The Graduation Party

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.”