by Lee Kalcheim
“We hear you every time. How can we not hear you?”
“Then why don’t you say something, like ‘Thank you, Dadoo. We’ll be there shortly.’”
“Oh please!”
“Oh please, what? Last year I woke you up at 7:00 o’ clock and you said that’s wasn’t enough time, so this year I get up at 6:30, so I could wake you at 6:45, and you lie there till 7:15. What’s the point of waking you early if you lie in bed anyway?”
“We like to lie in bed.”
“We like to just go back to sleep for five or ten minutes.”
“It’s a special pleasure.”
“It’s not a pleasure for me to come in here two and three times and get no response. It’s not a pleasure to have you then, at 7:15, rush to get dressed and bolt down your breakfast and frantically stuff your backpacks and shout at us that you are missing your Spanish book or your calculator or your watch. It’s exhausting. And not fun. Every morning, the same tense ritual!”
And then I said the wrong thing. “If you really cared about me, you’d get up the first time I asked, so we could have a relaxed morning”
Parry. Repost! “Oh puleeze. This isn’t about you.”
“Don’t take it personally. Why do you take it personally? It’s not your problem.”
“If we’re late, it’s our problem.”
“Why do you have to make it your problem?”
“Why do you have to take it personally?”
This wasn’t fair. Now both of them at once were having the last word.
I was about to explode. Fortunately, Julia was back from walking the dog, and she interceded. She kicked me out of the boys’ room, closed the door, and did as she always did—got them to get up and get dressed, using guile and charm and patience. All of which I flunked in Child Rearing 101.
I went to the breakfast table. Sat. Drank my tea and read the disheartening headlines in The Times. I wondered, what’s so awful about saying, “If you really cared about me, you’d get up”? Julia came into the kitchen and I said it to her. She calmly replied, “What’s wrong is, you make something fairly unimportant—getting to school on time—into how much they care about you. You blow your wad on a trivial issue.”
“Hey, they care about being on time. When they’re late they go ballistic. Why can’t I care for them?”
“Because you can’t. They’re already on emotional overload. They have too much homework. Not enough time to practice violin and you bring your tension into their life, and they don’t want it. They want calm.”
“Calm doesn’t work. I try calm the first time I wake them. They ignore me.”
“They hear you.”
“They ignore me. How do I know they hear me?”
“They tell you every morning that they hear you. Believe them.”
“But they don’t get up. And they always run late, and it makes breakfast pure chaos!”
“They know that. But when you act up, they can blame it all on you.”
“Act up? I’m sorry. I only ‘act up’ because they lie there and say smart-ass things to me. They don’t seem to care as much as I do.”
“They care about being on time. They don’t care that it drives you crazy.”
“Why not? Why not?”
“They have too much on their plate to care about that.”
“With all I do—with all we do for them, they don’t care?”
“Don’t go there. They are very, very appreciative kids. They know how much we do for them. They know how lucky they are. They just don’t want it thrown in their face.”
The boys came to the table. They ate one half a bowl of cereal, each. Sipped some tea. Late as they were, Gabe sneaked a look at The Times.
“Bush is acting as if he’d won a landslide.”
Sam still half asleep adds, “Or stole a landslide.”
Gabe finds the sports page. I check the clock. Bite my tongue. Julia to the rescue.
“Gabe, it’s 7:35. Read the paper when you get home!”
And suddenly they were up and off.
“Your lunches!” I shouted.
Sam came back, grabbed the lunches. Turned.
“What’s for lunch?”
“Ham and cheese on a roll.”
“Again?”
I try to steel myself, the way I did when Gabe stood up in his crib and said, “No, I want mommy.” I try not to take it personally.
The fact is, as a writer I am always trying not to take any form of criticism or rejection personally. Recently, I got a critique on something I had written that it was “boring.” My first reaction was the same as when a young cousin of mine told me that Mozart was boring. I (un-tactfully) told her that it was boring because she didn’t understand it. But, I was sure that this “critic” had fully understood my work. It just bored him. What does that mean—boring? It’s completely subjective. One man’s episode of Survivor is another man’s symphony by Mozart. I have never written a boring thing in my life! Sometimes scenes drifted to the slightly bland. Sometimes dialogue tended toward the obvious. But I prided myself on the originality of my work, and especially the vibrancy of my characters. How could a vibrant character be boring? I could feel my stomach churning. I was angry. I was taking it personally. How could I not? I’m sure my mechanic takes it personally if, after he repairs my car, I tell him that it still doesn’t run well. I’m always careful to say, “Y’know, I really wanna thank you for all the time you spent trying to get rid of that ear shattering engine noise, but … it’s still there.” I still like him. But the noise is still there. At what point, when the noise isn’t fixed, do I cease to like him? At what point when a studio executive tells me that my script just doesn’t have enough edge do I want to tell him take his edge and shove it. The fault lies, Dear Brutus, in me. When I am finished with a script, I know it’s not perfect, but think there’s a chance that it is perfect. I am just waiting for that first response, “Perfect!” It never comes. Frankly, anything less than, “Perfect”, I take personally. I’m sorry. I am what I write. I know I’m not supposed to be. But I am. I have often tried to distance myself from what I write. And when rehearsing a play, I can indeed look at what’s taking place on stage and say, “This isn’t working. This is … yes … boring.” And I can fix it. As if I’m fixing some other writer’s work. I have to be able to do that in order to function. To improve my work. But, that’s a learned skill. Like knowing just how much to lean left on skis to avoid hitting a tree. I taught myself to distance myself from my material so that I could work on it. I had to do this in order to make what I had written better. I had to fall out of love with my words and my investment in my work and just fix the damn noise in the engine. And yet … on opening night, when the audience doesn’t laugh at a moment that I was sure was the funniest thing I’d ever written, I am hurt. I take it very personally.
Someday I’ll learn not to invest so much in waking up my kids. Meanwhile, I’m trying to learn from them, what I taught myself during the rehearsals of a play; just do your job. Make the play work as if it were written by a stranger. OK. So, I’m going to wake them up every morning and pretend I’m not their father. I’m just the wake up guy. Let them hurl abuse at me. I don’t care. I’m cool.
Yeah. Right.
SCENE: THE LIVING ROOM OF THE NEW YORK APARTMENT.
(Samuel and Gabriel burst in, home from a long day at high school. Lee and Julia are having a quiet late afternoon tea.)
SAM
(Thrusting a piece of paper at Julia)
Look at this. Look at our reading list. All the books were written in the last thirty years. There’s no Dickens. No Thackeray. No Tolstoy.
GABE
Tolstoy? Are you kidding. There’s no book over two hundred pages.
SAM
They think the kids can’t read complicated language.
GABE
They think they’re making the kids feel better by giving them stuff that’s easy to read. That relates to their life.
SAM
But what they’re really doing is patronizing them.
GABE
They want to make them feel smart by giving them something easy to read, but the message they’re sending is, “You’re not smart enough to read really great literature.”
SAM
Essentially they’re keeping students in their place. It’s elitist!
GABE
It’s awful.
SAM
What a system!!!
LEE
Anyone for tea?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
TEACHERS
Teachers have it pretty good. At least with our children. They get the kind of respect we only dream of getting. I remember when my kids were in, I don’t know, third grade, and I asked them when they got home, if they could please take their lunchboxes out of their backpacks and take them to the kitchen. They didn’t do it. I reminded them. They didn’t do it. Frustrated, I finally said, “If your teacher asked you to do it—you’d do it!” Well did I get flack about that! Everything from, “My teacher doesn’t ask the way you ask” to the more nuanced and contemporary, “Oh please!”
My kids, rarely, if ever took their lunch boxes to the kitchen when they came home. It was a battle I was not going to win. Their minds were filled with too many issues of real importance for them to bother with such trivial matters as their lunch boxes. I gave up trying to lighten their backpacks. That they could avoid my current back problems by not running across town with twenty-pound loads on their backs was something they’d have to learn on their own. What the hell, I never did learn that if you put your shoes away before bed, you won’t trip over them on your way to pee at two in the morning.
I didn’t have to listen to them say, “Oh please” anymore. Did they ever say that to one of their teachers? Of course not. They hadn’t grown up with one of their teachers. They hadn’t seen their teacher sitting on the toilet reading National Geographic and brushing his teeth at the same time. They hadn’t seen their teacher shout “You stupid jerk” to himself when he lost in the computer something he’d just written. They hadn’t seen their teacher overcook a very expensive lamb chop and then angrily fling it into the sink. No, their teachers, as flawed as they might be, had never displayed their private humanity with all its warts, and therefore had managed not to be seen by my children as … well … family members whom they can treat with an easy lack of respect. After all, what are families for?
I know families where the children still address the father as “Sir.” I actually have a secret over-the-top admiration for these fathers. How the hell do they get their kids to do that? I’ve always wanted to ask one father I know who gets the “Sir” response how he worked it. Did you … I mean … when Brad uttered his first word … when he looked at you and pointed to the dog and said, “Doggy,” Did you snap back, “Doggy, Sir!” Do you have to start that young? Or did you wait till they had a small vocabulary. When they said, “Dad, I want more ice cream.” did you say, “No, Brad, it’s ‘May I have some more ice cream, Sir?’” And when they banged their spoons on the table yelling “Ice cream, ice cream, ice cream” did you then pull out a riding crop and whack them across the hands and say, “It’s, ‘May I have more ice cream, Sir?’ until they responded correctly? Or were you really good at it? Subtle. Did you start showing them old British movies where kids called their father “Sir” all the time, so they were inculcated with the idea by example? Or, did you patiently, each and every time the word “Sir” was left off after a sentence addressing you, say to them, “What word did we forget, Brad?”
I really wanna know. In my next life, I want to have kids that address me as “Sir.” At least I think I do. I mean, even if it’s, “Get a life … Sir,” I’d be pleased.
Teachers, teachers have always gotten that non-familial respect. But, they haven’t avoided criticism. When Samuel was in kindergarten, his teacher told all the children to sit on the floor with their legs crossed and their hands folded.
“Criss-cross apple sauce.”
Sam’s hand shot up. “Ms. Spector, I’m not comfortable that way.”
Ms. Spector responded patiently, “Well, we sit this way at Carpenter School so we don’t bother our neighbor.”
Sam was not satisfied, “But, if I’m not comfortable and I don’t bother my neighbor, isn’t that more important than a way of sitting?”
It was just the beginning of a long career of Sam’s anti-establishment behavior. And to tell you the truth, I’d rather have my son give one response like that over a million “Sirs.” So, along with that respect for teachers came a healthy skepticism about the whole system.
The first major confrontation came in fourth grade. They had a math teacher who was, to say the least, eccentric. She intimidated all the students. Rash outbursts. Worse, she was a past master at the art of humiliation. When the boys reported some of the put-downs she foisted on kids who were not prepared, I was appalled. When the boys were told that papers they had written were too good to have been written by them—that they must have had help from their parents—and she was going to take points off their grade because of it—we stepped in. We asked the principle for a meeting with the teacher. And with the teacher, and our boys present, we confronted her about all these issues. The plagiarism charge and humiliating remarks she made to the students. She had no defense and was suitably chastised by the principle. The boys had been uneasy about our doing this. It embarrassed them that we would march into school like this, but when they saw the results, they were impressed. We were impressed. A community school had listened … and responded to the complaints of parents in the community. The thing is, she wasn’t a bad teacher. She was a good teacher with bad habits. I guess I think of myself as a good father with bad habits. This incident ends sweetly, because at the end of the year, the eccentric teacher took her entire class to a Yankee game.
“You really want to go to a Yankee game with her?”
“Sure, why not? It’s the Yankees.”
In tenth grade, their history teacher presented a problem. He was a good teacher. He was more than a good teacher—he was inspiring. But he gave voluminous homework assignments that he never read! I said, “So, just write any nonsense. Write … blah, blah, blah on the paper. Write, ‘Thomas Jefferson was too smart for his own good.’ If he’s not going to read it, call him on it!” No, they couldn’t do that. They wanted to play by the rules. They were given an assignment, they wanted to do it properly. And they wanted him to read it properly. We asked for a meeting with the principal. We got it. And Julia and I and the principal and the Assistant Principal sat with the history teacher and registered our complaint. His reply was, in essence that, “It doesn’t matter what the kids turn in. If they were studying slavery, for instance, one child could turn in a drawing of a slave ship, while another wrote a detailed paper on slavery. It was about participating.”
“But, we responded, why should our kids spend so much time writing a detailed paper, if you’re not going to read it? They are writing it so they can get your assessment of it. They’re proud of what they write. They want some acknowledgment from you.”
It went on like this, and the assistant principle finally urged him not to give homework assignments that he wasn’t going to look at. Finito. This meeting took place early in the term. By the end of term, by June, the boys were enthralled with this teacher. He was a kind of neo-socialist. He was giving them a view of American history that was so off the wall … so against the placid taken-for-granted view of America as the beacon of freedom and democracy that it appealed to their revolutionary urges. One of their textbooks was Howard Zinn’s, History of the American People—a suspicious, if not cynical, view of our nation’s history if there ever was one. He, Mr. Turner, was teaching them to question authority! To question everything they read. To question the very foundation of our history. And they loved it. They were questioning my authority all the time. Now they were given permission to question it big time.
And they were to have several teachers of such an inspiring nature. Their math teacher, Mr. Galinor, their Biology teacher Mr. Mckenna—teachers who, even after their year with them was finished, continued to be touchstones in their education, and even became friends.
The boys practiced an odd kind of respect for their own parents. They were not always polite to us, but they deeply respected who we were, how hard we worked, and what we believed. And though they were always polite to their teachers, more polite than they might have been to us, they only showed them deep respect when they earned it. It took me awhile to realize that. To realize their different standards of respect. They could be flip with us and deferential to their teachers, but when their teachers behaved badly, they had the guts to call them on it. Or if intimated, to allow us to intervene. What I learned was, that they had learned something more important than a “yes, sir” reply. That they could be polite and outraged at the same time. A much more effective method than the pure outrage that I was wont to express to a tardy waiter, “When we tell you we only have forty five minutes to eat, you can’t bring the meal forty minutes later!”
In the boys last year of high school, they confronted their most daunting situation. Gabe’s English teacher, whom I shall call Ms. X, gave them, and indeed all of us, a trial in the art of patience. We’d encountered her before. In the boy’s freshman year, they auditioned for her production (she’s a director) of The Fantasticks. The boys learned the music in preparation for their audition, and Sam felt he had a good shot at a part. He auditioned and came home excited. “I was the best singer. I’ve got a good shot.” A few days later, they were told that no one who had not previously worked with Ms. X on a play, would get a part. They were offered understudy roles. Sam was livid! It was bait and switch. Why weren’t they told this before they auditioned? Why weren’t they told they had no chance of getting a role. It was particularly cruel.