Monday
Everywhere else there was the characteristic New York impatience – shouts, curses. … Yet the old men sat in a state of stoic introspection, uniformly indifferent to their rate of progress, or the noise, or indeed the city through which they traveled."
-E. L. Doctorow, The Waterworks
It was on a similarly dark morning last October or November that I myself stood stock still, staring through my front window whilst holding a cup of coffee that promised to clear the fog that follows me from the Land of Nod each day. On this particular morning however, (and to this day I can’t fathom how I had missed it until then) I heard the telltale screeching and growling of a school bus as it made it’s way up our street. I double-checked the time… 7:05 am. I rubbed my eyes in an effort to refocus them, and sure enough a few seconds later I saw a big yellow bus rumble past. This bus, thankfully, was not steeped in an aura of magic realism that caused it to glow with a strange radiance as did Doctorow’s omnibus; had it, I’m sure I would still have the heebie-jeebies to this day.
This school bus, however, was singularly ghostlike as it was filled with middle school students who were, to a one, “…in a state of stoic introspection, uniformly indifferent to their rate of progress, or the noise, or indeed the city through which they traveled.” They were, in short, a wretched bunch, each with a pitiably mournful expression that spoke volumes about the side effects of the zealous achievement and conformity that we allow society to expect of our children.
Oh all right, it’s not as grim as all that, but jeez, that bus wasn’t just really early, it was almost full when it went by at 7:05. What time did all those kids have to get up? And how about all those breakfast-making, lunch-packing moms and dads? Whatever happened to the reasonably civilized 8:35 school day of my youth? And what’s up with my fondness for rhetorical questions?
Anyway, I found that this bus experience was yet another reminder that we always have to be wary of the indifference with which institutions and bureaucracies regard human beings. (Speaking of which, may I recommend Tom Hodgkinson’s How To Be Idle? It’s mostly a light bit of work that I would argue has few practical implications for those of us busy trying to keep our lives reasonably tidy as we raise kids, but it sure does remind us to keep our priorities in perspective.)
So in the end, I know that the world has always had, and always will have its share of 7:05 busses, and that part of life is learning how to deal with them when you must. But I do know this as well: all those little school-bound faces I saw that morning convinced me that my boys and I will be playing more than our fair share of hooky in the years to come.
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Full Circle
That said, for the sake of preserving the opacity of my usually inscrutable posts, I think I'll be trotting out a well-worn conceit to begin today's rumination. -E)
It was a hot, rainy summer, and the humidity in the northeast was, more days than not, oppressive. It was a summer that not only saw the space shuttle Enterprise make its first test flight from the back of a 747, but saw the White House occupied by an overly smiley peanut farmer from Georgia. This was also a summer that saw the deaths of Elvis Presley and Groucho Marx which were followed in short order by the births of Ludacris and Dustin Diamond in what I can only assume was some sort of twisted cosmic joke.
In any case, through a series of no coincidences at all, this was also the same summer that saw a certain fair-haired boy of twelve become increasingly disillusioned by the steady stream of feculence that oozed from Hollywood. (Oh, all right, feculence is probably too strong a word, but jeez, how often do you get to use the word 'feculence?' On the other hand though, feculence is truly the only word that accurately describes the cinematic, well, feculence that is Mitchell. )
Anyway, while it's true that 1977 was a year that brought us Annie Hall, The Goodbye Girl and Black Sunday, the 1970's as a whole wasn't a very family friendly decade for movie going. There was, of course, the perennial stream of Disney fare aimed at the kiddies, but even that wore thin for the fair-haired boy of twelve. There are, after all, only so many times you can sit through cookie-cutter exercises in cinematic tedium like The Shaggy D.A. and Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo before a glassy-eyed ennui takes hold.
But then, just as it looked as if America had no choice but to sit through years of interminable cinematic road trips with Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed, everything changed. The fair-haired twelve year old, who was, oddly enough, remarkable only for his striking resemblance to me, went with his folks to a freshly minted space opera otherwise known as Star Wars. And the rest, as they have been known to say, is history.
And so it was that twenty-eight years and four movies later I found myself entering our local Lowe's googolplex with my own two fair-haired lads in tow, hoping for a big, satisfying whiz-bang climax to the whole thing. As we found our seats and settled in for a round of ads and trailers I pondered the fact that my first born, who is almost ten now, is surprisingly close to my own age when all of this started. The only real difference between us, I mused, is that he's by far a bigger fan of the series and even more exited about seeing Revenge of the Sith than I was. Of course the fact that he was sitting there wearing a Darth Vader helmet was sort of a giveaway.
Anyway, almost as satisfying as musing about my boys and the whole circle of life thing was that Revenge of the Sith really did turn out to be, in my humble opinion, a great movie. No spoilers here, but as the saga finally came to a close in a perfectly imagined and dialog-free denouement I was left with that all too rare sense of wonder that seems to come so easily to twelve-year-olds.
Oh yeah, and go get a copy of the Mst3k episode of Mitchell. Trust me.
"...he labors in vain and hypocritically in the vineyards of equality." *
It often occurs to me that there are countless advantages to being an adult rather than the child I used to be. Children are, after all, subject to the whims of chance and happenstance just as are adults, yet children are also obligated to navigate the oft-opaque world of rules and regulations created long ago by adults in an equally opaque process of reasoning and justification. Opaque enough, I might add, that much of the logic behind many standard parental rules still elude me at the frighteningly adult age of forty.
In any case, as a tot I was lucky indeed to have two pretty sharp, clear thinking parents who always did their best to make sure that the world of rules and regulations was as un-opaque as possible. Or less cloudy. Clarified? How about transparent? Oh, all right, transparent. They did their best to make the logic behind how the world should work transparent. When at home, for instance, if they promised we would do something or go somewhere, by golly that promise was kept each and every time.
Likewise, if they promised that I was going to be punished after school for some idiotic thing I had done, by golly I got punished after school. Couldn't be clearer.
And complimentary to home life, whenever we were out and about, my folks consistently treated others just as they expected to be treated. As such, each and every social situation was all about Please and Thank You, and not only did I learn that one always arrives five minutes early for an appointment, but also that tipping is based on the effort put in by a server rather than whether we thought the green beans might be a little over-done.
In short, unlike many parents I see today, mine didn't just talk the talk, but they, as expressed in the vernacular, walked the walk.
That said, here comes my big confession for the week: I am, on occasion, guilty of not walking the walk. Sure, the boys and I mostly have the social stuff down pat and around here a promise is a promise; yet when it comes to being both organized and tidy, I'm a complete hypocrite. There, I said it.
For instance, if I had a nickel for every time I gave the lads a hard time about leaving their clothes on the bathroom floor only to realize that underneath each soiled pile of Under-Roos was a lost section of my day-old newspaper... well, I'd have a pocket full of nickels.
And as often as not I'm all over the two of them like ugly on an ape about learning to pay attention to the time and organize themselves better... so guess who just spent the last fifteen minutes staring out the window while absentmindedly scratching his butt? Why yes, that would in fact be... me. A quarter of an hour gone with nothing to show for it. Except that my ass does feel a bit better, thank you. But I digress.
Anyway, now that I've mulled all this over, I figure I still have a year or two to change my errant ways before the lads get savvy to all this parental hypocrisy of mine. Yup, I'd better not waste any time getting my ticket for the Redemption Express, because if I can't change by then I'll run the risk of becoming just like every other ethically challenged parent who resorts to the would-be nuclear option of behavior modification: "Do as I say, not as I do."
Eeew. Gives me the willies just thinking it.
*Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
