’s ex-wife’s
grandmother and her son Arlen.
“Mom, we’re gonna go to dinner after the party”
“I don’t want to go to dinner. I won’t be hungry.”
“Yes, you will.”
“No, I won’t”
“You’re gonna go to dinner.
And we’ll have a drink or two before.”
“I don’t want a drink”
“You’re gonna have a fucking drink!”
“I’m not. And why are
you using the f-word?”
“I always use it. You
just don’t listen.”
She lit a cigarette and glared at him. He polished off his beer and glared at her. They scoured each other with their
glares. I felt embarrassed. Here was a family dynamic that would no doubt
have sent Freud running for the exit. I
headed for the entrance to the park shelter.
* *
*
I discover that the beer my oldest grandson scored for me
came from another of my son’s ex-wife’s uncles, Ted. I thanked him, he said, “No problem.” I told him I was the father of the father of
the graduate, and he asked me what I did.
“I’m a teacher.”
“Yeah? Where do you
teach?”
“In Lamoni, Iowa.
It’s a small, southern Iowa town near the Missouri border.”
“High school?”
“No, at Graceland University.”
“You’re a college professor?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you teach?”
“English.”
He looked at the man next to him, who had been
listening. He smiled; no, he jeer-smiled. The other man smile-jeered. The same thought had evidently occurred to
them simultaneously. Both sang, “Hey!
Teacher! Leave them kids alone!”
Charming. I felt
unfortunate that I did not have an appropriate lyric for a Culligan Water
Softener installer. Ah, well, just
another brick in the wall.
* *
*
My ex-wife’s cousin Mickey is a pipefitter, and a union
man. A gentle, soft-spoken man, he
turned into a semi hauling a volatile mix of raging scorn when I mentioned
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s having survived a recall vote for his
legislative push to strip the public unions of their bargaining rights. I attempted to draw him into argument, not
because I am anti-union, but because I relish conversation and believe argument
is a truth-seeking enterprise, not a zero-sum debate.
“Well, Mickey, you know a lot of people who are hurting
economically look at the wages and pensions the public employees get, and think
they’re pretty cushy, and because their taxes fund those wages and
pensions—well, I can understand how they’d find Walker a kind of
standard-bearer. It’s like he voices
their anxiety and discontent.”
“Shit,” Mickey replied.
“Walker’s a stooge in the pocket of the corporations, and the people who
support him are stooges, too.
Christ! How ignorant can people
be?”
I understand. We all
need our monsters, if only to feel the strength of our irresistible otherness. And
I don’t know, maybe it was the epithet “Christ,” but I wondered what Jesus
would have though, or thinks, about unions.
Would Jesus have been a union man or a right-to-work advocate? He did claim that a camel would have an
easier time passing through the eye of a needle than a rich man passing through
the gates of heaven. He did say that
“whatever you did not do for the least among you, you did not do for me.” He did concern himself with common people
living common lives, and ate and drank with people of the lower social ranks,
violating Roman and Jewish eating rules.
And, in his name, that first-century Norma Rae, Paul, created one of the
largest unions ever, one with great benefits if you forego the wages of sin.
* *
*
At breakfast the next morning my youngest granddaughter was
glum. I attempted to lift her
mirthlessness by sending some cheery words her way, but halfway there they
collided with the impenetrable force field of her gloom, splintereened, and
floated to the floor. Her cellphone
vibrated: a text message. She read it
and ran crying from the table. I looked
at my son who shrugged and followed her.
When he returned, he said she had received a text from her boyfriend,
Chad, who told her he no longer wanted anything to do with her. His words, exactly: he no longer wanted
anything to do with her.
I am three continents away from being a violent man, but at
that moment a blinding rage flared in me, a rage so large it cast a shadow
before it. I wanted to confront Chad and cure him of his
cruelty. I wanted to place a hand on his
neck, pinion him to a wall, get marine-drill-sergeant in his face, hiss that I
did not appreciate his making my granddaughter cry, curse him for his cruelty,
and knee him, hard, several times, in the groin.
This dark capacity in the face of cruelty has visited me
before. Several weeks ago, my
step-daughter’s son came running into the house, holding his head and sobbing
uncontrollably. A wasp had stung him
while he was out raking leaves from the garden.
My wife cut an onion in half and held the exposed portion against the
spot of the sting. His mother explained
that he needed to calm down: his agitation sped the spread of the poison. That was correct, of course, but not what he
needed at the moment. I gripped his arm
and said, “Those wasp stings, they hurt like hell.” And then I headed outside, determined to
slaughter that wasp, any wasp, all wasps, for making my handsome and strapping
14-year-old grandson cry, until my wife called after me and returned me to
reason, and the shameful irony that in some uncurated annex of me lay a barely
kenneled capacity at odds with the very end I sought.
* *
*
At my second-oldest grandchild’s graduation party, my grandfatherly
pride would have easily filled the Big Room at Carlsbad Cavern: straight-A
grades, including every Advanced Placement course her high school offered, a
stack of plaques memorializing her scholarly and marching band accomplishments,
and a scholarship to the University of Minnesota in the fall to major in Chemical
Engineering. Her curiosity is
incandescent; her desire to learn, shoreless.
She is experience-tranced and expectation-imbued and hope-infatuated.
Unlike most, maybe all, of us in attendance, she is not
jacketed by the comforting fit of the familiar; she wants to be surprised
rather than flattered, vulnerable to the risk of a different perspective rather
than armored in certainty. She refuses
to consider the world necessarily what it is, refuses to occupy it without
being much occupied about it. She wants
the world to make sense and make it make sense so it doesn’t break her heart. I hope it does break her heart, but only in
the sense that Mary Oliver describes in her poem “Lead:” “that it break open
and never close again/ to the rest of the world.”
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