Manhood for Amateurs Read online

  We’ve had a run of crazy stuff going on around here lately, culminating (for the moment) with global economic collapse and my mother-in-law’s suffering an injury that looks as if it may permanently alter the contour and quality of her life, as well as the whole family’s—a pair of calamities that followed on a series of unpleasant surprises, diagnoses, minor crises, the dog undergoing a “spinal stroke,” professional setbacks, sorrows in the second grade, the loss or destruction of many objects of value, a brutal twenty-month-long presidential campaign, and all the usual, unusual alarums and disruptions that result when six people and a Bernese mountain dog, requiring various mental, emotional, and physical accommodations, therapies, and treatments, conduct an ongoing experiment in measuring mutual interference in one another’s reality distortion fields by sharing a house in Berkeley, California, a place that may, at any moment—which will, given the way things have been going lately—be destroyed by a massive once-a-millennium earthquake, or by a raging October wildfire, or by the fire that immediately follows the earthquake. And when I say lately, I’m using the term very loosely. This shit has been going on around here for years.

  The thing is, we are six lucky people (and a dog), and all our needs and desires are amply met. We have set up the household to run smoothly when possible and to recover quickly when smooth is not an option. The children do their chores and their homework, the adults our work as spouses, parents, and writers, and if you took a sample of any random hour any day, if you employed some human calculus to arrest our progress, to ascertain our state at any given instant, you would find contentment with one another’s company, love and respect, a fruitful exchange of ideas, compulsive storytelling, joking around, even the odd outbreak of peace and quiet. But since this thing with my poor mother-in-law (broken femur, shattered wrist), I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out how long it has been since the days around here have been normal. Steady. Routine. Productive. Neither beset nor fraught nor teetering on some brink of disaster, free of emergency and crisis. I spend a lot of time thinking about, wishing for, working to arrange and to render inevitable, the return to our lives of Normal Time. And yet in trying to work my way back to the last golden era, I find myself casting my memory so far that the exercise begins to call into the question the very idea—an idea, by the way, that forms the basis of my understanding of our family life, here on our notional seam between the fault line and the burn zone—that there has ever been such a time. It turns out that the whole thing may be a delusion.

  Like everyone—I hope—I suffer from a number of delusions, many of them apparently ineradicable. There are the geographical delusions. When I am in Pittsburgh or Paris, for example, I can never prevent myself from thinking of the point where the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio conjoin as facing eastward, or of the Left Bank as extending to the north of Notre-Dame. Most of my delusions of longest standing have to do (such is my legacy as a human being) with the acuity of my judgment, of my memory, and of my insight into the hearts of others. But the worst and most wondrous of the delusions that plague me tend to take the form, like this idea of Normal Time, of vague but unquestioned certainties about the nature and course of my life.

  Here’s an example: I am forty-five years old. By even the most conservative estimate, it has been nearly a quarter of a century since I climbed eagerly aboard this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood and left the planet of my childhood forever in my starry wake. I know this. My grandparents, my boyhood bedroom furniture, a miniature schnauzer of admirable character named Fritz, the dazed and goofy splendor of bicentennial America: I will never see any of those or a million other things again. And yet always lurking somewhere in the back of my mind is the unshakable, even foundational knowledge—for which certainty is too conscious a term—that at some unspecified future date, by unspecified means, I will return to those people and to those locales. That I am going back.

  No, that’s false. The delusion is not really that I believe or trust that I will be returning one day to the planet of childhood; it’s that the world I left behind so long ago is still there, somewhere, to be returned to; that it continues to exist, sideburns, Evel Knievel, Spiro T. Agnew, and all, like some alternate-time-line Krypton that never exploded, just on the other side of the phantom-zone barrier that any determined superman would know how to pierce. When I watch a film or a television show from the period and see again the workingmen wearing short-sleeved shirts with neckties, or the great wide slabs of Detroit automobiles, or the blue mailboxes with the red tops, or when I happen to hear from some random radio the DeFranco Family singing “Heartbeat (It’s a Love Beat),” I do not think merely, Oh, that’s right, I remember that or the more pathetic I wish I could go back there again. What I feel is something more like gratitude, a sense of relief, the way you feel when you wake from a dream in which your beloved has died, and the world is grief and winter, and then you find her warm and snoring in the bed beside you.

  But even that delusion pales beside this mad hankering, this utopian or millenarian yearning for the coming days of Normal Time, of time to spare, of time in plenty. Time not just for work and reflection and unhurried lovemaking but for all kinds of fine and tiny things. Time to learn German. Time to print out the digital photos and reorganize the albums. Time to lavish on my younger children as I seem to have lavished it on their older siblings (though back then I thought there was never enough time for anything). Time for regular lunches with my mother. Time to get deep into a baseball season again, to linger over the box scores in the morning, to watch a meaningless game between teams I don’t care about, just out of fondness for the game. Time to write the short stories I used to fling like Frisbees out into the blue, the libretto for an opera of The Long Goodbye, an annotated version of my failed, never-completed novel Fountain City. Time simply to stretch out, to play with, to dandle and dilate and waste with my children and my wife.

  Instead it’s just, as Arnold Toynbee or Henry Ford or Dr. McCoy used to say of history, one damn thing after another, and often several damn things at the same time, overlapping swaths of color on the digital calendar, conflicts and cancellations, two tasks half-done badly where one might have been pulled off in style. There is never, in the words of Irish poet Tom Paulin, any “long lulled pause / before history happens.” Only days after my wife and I guided our last baby into kindergarten, we began preparing in earnest to send our half-grown woman off to high school next fall; in the interval, the stock market crashed and my mother-in-law fell down a flight of stairs. There is no Normal Time, or rather, this is it, with all its accidents and discontinuities. With a breathtaking sequence, your last child leaves home, gets married, has children, and then you fall and break your leg, and the next thing you know, you’re approaching the point at which space curves back on itself or doesn’t. The end, unless the end, too, is a delusion. After that, either way, there is no time at all, and you’re never going back again.

  I was walking past a public elementary school off Solano Avenue a few weeks ago and noticed, hanging over its entrance, a large paper banner decorated in orange and black, featuring a motif of jack-o’-lanterns and scarecrows and proclaiming the imminent observation by its students of the school’s annual Harvest Festival at the end of October. The sign, like the other elements of decor hung from the gates of the schoolyard, said nothing about Halloween. There was no imagery of ghosts, bats, witches, haunted houses, etc., but I noticed that aside from the pumpkins and the scarecrows, there was nothing in the way of agricultural or other harvesttime imagery, either—no haystacks or, I don’t know, ripened ears of maize, cornucopias, sickles, threshing machines, ritual stonings. Apart from the gardens in its backyards—lavish as many of those are—and the bounty of hydroponic plantations in its closets and basements, Berkeley, California, has, as far as I know, no harvest to be observed. I wondered whose sensibilities were being respected by this absurd bit of subterfuge or, if you prefer, cultural sensitivity. Perhaps those of evangelical Christi
ans who have been known to object to the historical association of the eve of All Saints’ Day with witches, devils, and other characters one would have imagined might fall beneath the contempt of a truly effective personal savior, at least when depicted in crepe paper, latex, and cake frosting. Or maybe it was, paradoxically, non-Christians whose feelings were being respected, given the connection between Halloween and the ancient Catholic feast of All Hallows. Or maybe the decision to rebrand and denature Halloween had been made out of respect for, though without recourse to any observable facts about or even a passing knowledge of, the feelings of small children. But mostly, I wondered, Who the hell do the people who authorized that sign and that “festival” think they’re kidding?

  I’m not saying that school districts—or anybody else, for that matter—ought to go around scaring people without their consent, or that disrespecting people’s feelings ought to be any public institution’s official policy, though I think I could make an argument for the latter in certain cases, such as that of people who see grave moral danger in an eight-year-old wearing a bedsheet. I don’t think public schools should impose Christian worship on anybody, least of all Christians. I don’t want my children taught that it’s all right to persecute or demean others for their beliefs or, for that matter, that on October 31 the souls of the damned rise up from their graves to go carousing with the Prince of Evil. But if had a choice, I might pick either of those over teaching them that it’s our unavoidable lot as modern humans to dwell everlastingly, wearing an eternal smirk of knowingness, in bullshit.

  The same thing goes for Christmas and the by now ubiquitous school holiday or winter pageant. I am a liberal agnostic empiricist, proud to be a semi-observant, bacon-eating Jew, and I have only contempt for the intolerance, ignorance, anti-intellectualism, self-deception, implicit violence, and misogyny that underlie religious fundamentalism of every flavor, from bearded to clean-cut. But I’m all for putting the Christ back in Christmas, and not only in the hope, doubtless in vain, that it might shut a few evangelical Christians up. It pains me to say it, but the people who argue that it’s dishonest to equate Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa are, at least in this instance, and with very little in the way of percentage gain in their own overall level of honesty or correctness, correct. I like to eat latkes as much as the next Jew, and candlelight is lovely, but the glorification of Hanukkah by American Jews is another example of voluntary group self-deception. It’s an exercise in collective bad faith in which everyone agrees to ignore what everyone knows to be true: that Hanukkah is a pissant holiday elevated beyond its station and intrinsic meaning for the gratification of toy manufacturers, greeting-card companies, and the makers of chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil, in an effort to battle the cultural stranglehold of Christmas, an effort that has never been and never will be successful, if only because Hanukkah songs are so painfully lame. As for Kwanzaa, I can’t say for sure, but I see no compelling reason to give it the benefit of the doubt. Christmas is a big deal, a much bigger deal than Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or any other Christian holiday, for that matter, apart from Easter. So, fine, let’s put the Christ back in it or get rid of Christmas entirely. Either way, let’s do it honestly, which, if we are fundamentalists, means throwing out Santa Claus, candy canes, and mistletoe, not to mention decorated trees, light-up life-size plastic reindeer, and the entire Christmas economy itself.

  Thank God, though, we are not fundamentalists. And maybe there’s a way we can keep Christmas, Christ and all, and still respect and acknowledge both the traditions of non-Christians and the First Amendment of the Constitution. Because I would kind of hate to lose Christmas, a holiday that—as with poor old Jesus Himself—I’ve always been rather fond of.

  In my family, the yearly colonization of Jews by Christmas produced a kind of pidgin holiday free of adjectives and ritual angst. The Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Savior, Jesus Christ, the King of the World, born amid portents and miracles in the manger with the talking animals and the little drummer boy, was put through an extremely fine sieve, leaving only a residue: stockings over the fireplace personalized with Elmer’s glue and glitter, a half-gallon of eggnog in the refrigerator, and a set menu of animated television shows (A Charlie Brown Christmas, The Year Without a Santa Claus, and the parable of Whoville). There was a stocking for the dog, too, in which, on Christmas morning, he would find a dog biscuit just like every other dog biscuit he had ever been given but which he would nonetheless greet with a gratifying show of holiday spirit. We didn’t have a mantel to hang our stockings from, mantels having fallen out of fashion by then, so we hung them on the iron utensil hooks with the poker and the shovel and the tongs. To this thin Yuletide residue we then added a few syncretistic customs of our people. We went to the movies with a bagful of chocolate Santas, having ensured beforehand that they were solid and not hollow. We went for a walk in our gloves and scarves, admiring the doorways and windows of our gentile neighbors’ houses, crayoned in lights against the evening, with the hasty squiggle of a tree or a hedge in front. Most crucial, we ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant. And even though we ate dinner at the very same Chinese restaurant at least twice a month, the Christmas meal seemed more leisurely, and the traditional pupu platter, with its central flickering brazier of heatless comedy fire, lent a festive suggestion of bounty and esoteric rites. The whole day was like that, a bright flame that did not burn, a holiday without gravity or meaning or claim on our memories, a lost day when the stores closed, the roads emptied, people stayed inside their houses, and the world was briefly left to Jews like us to do with as we pleased.

  Still, there were, every year, strange face-to-face encounters with the conquering holiday that left me feeling obscurely moved. Take that Peanuts TV special, for example. At its climax, Linus Van Pelt, the character with whom I most strongly identified, saved the day by reminding everyone, in the lean, poignant language of the King James Bible, of the reason for the ornaments and pageants and teriyaki-pineapple chunks on bamboo skewers. It never occurred to me to wonder whether any of it could possibly be true. The idea that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, that He was the Messiah, that if you did not believe in Him you would go to hell, and so forth, these ideas were even more insubstantial to me then than they are now, when my learning to doubt everything has created a condition strongly akin to that of fierce belief. But all the same, there was something profoundly touching in Linus’s voice when he spoke those words, particularly when he got to the part where the angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds “and they were sore afraid.” There was nothing about the story in itself that was any more powerful or moving or true than the stories over on our side of the Bible, but it was a story fixed upon, so determinedly and exhaustively, by all my favorite forms of popular media, from comic strips to sitcoms to the radio playing “Jingle Bell Rock,” a story repeated so often that I could not help but respond on some deep level to its appeal, to its promises of answered prayers and brotherhood and home.

  I don’t see anything wrong with that; A Charlie Brown Christmas didn’t convert me, or threaten me, or imperil my ties to Judaism. What it did was educate me. But then the antidote to any kind of bullshit, bad faith, hypocrisy, or cant, whether offered in the name of Jesus or of multiculturalism, is always education. I still know that chapter and verse of the Gospel of Luke by heart, and no amount of subsequent disillusionment with the behavior of self-described Christians, or with the ongoing progressive commercialization that in 1965 had already broken Charlie Brown’s heart, has robbed the central miracle of Christianity of its power to move me the way any truly great story can.

  My own children have attended a private school administered under the auspices of the Episcopal Church. Every year, as part of the school’s annual Christmas pageant, the second-graders put on a Nativity play, just like the Peanuts kids. They dress as sheep, wise men, Joseph, Mary, angels of the Lord—my daughter wore a halo, and my son carried a shepherd’s crook. The story is presented straight, in the l
anguage of the gospels, with the sole nods to multiculturalism being a running translation into Spanish provided by their schoolmates and musical accompaniment by the choir singing Nativity-related carols from around the world. During the first part of the program, there are usually a couple of Hanukkah songs and a nod to Kwanzaa. But there is no Hanukkah play, no reenactment of the miracle of the oil or even, for that matter, any mention of the Maccabees at all.

  There are a fair number of Jewish kids at the school, and I know that sitting through the annual recounting of the birth of Jesus—an event that, however opportune for Christians, has brought millennia of suffering and persecution to Jews—makes many of their parents uncomfortable. Even more than the Friday chapels (at which the kids are admittedly as likely to hear about Ramadan, César Chávez, Yom Kippur, or recycling as they are about the life of, say, St. Brigid), the Nativity play seems to quicken all their anxieties about sending their little Jews to an ecumenical and progressive but unabashedly Christian school.

  Not me. I love hearing the story of Jesus’ birth, and I always have, just as I have always loved hearing about the births of Moses, King Arthur, Hercules, John Henry, and the Peach Boy of Japanese folklore. Like all stories of miraculous births, the Nativity is the story of a great promise being made to the world. In the case of Christ, that promise, while unredeemed, has led demonstrably to the making of the world we live in, and if the subsequent years have brought as much disgrace as glory to those who have accepted or claimed to accept the promise of Jesus’ birth, I don’t think it does anyone any harm to hear the promise itself: a statement of hope, forgiveness, and love among all the people of the world, repeated by a bunch of little kids dressed up in kingly turbans and cottony fleece. On the contrary, it breaks my heart every time.