Deja Vu

When reading Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, much seemed eerily familiar.  Chabon is about five years older than me, but many of his reminiscences resonated with me.  Since I don’t want this to read like a book review, here is a list of five things (as a sample–if you want more, read the book)   in no particular order.

Legos.  I loved them as a kid.  My wife and I were recently complaining that you can’t find huge boxes of plain Lego bricks anymore–the ones we played with in the late 70s and early 80s.  If you go into Target or Wal-Mart, all you can find are themed sets.  Right now, if you walk through the stores you can find Star Wars, Harry Potter, Bionicle, City, Pharaoh’s Quest (this one is an Indiana Jones/Mummy-type thing) Sets.  All of these sets are designed to be able to make one thing (occasionally, you can make two or three variations).  There is also a new one called Ninjago which is a Lego set and also a Pokemon/Bakugan-type game.  To get the plain sets you have to spend lots of money and buy them online (look how far down the page  “bricks and more” are).  We mourn the loss of the stuff that you had to invent yourself.  Chabon mentions this, too, in his chapter “To the Legoland Station.”  He ends ups reassuring me, though.  His kids have used the “minifigs” and special bricks unique to specific sets to create their own hybrid universes: “kids write their own manuals in a new language made up of things we give them and the things that derive from the peculiar wiring of their heads.” 

Not knowing what I’m doing.  In “Faking It,” Chabon writes about putting up a towel rack on a bathroom door.  When performing such tasks, which still routinely are done men qua men, our goal (here’s a not-so-well-kept secret) is to “sustain the appearance of competence.”  When asked if we can successfully complete the task, the stock response is “to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit, one whose source and object of greatest intensity is yourself.”  We learn this from our fathers. Most of the time it works.  This includes the cliched failure to ask for directions.  I recently reattached a curtain rod.  It’s still where it is supposed to be but, like Chabon and his towel rack, “I fully expect, at any moment, in the dead of night, to hear a telltale clatter.”

Radio.  Things from our youth are now oldies, just as when we were younger stuff from the 50s and early 60s was, followed by 60s to early 70s.  This has happened at the same time that radio has become homogenized by a few conglomerates like Clear Channel (900 stations, many with the same centralized programming).  Quite often, as he points out in “Radio Silence,” you tune in your favorite station and it’s either changed formats, or just gone.  Like many, I now listen to Sirius/XM (12 stations there are Clear Channel, too, by the way), with it’s reassuring expectation of what each channel will play, along with its crystal clear sound).  Back to the “oldies thing” now, he describes the changes as “a sudden loss of memory.”

Family geekdom.  Chabon and his family are handing their coats at a museum and a young Englishman was surpised by what he saw on Chabon’s son’s shirt: “Is that–is that a Dalek?”  This sets off a discussion of Doctor Who by the whole family.  Although our son is too young for Doctor Who, he is a fully functioning member of one of our family’s geek rituals–tabletop role-playing games (RPGs).  Ever since he was a baby, he has been in the room for our Friday and/or Sunday afternoon gaming groups.  These groups are populated by people with graduate degrees and full-blown geek credentials.  Recently, our boy has wanted to play a character with us.  We have tried to make the content more age-appropriate (attacking monsters or robots instead of people) and he needs help reading his character sheet (all of your skills and abilities are in front of you on paper), but he shows no signs of wanting to turn back.  Well, it’s hard to beat the excitement of taking out robot cowboys created by a mad scientist with your slingshot, even if you have to imagine what it looked like.  I think it’s good for him to hang out with extremely bright, well-read adult chemists, engineers, physicists, poets, and philosophers.  These are hardly bad influences.  As Chabon says in “The Amateur Family”

I suppose I am a geek, the geek matrix of four bright geek spawn. And if you aren’t  wathcing and loving the glorious new BBC incarnation of Doctor Who, geeking out on the mythos of Daleks and Time Lords and Cybermen, swooning to the polysexual heroics of Captain Jack Harkness, aching over the quantum transdimensional heartache of Rose Tyler, and granting yourself the supreme and steady pleasure of watching the dazzling Scottish actor David Tennant go about the business of being the tenth man to embody the time-and-space traveling Doctor on television since the show’s debut in 1963, then I pity you with the especially harsh pity of the geek.

I sympathize with this sentiment and have watched every episode of the five series (the Brits do not call them “seasons”) the BBC have produced of the rebooted Doctor Who.  As a true geek, I can point out that since Chabon wrote those words, the Doctor has regenerated again and now Matt Smith  is the eleventh man to play him.  It is also true that there are some animated episodes of the show that I placed on my Netflix queue to preview for possible introduction to my son before I read Chabon’s book. 

Double Standards.  Parents are held to different standards by society.  Despite recent progress, “the handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low.”  That is how “William and I,” the second essay of the book opens.   On the other hand

Because the paradoxical thing, or one of the paradoxical things, about the low standards to which fathers are held (with the concomitant minimal effort required to exceed the standard and win the sobriquet of “good dad”) is that your basic garden-variety mother, not only working hard at her own end of the child-rearing enterprise (not to mention at her actual job) but so often taxed with the slack from the paternal side of things, tends in my experience to see her career as one of perennial insufficiency and self-doubt.

This accurately captures my own experience of being called great dad for occasionally doing things (taking our son to the playground or a classmate’s birthday party) that my wife does as part of “business as usual.”   To Chabon there should be a single standard for all parents:

doing my part to handle and stay on top of the endless parade of piddly shit.  And like good mothers all around the world, I fail every day in my ambition to do the work, to make it count, to think ahead and hang in there through the tedium and really see, really feel, all the pitfalls that threaten  my children, rattlesnakes included.

Amen.