The Book of Dads
Page 24
About the Editor
BEN GEORGE is editor of the literary journal Ecotone. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for the Best New American Voices, and has appeared in Ninth Letter, Tin House, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in North Carolina, and teaches at UNC Wilmington.
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Credits
Cover design and illustrations by Christopher Silas Neal
Copyright
An extension of this copyright page appears on Back Matter.
The lines in quotation marks and within parentheses at the beginning of the section titled “[The Pond],” of Nick Flynn’s essay, “Here Comes the Sun,” are taken from George Oppen’s poem “Sara in Her Father’s Arms” and are used with permission of Linda Oppen.
THE BOOK OF DADS. Copyright © 2009 by Ben George. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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* I’m fairly certain that I had told my dad that we would both load the van after the chaos machine was complete. My dad, however, decided to load the van on his own before the machine was finished.
* I’m not in a rush to let people know about the name switch, but I suppose this essay would be incomplete if this were omitted.
* The shirt was red and shiny but was by no means a “tropical shirt” in the Jimmy Buffett sense of the term.
† GÜ was best known on campus for covers of “Psycho Killer” and “Jump” and for the original mini rock opera Astronaughty.
* My dad was often able to quiet me down by playing Brian Eno’s Music for Airports while we drove around in his car.
* Unfortunately this is true. I remember getting in trouble in Hawaii after I snuck out early one morning to watch the pop-up lawn sprinklers in action.
† My dad’s short story “Talk Show” was based on this and the aforementioned Hawaii trip, although I don’t remember there being anything about pop-up sprinklers in the story.
* None of my Carleton friends appeared physically awkward, at least not to me anyway.
† In fairness to Carleton it should be noted that the women’s and men’s top-level ultimate Frisbee teams won the national championship in 2000 and 2001, respectively.
‡ The weekends followed a pleasant routine. My parents and I went out to dinner on Fridays. My dad, Tasha, and I would always go through the drive-through line at the nearby Taco Bell to get lunch on Saturday, where we (except for Tasha) would always order the same things we ordered every Saturday. After we ordered, Tasha would start to growl if the drive-through line was slow, which it usually was at that particular Taco Bell. When we got home, Louis the parrot would squawk until he was given a nacho from my Nacho Supreme, and I would sneak a second nacho to Tasha. On Sunday afternoons we would go walking, as my dad mentioned, and we always had spaghetti for dinner afterward. My efforts at the time, however, to convince my parents to extend this system and have a different preset dinner for every night of the week were not successful.
* My favorite years before Carleton were when I was at Steiner, from third through eighth grade.
† Probably not. The desk was included with the furniture that came with the room.
‡ Four Saints in Three Acts is still funny and is good driving music. Along with Four Saints, tapes of the NPR incarnation of the Bob and Ray radio show were a staple of my family’s annual summer road trips to Minnesota’s north shore. Growing up, I’m pretty sure that I assumed that both Four Saints and Bob and Ray were also being listened to in many of the vehicles we passed on the freeway, but when I think about it now I can’t remember the last time I’ve heard either of these mentioned in conversation or the media. I hope this is because I’m not talking to the right people or reading the right magazines, and that there are, in fact, plenty of people driving around with Four Saints and Bob and Ray in their CD changers and iPods.
* In the closing credits, Tasha is credited with the role of Cerberus.
† For example, the last scene featured close-ups of Mr. Scary’s face, onto which 8-mm home movies were being projected, intercut with footage of imploding buildings from Koyaanisqatsi.
* This essay still makes me laugh. Another Northwestern demand was to list my least favorite word, which was then, and still is, “potpourri.”
† The chaos machine, when completed, was an analog electrical current waveform generator that consisted mostly of a small circuit board and several electronic instruments from the physics department attached to a metal rack and connected together with cables. It was capable of generating waveforms with chaotic properties, the details of which I have since forgotten. The machine worked as planned, and Alex and I made a poster (which either has been thrown away or is gathering dust somewhere in the physics department) that explained its inner workings and reason for existence. Over the following summer, the machine was probably dismantled by members of the physics department who needed its parts back.
* I remember that we ate at the somewhat oddly named Mexican restaurant Carlos O’Kelly’s.
† Except where I’ve noted previously, this essay is fairly accurate. It is probably worth mentioning that this is my first, and probably last, writing collaboration with my dad, unless my editing assistance for his last three novels counts. All in all, my dad is a nice guy. You’d like him.
* I don’t want to sound like a crank who longs for the days when children were “seen, not heard.” But I’ve observed plenty of households in which the parents refuse to discipline their kids, and the kids always strike me as incredibly anxious. What they need to be rescued from is the horror of their own aggression. That’s often what makes them act out in the first place—the secret wish for a parent who will rein them in.
* Shtunkdom (of Yiddish origin): exuding the qualities of, or personifying, the shtunk, loosely translated as a “;little stinker.”
* I am using this term loosely. I don’t mean actual conservatism, as articulated by the nineteenth-century political philosophers. I don’t even mean the “conservatism” of Ronald Reagan, which was predicated on fiscal discipline and a smaller, less invasive government. I am referring to conservatism as espoused by the right-wing talk show hosts.
* This critique applies to the Democrats as well, who have shown the same essential willingness to traffic in these shameful myths.
* Erin has already started
fretting about getting Josie into the right preschool. (As a reminder: Josie is barely one year old.)
† I spent most of second grade in mortal fear of Keith Minnis, who beat me up once a month or so.
* And it leaps to mind because—to my shame, and in a moment of weakness—we purchased this obscene monstrosity for our daughter.
* I realize that a single mom working two jobs isn’t in a great position to choose environmental good over convenience. But for those of us who have the time, and the will, to do a bit more laundry, there’s really no excuse.