But let’s stop thinking, Nick. It’s summer. There may be nobler times of year, but no one’s made a movie called Endless February. There never was a “Mud Season of Love.” And no pop songs have been written about slush and driveway salt.
Summer isn’t worthwhile. Bless it. The worthwhile things get on our nerves enough the other three-quarters of the annum. Let’s see what Duty looks like in a thong bikini. Let’s find out if Honor can water-ski. Summer is inconsequential. But we know what “take the consequences” means. We don’t get much done in the summer. But what are we, do-gooders? And, if what we do isn’t good, is the world worse off without it? Summer promises us nothing. Couldn’t we all use a little more of that in our lives? Summer makes us act foolish. So? How much fun have you had acting serious?
The major religions of the world do not have their high holy days in summer, for good reason. The Goddess of Winter is stern and self-disciplined. The Goddess of Fall is fruitful and wise. The Goddess of Spring is full of hope. But the Goddess of Summer is…naked, if we can get her to drink two more Mai Tais.
Summer is pointless. That’s the point. Summer is useless. Who wants to feel used? Summer is dumb. And so are you and I. Looks like one more perfect summer, Nick. Better hold on to the car keys. And if you’re going out again later, bring home a bag of ice.
One enormous advantage to being up all night with a baby, I said to my wife, is that we get to watch all sorts of things on television. There are whole segments of popular culture that we never knew existed—except when we were up all night with the previous baby. It’s highly instructive.
“You may think so,” said my wife. “I’m not allowed to drink until Poppet is weaned.”
Let’s see, I said, riffling through a copy of Cable Existence while mixing an old-fashioned. [Another thing parenting teaches you is how to multitask.] MTV has a new quiz show where all the contestants are members of popular music groups, Name That Drug. On VH-1 there’s an hour-long special, the story behind Courtney Love’s power ballad “I’d Die for Me.” The Memoir Channel is featuring Morris Freud.
“Who is Morris Freud?”
Sigmund’s lesser-known cousin, also a psychiatrist. He had a theory that there was an aspect to the psyche even more important than the subconscious. He called it “consciousness,” the idea being that we sometimes know what we’re doing. It’s never been proven.
“What’s on the History Channel?” asked my wife.
A new look at the Visgoths. Turns out they were sensitive, artistic types—starved for literature, music, drama. They didn’t really sack Rome. They were just searching for poems. They were sorry if they happened to break some things.
The Disability Channel has a roundtable discussion on handicapped access to Lover’s Leaps plus a preview of a new superhero cartoon series that Disney has created for obese children, The Incredible Bulk. There’s a show on the Paranormal Network about people who’ve had out-of-auto-body experiences. Archaeology Tonight is featuring “The Lost Mall of New Rochelle.” There’s a live broadcast of the 3 A.M. service at the US Airways First Church of Christ. Or we can watch that Turner Broadcasting show What If? It gets five stars out of a possible four: “This week Moo Sioux. The Spanish conquistadors brought European livestock to North America, and the history of the West would have been vastly different if their cows had escaped instead of their horses.”
“No,” said my wife.
How about Too Rich, Too Thin on HBO? “A slimmed-down Julia Roberts plays ultra-wealthy American appliance heiress Amana Fridge, who is lured into marriage by a penniless French count (Billy Bob Thornton). After she wills him her fortune he throws her into the Seine from the Pont Neuf and tells the gendarmes that she accidentally slipped through the grating.” Here’s something even better: The Great Car Chase, starring Steve McQueen. He did all his own stunts, you know. We lost one of the true thespian geniuses when he died of lung cancer.
“He should have had a stunt double do his smoking for him,” said my wife, as I sneaked out to the garage.
It’s the second anniversary of the air war in Kosovo! exclaimed the Political Nut who lives around here [coming in at cocktail hour, when he seems to be most active]. I’m starting an organization of Kosovo War Reenactors, he said. I’ve got the poster designed already.
Muffin is pretty upset,” said the teenage baby-sitter. “Somebody used up all her crayons.”
To make a bold political statement, I said.
“I thought Max was going to teach you to use the computer.”
I know how to use the computer, I said—In theory. But consider this: The Old Testament was composed with a hammer and chisel on tablets of stone. The works of William Shakespeare were limned with a goose quill. Henry James wielded a fountain pen. Jack Kerouac used a typewriter. And John Grisham writes on a computer. You see the pattern. I’m bad enough in crayon.
For millennia the process of communication has been getting easier and more enjoyable. What a terrible idea. The infinitely forgiving monitor is free of eraser burns, white-out puddles, and scribbles in the margin. Various “check” programs spell, punctuate, and correct grammar. The keyboard is as effortless as a Florida ballot dimple. A wrist wiggle and a finger tap deliver the vocabulary of William F. Buckley. Now anyone can put thoughts into words, and—as a glimpse at the Internet shows—almost no one should.
Right here in the November 26, 2000, issue of Parade it says…
“Mr. O,” said the baby-sitter, “my mom thinks you really ought to recycle some of these newspapers. She says you’re sitting on the whole Willamette National Forest. She’s tinkering with Grandpa’s leaf mulcher, so it can do pulp processing and—”
Parade is a valuable research tool, I said. How else can we know what people who collect china figurines think? Anyway, Parade says, Thirteen million older Americans have discovered the home computer. That includes your grandparents. I rest my case. If one irate phone call from next door about Muffin wearing an I’M THE NRA T-shirt can drive me crazy, imagine thirteen million electronic messages via Internet appliance. But the problem is not limited to pesky old folks with e-mail or idiots your age in chat rooms or management bores “dialoguing” every person in the corporation.
Writers are famously supposed to suffer, and the computer is fun. The difference between writing and the rest of the artistic endeavors used to be that the other artists had toys: saxophones, toe shoes, water-colors and oils. No writer ever sat down to work without feelings of bitter envy toward musicians, dancers, painters. Even the painters redoing the writer’s apartment looked like they had it pretty good. As a result, few writers ever sat down to work at all. They would avail themselves of any excuse for missing deadlines: the writer’s apartment was being painted. Hence the large number of poets in garrets and freelancers still living at home with their parents. Authors were kept out of the public’s hair—itself a good thing. And the author who did author something was almost certain to put the actual writing part off as long as possible, until the piece had been written, rewritten, and polished in his mind. Using your mind is almost as much fun as using a computer—except, of course, computer use is mindless.
Now Amazon.com bulges—or would bulge, if e-commerce enterprises contained anything. Every writer is writing, mostly memoirs. The world is full of quotidian experiences tamely described and tepid ideas lamely expressed.
I was a magazine editor, young lady, when the personal computer first came into use. It was easy to tell, even when articles had been set into type, which writers owned a PC. Their writing was more fun—for the writer. For the reader, the writing seemed to lack a few things, such as a beginning, middle, and end. On a computer, it’s so easy to fix those later. But in writing, as in cooking and courting, to defer a decision is to decide.
Computer writing is disorganized, parenthetical, digressive, prolix, and overly casual in tone. We need not alter Lincoln’s magisterial phrases to hear how the Gettysburg Address would have turned out if Abe had been
noodling on his iMac:
A great battlefield! Now we are engaged in a great civil war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field of that war we are met on as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives testing whether that nation (a new nation) so conceived and so dedicated (conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal), or any other nation our fathers brought forth on this continent, can long endure. Hey, 87 years and counting!
And let’s not think about Lord Chesterfield’s web site for his son, let alone www.abelard-heloise.com:
Everything fine at the nunnery. Real quiet, tho. Nunssay hi
These castration stitches sure itch:(
Even modern love letters can be spoiled by the computer, if the computer automatically includes the routing:
To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
And what if no one had thought to print out the e-mails of Saint Paul to the Corinthians? How would we get through a modern marriage ceremony (written by the bride and groom using Word PerfectTM) without First Corinthians, chapter 13, verses 1–7?
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not something, something, something…. It was really clever. I’ve got it in a file somewhere.
No doubt the computer is a marvelous tool, but then so is speech. When humans quit grunting and waving their arms and began to talk, communication definitely became easier and more enjoyable. But we’ve been speaking for a hundred thousand years and still haven’t got it right. After all this time we’ve yet to learn that what most of us do best when we talk is shut up. Excuse me while I go take a dose of my own medicine, with a brandy, in the garage.
“And I won’t say a thing to Muffin,” said the baby-sitter, “about what happened to her crayons.”
Hello! I said, as my godson Nick pulled into the garage. [He’d been driving the baby-sitter home again, and it seems to take a little more time than backing out of one driveway and pulling into the next usually does.]
“I’ve been thinking about kids,” said Nick.
Not thinking too much about how to make one, I hope.
“No,” said Nick, looking a tad crestfallen, “the baby-sitter was explaining Ricardo’s Principle of Comparative Advantage to me.”
And that got you thinking about children?
“Sort of. I mean it’s important to know things—like Ricardo’s Principle of Comparative Advantage and whether to ever get married or not.”
Definitely, I said.
“Or have kids.”
And that, Nick, is the way you really get to know things. Let me tell you what you learn from having kids. You learn you’re a total idiot. You experience an epiphany of true and perfect ignorance the moment the scary nurses in the delivery room—masked like Yemeni harem wives—hand you your wet, red, screaming bundle of joy. You learn you don’t know a thing about life. Why, here is the most important of all things about life. Here is life itself. And—EEEEE, IT’S ALIVE!!!—you don’t even know how to hold it. One hand for the baby’s bottom, one hand under its back, and then, with your third hand, you…no…
The nurses quickly snatch the baby back. You don’t know a thing. Maybe you’ve been to graduate school. Maybe you’ve been around the world. Maybe you can hack into the company’s Human Resources Department files and find out which of the senior VPs is in the federal witness protection program. You’re able to pronounce the last names of every placekicker in the NFL. And you don’t know an effing thing. An effing thing, literally. You don’t know where babies come from. Oh, intellectually you know. But you don’t really know until someone near and dear to you has a baby and you are forced by the callous laws of modern male sensitivity to be there when it happens. Babies come from there?! Whole babies?! Head and everything?! Ouch.
You learn you’re a total idiot, Nick, and then you learn you’ve married a genius. You thought you and your wife had an equal amount of information about babies. After all, you attended the same birthing classes. (Although she, maybe, wasn’t hiding a beer under her sport coat.) As far as you could tell, your wife believed a baby was, mainly, a possible impediment to making partner at the law firm. Suddenly she understands exactly what to do when the baby cries, poops, screams, spits up—actions that babies are capable of performing all at the same time and continuously, if there’s an important baseball game on TV.
You’ve married a genius. In fact, you’ve married into an entire race of geniuses—women. Aunts, mothers-in-law, female cousins, your wife’s sorority sisters, random old ladies from the neighborhood descend upon your house to tell you you’re a total idiot. “That’s no way to hold a baby!” they say and quickly snatch the baby back. Should you be insulted by this? Or should you watch the Orioles get their bucket kicked? Don’t be an idiot.
You probably thought you loved women before. Hah! That was mere admiration from afar—sort of paging through the Victoria’s Secret catalog of love, thinking swell thoughts without actually knowing women. As a father you learn what these adorable cupcakes are capable of. They’re capable of forgiving you for getting them pregnant. What would you do to a person who forced you to spend nine months shaped like a bowling pin? That’s a bowling pin that can’t have a cigarette or a martini and at the end of nine months has to, basically, pass a kidney stone the size of a cantaloupe. You’d murder him. And consider breast-feeding. Not the earth-mother Madonna-and-child scene of maternal bliss you thought, huh? Here’s a wonderful, beloved, helpless little creature depending for its very existence on biting my wife in a sensitive place. And for twenty hours a day.
Then there are diapers and burp cloths and belly button scabs and all the rest of the icky goo of life that women plunge right into, armed with nothing but a Handi-Wipe and a smile. Women can cope with dreadful messes and misbehaviors and turn around and excuse and exculpate the person who made them. This is a wonderful thing. Although, considering the recurrent dreadful messes and misbehaviors in American politics, it also explains why women weren’t allowed to vote until fairly recently.
Becoming a father also teaches you that you are, personally, a religious fundamentalist and antiabortion fanatic. This information comes as something of a surprise to those of us who hadn’t been to church since, um, my mother got married kind of late and who had always regarded abortion clinics as a sort of emergency date-night resource—where you take a really bad girlfriend on the very last date. But the first time your little inchoate blob pops up on the sonogram screen and you shout, “He looks like me!” it’s all over between you and NOW. Never mind that the baby comes out wet, red, screaming, crying, pooping, spitting up—he (actually, as it turned out, she) looks like me (which, mercifully, she doesn’t except for—as my wife points out—the wet, red, screaming, crying, pooping, spitting-up part). What can abortion advocates be thinking? Babies are so soft, so tender, so sweet…. Wait, wait, I know, they want to eat my baby. Be gone, you imps of Satan. Which brings us to the religious stuff.
A lot of praying goes into becoming a dad, Nick, and it’s not just praying for the Viagra to kick in. “Please, God, let my wife be all right. Please, God, let the baby be all right. Please, God, don’t forget—ten fingers, ten toes. And, oh, yeah, just one head. And, God, don’t let me blow chunks and pass out in the delivery room.” By the time it’s over, you owe the Big Guy. Not to mention what you owe the hospital and the doctor, plus college tuition is coming up fast—further reasons for prayer.
However, don’t be frightened that fatherhood will make you vote for Gary Bauer in 2004. Fatherhood also turns you into a big mush of a liberal. I am, as you know, a Cro-Magnon Republican of long standing. Yet I can now be reduced to a puddle of compassionate tears by It Takes a Village. Perhaps I exaggerate. But I did used to think welfare mothers were irresponsible jerks for trying to raise kids without a job, without an income, without a good home, without a husband to blow chunks and pass out in the delivery room. N
ow I think welfare mothers are irresponsible jerks who should be given the Congressional Medal of Honor. And I am enraged by any government policy that might…what do you mean the Reagan administration declared that ketchup counts as a vegetable in school lunches? Don’t tell me the guy has Alzheimer’s, I’ll go out to California and knock some sense into his head. These days, I believe the Department of Transportation should require bicycle helmets for children going to bed.
And that, Nick, is what you learn just in the first two days of being a father. This is nothing compared to what you learn later. For instance, when Muffin got old enough to watch children’s television, I learned what my hobby is going to be when the kids are grown up and out of the house. I’m spending my retirement years tracking down all the people involved in children’s television programming and shoving the Teletubbie with the sexual-diversity issues in their ear. Except Maria on Sesame Street. She’s still a babe. I’ve had a crush on her since the show started thirty years ago and my artsy-fartsy MFA friends and I would get together every afternoon and smoke dope and goof hysterically on the Cookie Monster. Which tells you everything about the intellectual level of children’s television, not to mention the intellectual level of children.
A child has the same amount of brains as a pot-fumed graduate student. In fact, a child has the same amount of brains as every other member of the nitwit human race. This is why I get There was a farmer had a dog/And Bingo was his name-O stuck in my head for a week just the way Muffin does. Except I don’t feel obliged to sing B-I-N-G-O out loud all day, although the clapping part is rather compelling: B-I-N-clap-clap, B-I-N-clap-clap—.
The CEO of the Sofa (O'Rourke, P. J.) Page 25