Familyhood

  “Maybe this school is too easy to get into,” my wife whispered to me.

  “I know,” I whispered back. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  It was shortly thereafter I made a very big decision: our children are not going to college—I can’t go through this again.

  Emotional Baggage vs. Luggage

  I’m not a particularly nervous flyer. I am, however, a nervous packer. I worry about not having enough stuff, too much stuff, the wrong stuff. (“Am I really going to need a sports jacket? What if I’m the only one there who doesn’t have one? Or the only one who does have one, and others mock me just for packing it?”)

  Then of course there’s the anxiety that the stuff you ultimately pack may not even make it to wherever you’re going. Will my stuff get lost or mangled? The idea that I myself could get lost or mangled is not a concern, but the possibility of my pants and pajamas going through that kind of trauma rattles me to the core.

  Packing for the whole family, this anxiety is multiplied a hundredfold. Forget me—now it’s “Do my children have the right clothes? Will they be warm enough? Will they be too warm? Will they look like slobs? Will they look too well dressed? Do they have enough things to amuse them? Do they have too many things to amuse them?” It’s downright exhausting—and we haven’t left the house yet.

  NOT LONG AGO, we went on vacation, the whole family. We got to the airport, checked our bags, and went to wait for our flight. Within minutes, there was an announcement, paging my son. “Hmm . . . that’s odd,” I thought. My son looked at me, a bit tickled and a bit nervous. He had never heard his name blared out loud in a public place like that. Could it be a mistake? I wondered. Is there possibly someone else with his name at this airport at this moment and they are actually paging him? Unlikely. Maybe it is a prank. As it happened, his birthday was the next day, so I decided that the airlines must have noticed his date of birth when we checked in and were going to make a little bit of a big deal, give him a special cookie or something.

  So we headed over to the counter, where the nice airline lady was on the phone, indeed discussing my son, and his luggage. Quickly calculating the possibilities, I decided the problem must be his video games. They’d triggered some security sensor; too many electromagnetic digital gigabytes could potentially knock out the plane’s navigation system. Or perhaps the actual content of the game was so violent that even packed away inside his suitcase, the very idea of it was deemed a threat to public safety. So as to not make him any more nervous, my wife and I told our little guy to go relax—we’d deal with it.

  It was soon explained to us that, in fact, his bag had somehow gotten caught in the rollers of the conveyer belt while it was being loaded onto the plane and ripped wide open. Nothing was lost, the agent assured us; just the bag was damaged. They had since taped it securely shut and, of course, would reimburse us for a replacement. This call to the desk was, apparently, merely a courtesy “heads-up” so we wouldn’t be alarmed upon arriving at our destination. All in all, a very nice handling of a minor, albeit unpleasant mishap.

  But my heart sank for the little guy. First of all, he had just gotten the suitcase—the first of his very own. It was a rite of passage for him; he was very proud of it. But also, this was a specific nightmare I have always feared—the ripped-open luggage at the airport. We’ve all seen the poor guy whose bag implodes in transit, and who stands there at the baggage carousel pathetically watching his clothes pour down. You do not want to be that guy. It’s almost too painful a humiliation to consider: all your personal effects violated and on pathetic parade for public viewing. I always look away; it seems the charitable thing to do. Give the guy a little space to gather his underwear with a modicum of dignity.

  And now, my sweet little boy was that guy. My wife and I went to tell him the bad news. As is often the case in these matters, we had different ideas about how to handle it. I suggested we wait; why should he spend the next several hours upset about his dead suitcase? I argued. We could tell him when we landed; let him live in innocence a few more hours. My wife—an ardent proponent of Full Disclosure All the Time—disagreed. She thought our son should know everything that we knew. Not feeling particularly strongly about it, I acquiesced.

  We told him about the bag, and to my great surprise, he was totally fine with it. Eerily flippant, actually. I believe his exact words were “Okay, whatever.” I couldn’t have been prouder. Truly. For a kid who loves his things, he handled the news remarkably well. (Maybe because the only thing he cared about—his video games—were, as it turns out, safely in his carry-on.) But, no matter. I was impressed and inspired; he had shown me a thing or two about retaining equilibrium in the face of life’s little bumps.

  HOURS LATER, we landed and went to collect our bags, prepared for the worst. His bag comes around and, surprise of surprises, it doesn’t look bad at all. Can’t even see the tape. Or the rip. Maybe they got it wrong and it was some other poor sap whose bag got shredded.

  It was. My bag came down next. Apparently, we had somehow put his name on my bag, and vice versa. When I saw my bag spit out of the luggage chute, my stomach clenched. It looked like a toy left too long in the gorilla cage, on the day the gorilla had a playdate with a shark. And a monsoon. And a civic uprising. Ripped to pieces it was, my not inexpensive, supposedly damage-proof feat of technological engineering. Hours earlier, when I thought it was my son’s bag that had been destroyed, I think I even said to my wife, “I hate that this happened to him! I wish it could have been my suitcase instead.” I can’t believe that out of all the wishes I’ve thrown out there over the years, this is the one I’m granted. (And I didn’t even really mean it.)

  Thankfully, the airline pros had done a very thorough job of taping the suitcase up, shrink-wrapping the thing entirely in industrial-strength cellophane, so at least the individual items weren’t streaming down one at a time—which would have, frankly, put me in the hospital. All the bag’s contents were securely cellophaned up.

  But it was see-through cellophane, so everything was still clearly visible, frozen in awkward, ugly suspension. Like pathetic fossils captured at the moment of their death, sealed for eternity, faces screaming against the outer surface, straining desperately to break through. Oh, the stories they longed to tell! (“The ground shook, and the gods’ anger rained down upon us!”) Except, instead of ancient Greek shepherds, this was my underwear. And socks. And pajamas.

  My wife, bless her heart, knows me well enough to know that nothing in the world could make me less happy than what was in fact happening. She calmly took charge, suggesting I go wait on the side while she gathered the butchered luggage. I waited at a safe distance, shielding my eyes. It was like childbirth; the woman knows what to do, and the father (in this case, the father of luggage) has only to get out of the way and wait for the messy part to be over with.

  I’M NOT SURE when this particular aversion of mine developed—the fear of a publicly violated suitcase. I’m not suggesting anybody enjoys it, but I remember having this specific phobia even as a kid. And becoming an adult has done nothing to alleviate the anxiety. Nor has having been on TV. Fittingly, I have exactly the kind of recognition that’s small enough to not do me any good, but big enough to draw attention when I wouldn’t want it. I would never count on getting a good table at a crowded restaurant, but I’m pretty confident that if my underpants were to be scattered about Delta Airlines Carousel 5, the video would find its way onto YouTube. (“Former TV Funny Boy wears briefs! And ratty ones, too!”)

  I suppose I should take solace in the fact that the contents were, in fact, perfectly mundane and universal. Everyone has socks, underwear, and a toothbrush. It would have been a lot more embarrassing if I’d been packing, say, sex toys. Or cheese. Or a severed human head. I had normal stuff; exactly what ten out of ten people have in their bags. So why, then, should it be so crippling to have it be seen? It’s like the proverbial tree; if you trip and fall in the forest and no one sees, is it
still embarrassing? Well, yeah, but . . . who cares? It’s a private failure; in that case, failure to walk without falling down. But having your bag ripped apart in an airport is a public failure. Failure to . . . well, to avoid being the poor son of a bitch that that stuff happens to.

  I don’t understand why it is we’re so embarrassed by those very things that, in fact, happen to everyone. You would think such misfortunes would serve to bring us closer; celebrations of our common, flawed humanity.

  But it doesn’t work that way. Think of any public scandal: the elected official caught with his pants down; the celebrity fighting unattractively with a loved one; the rock star spotted picking his nose at a stoplight . . . Nothing each of us hasn’t done, or couldn’t, without much imagination, picture ourselves doing. You’d think that as a group, we’d embrace these poor fallen brothers and sisters all the more at these moments. Feel their pain. But we don’t. We go the other way; we beat them into submission with their unfortunate falls from grace. And why? Because we’re so happy it’s them and not us. We get giddy and rambunctious with nervous relief. All the shouting, pointing, ridiculing, and memorializing is just our attempt to push further away the possibility of it ever happening to us.

  Embarrassment, I’ve decided, is a factor of age. My kids get embarrassed at the drop of a hat—usually by me. (Which is ironic, because I vividly remember every single thing my parents did that embarrassed me, and swore even as a child that I would not repeat those indignities with my own children. But I do, with shocking regularity.)

  Kids still think they’re the first ones to ever experience embarrassment. And why wouldn’t they? They’re new here. They haven’t yet learned that everything happens to everyone.

  Old guys, on the other hand, don’t care anymore. And I’m not talking about an unflattering cartoon caricature of old guys—addle-brained incontinents who spend their days talking to cats. I’m talking about dignified men—friends of mine in their eighties who have attained every measure of success in their fields. These guys don’t “do” embarrassment; they’re beyond it. So what happens between nine and eighty-nine that makes that happen? (Relax. I’ll try to answer; you just sit there.)

  I think that all our lives, we feel the pull of two conflicting forces: the desire to blend in and the desire to stand out. (And by “stand out,” I mean standing out by virtue of an accomplishment; something of our own choosing. As opposed to standing out because a trail of toilet paper is stuck to your shoe and everyone sees but you. That’s different. And not at all the goal here.)

  Furthermore, we never want too much of either. We want just the right amount of blending in and standing out.

  You have to start with the blending in; then you can aspire to stand out. But sometimes, in the effort to stand out, you can fail. And then you wish you could just blend in. Until you tire of blending in, and then start dreaming again of standing out.

  As a kid, I was not a particularly great athlete. Playing baseball, for example, going 0 for 4 was considered a good day. (A bad day was going 0 for 4 and getting hurt.) I knew I wasn’t likely to make the spectacular catch or hit the walk-off grand slam. I just wanted to get on base once in a while, and not let a ball go through my legs. That’s all. I prayed just to not conspicuously fail. (The praying rarely worked, by the way.)

  Now. Had I in fact gotten on base with regularity, and fielded everything that came my way, I would have been able to cross that wish off the list, and most likely I would’ve gotten greedy and upped the ante; I would have wanted that walk-off home run. I would have tried to stand out. But that can only come with the confidence of having already blended in.

  Over the years, I’ve managed to blend in, by and large. I’ve even had the good fortune to occasionally stand out for doing some things that have met with success. And as childhood drifts further into the distance, I begin to see what my older friends have learned, and what I try to teach my children: everything truly does happen to everyone. We all want to blend in, and we all want to stand out—for the right reasons. In fact, it’s the universal fear of standing out from the crowd for the wrong reason that makes us a “crowd” in the first place, I believe. That’s what unites us. We’re already all blended in from the get-go. So run free and enjoy your life, I tell them. There’s no reason for any of us to ever be embarrassed about anything.

  Except having your underwear fall out at the airport. That’s . . . that’s just embarrassing.

  Loyalty

  I’ll tell you something about my wife that only makes me admire and love her more: she can cut in line in front of people, and not only make it look like a good thing, she can make you feel bad for questioning it in the first place.

  We were with the kids, in line for a museum. Freezing cold. Blustery winds. Lines around the block and then on to other blocks. The options were: (a) go home and try again some other time, or (b) go to the back of the line, which was so far away it was about the same size trip as going home.

  We kind of slinked off, not having clearly decided either way, but when we got to the corner, my wife came up with a third option, called “Let’s just get in line right here!”

  A great idea—if you discounted the fact that this would be “cutting,” thereby sticking it to the three thousand people already waiting in line behind you, who only seemed to not be there because the line picked up over there, across the street. So if you closed your eyes and tuned out the vitriolic taunts of the three thousand people who wanted to beat you to death, and shut off entirely your moral compass and sense of decency, then yeah, you could, conceivably, convince yourself that you had arrived at the legitimate end of the line.

  Now, don’t get me wrong; my moral compass is nothing if not flexible. And I certainly didn’t want to stand out in arctic winds any longer than necessary. But I knew this was just wrong. (Also, the stares and threats and the colossal wave of ill will washing over us from all sides were impossible to ignore.)

  I leaned in to confer with my wife.

  “Honey, we can’t cut in line.”

  She looked at me so oddly I thought maybe I had missed something obvious, like “Don’t you remember the proclamation the mayor made yesterday granting us the right to do exactly this if we needed to?”

  I started again to—gently and confidentially—voice my protest.

  “Sweetie, I don’t think we can—”

  But again I got that look—this time a bit more intensely—that wordless glare that indignantly argued “What are you talking about? I’m not cutting in line.”

  Now, understand: This was coming from a sane person. An extremely intelligent woman, and—I feel compelled to reiterate here—a good person. Maybe the best I’ve ever known; an extraordinarily empathetic, caring woman. This is a woman who has reached out to some of the absolutely most hateful people you’d ever want to meet—people I had lobbied strenuously to jettison from our lives—and she has cared for them, brought them into our house, clothed and fed them, and never asked for so much as a thank-you. This is a woman who hates bullies, snobs, and liars, who detests pretense or anyone taking advantage of anyone else; the last person on earth who you could ever see cutting in line. And she wouldn’t.

  Except for the fact that she just did.

  But in her mind, at that moment, she was convinced she had done nothing wrong. I couldn’t tell you the particular path of logic she followed to get there, or the exact formula of denial she used to leap the many readily apparent hurdles of reality. I just knew that somewhere in the previous few moments, something had changed in her and she had gone “there.” That place she goes sometimes from which I can’t get her back until she decides on her own to return.

  I know this is a place she goes only when it concerns her children. In this particular case, she was just doing what she felt she had to do to get her children out of the freezing cold—even if it meant partaking in an act that she herself, at any other time, would vociferously oppose.

  I felt the need to illuminate.


  “But, sweetie,” I said, as tenderly as I could. “We actually are cutting in line.” I smiled, trying to appeal to her higher angels, which I knew lived somewhere inside her, but were apparently staying in to avoid the cold.

  The smile didn’t work. She clenched her jaw slightly and looked straight through the very center of my eyes—another of her deep supply of silent signals, this one imploring me unequivocally to “just drop it.” Fair enough. As she scooted our kids into the line, I fell in behind them, now a knowing and guilt-ridden accomplice.

  Shortly later, as we all shuffled forward a few inches, I could feel on my neck the white-hot hatred of those behind us. Once or twice I turned around and shrugged apologetically, as if to say, “What are you going to do?”—hoping for some kindred spirit to assuage my guilt. Perhaps some other husband who, like me, knows what it’s like to be caught in the crosscurrents of that which is right and that which your spouse has already committed you to and which you are powerless to abandon.

  When I got no sympathy from anyone—and why should I have, really?—I was surprised to feel a shift inside me. The sense of embarrassment and self-conscious guilt gave way to something else: a defiant sense of allegiance. While yes, my wife may have fired that first shot and started this whole thing, I now felt honor-bound to stand and fight beside her and continue the battle she’d chosen, while our children huddled against our legs for warmth. (All so we could get into this museum, which, by the way, the kids would have been thrilled to skip entirely.)

  But being a family involves being loyal to the family. And part of that loyalty—who are we kidding—absolutely all of that loyalty is about going along with family at the very times you’d like to cover your head and deny even knowing these people.