We hold on to each other in bed. The undercurrent of panic in my consciousness subsides for a few moments, but we both know that there’s nothing either of us can do.
Oona won’t sleep.
Jen can’t sleep.
I’m sleepwalking.
We are all rooting for each other.
I’m thirty-five pounds overweight.
We all want to be together.
We can’t always be together.
It is what it is.
VII.
ME AND MY WIFE ON A PLANE THAT’S CRASHING
My worst nightmare is being in a plane crash with my wife because somehow I feel like I would be blamed for the plane crash.
We’ll find out we’re going down and she’ll look at me and say, “I told you we shouldn’t have gone on this flight.” And I’ll say, “First of all you didn’t say we shouldn’t go on this flight. Second of all we’re visiting your parents in Florida. I didn’t want to do either of those things. I didn’t wanna visit your parents in Florida and I didn’t want to die in this plane crash.”
She’ll say, “Never mind, doesn’t matter.”
I’ll say, “Okay, but it does matter because you literally just told me we shouldn’t have gone on this flight, and that didn’t happen.”
She’ll say, “You know I hate going on planes.”
I’ll say, “Right, but everybody hates going on planes. You can’t own the idea of ‘hating going on planes.’”
She’ll say, “Whenever we fly I’m always telling you that we’re gonna crash.”
I’ll say, “Again, that’s the risk you always assume when you fly in a plane and everything in life really is a risk-and-reward situation and in this case the reward was going to be seeing your parents and the risk was that we could die and as it turns out, we’re going to die. So I don’t even think we should talk about it anymore. I think we should just spend the last ten minutes of our lives enjoying each other’s company since we are deeply in love and I wish to spend the final minutes of my life with you in peace.”
She’ll say, “That’s what I wanted to do.”
I’ll say, “Actually you didn’t.”
She’ll say, “It doesn’t matter. It literally doesn’t matter. Oh, look—it seems like they might be able to land the plane.”
I’ll say, “Do you know if you can order an Uber to a field?”
She’ll say, “I don’t use Uber anymore because of the way they underpay their employees. There was that one story in the Times about that driver committing suicide.”
I’ll say, “Right, but if it’s the only way to get out of the field, I think we should make an exception.”
She’ll say, “It’s up to you. I don’t care.”
I’ll say, “But you just said you care.”
She’ll say, “Well… I would just appreciate it if we could try Lyft first and if Lyft isn’t available then we can do Uber.”
In conclusion, my greatest fear is being on a crashing plane with my wife and knowing that I am right and being told that I am wrong and then dying.
VIII.
CAN I HAVE THIS HOUSE WHEN YOU DIE?
One Christmas, when I was twelve, I said to my parents while sitting by the fireplace, “Mom and Dad, can I have this house when you die?”
When you die.
I was more comfortable with my parents’ deaths than I was with parting with our cozy, medium-sized home, built by Bob Cole in 1978, the year of my birth.
I loved that house. I wanted to live there forever. That said, there was a tree outside our window that my parents must have planted when I was born. It was a small, flowering tree. My window was about twenty feet above the ground and the tree was about thirteen feet high. And I always had this fantasy that someday the tree would grow tall enough that I could climb out the window and leave our house. I don’t even know where I was planning to go. But the tree never grew high enough. And eventually we moved. And I recently visited Shrewsbury and I went for a walk to my childhood home. And there’s the tree. And it’s still not tall enough for someone to climb out the window. I think the moral of the story is: Don’t wait for that fucking tree to grow. Because it’s not going to.
It’s Christmas 2015. Jen and Oona and I are visiting my parents at their current home in Cape Cod. I’m walking with my dad around the neighborhood. There’s become increasingly less to talk about with my dad as we’ve gotten older.
My dad, or “Vince,” as my family prefers to call him, was born and raised in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and caught a break when he scored well on an entrance exam for a Catholic high school in Manhattan called Xavier. From there he went to Holy Cross College and then University at Buffalo for medical school.
Holy Cross College forms the backdrop of many positive memories from my childhood. My dad used to take me and my best friend Michael Kavanagh to football games there every weekend in the fall when I was a kid. We would start the day eating lunch in the school cafeteria at the top of the hill, and we would slide down a series of grassy slopes until we reached the stadium. Along the way we’d accrue grass stains and knee scrapes and pull off imaginary game-winning catches in football plays with our mini purple Holy Cross football that my dad had bought us in the school bookstore. When we got to the stadium we would watch part of the game and then Michael Kavanagh and I would play pickup football in the grassy fenced-off area behind one of the end zones. Every half hour we’d take a break and fill up on hot dogs and popcorn and crazy crappy food that kept us powered up for another half hour.
My dad was always happy there. He was so proud that he had gone to Holy Cross. And I think he was equally proud when I graduated from a Catholic college as well. That feels like a long time ago, partly because it is and partly because there’s a rift these days between my dad and me.
Vince is extremely smart but hasn’t caught up to the fact that email forwards about American foreign policy from an account called [email protected] aren’t as legitimate as in-depth reporting by a war correspondent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
I bring up this particular example because my best friend from childhood, Michael Kavanagh, became a war correspondent in the Congo. And it’s scary. And it keeps me up at night. So it rubs me the wrong way on this Christmas walk with my dad when, inevitably, we stumble into a discussion of current events and my dad says, “The media is the problem.”
I say, “Dad, your son is in the media.”
He says, “You’re not really in the media.”
I say, “I work in media. Secondly, Michael Kavanagh risks his life every day as a journalist so people can better understand the complexity of that part of the world.” That might sound less exciting than my dad’s TV show of choice, Mad Money, but I’d venture to say that it’s more noble than shouting into a TV camera about the stock market for an hour a day.
My dad isn’t alone in writing off journalists. This is a current trend.
Email forwards can be a more pleasant resource.
Vince used to send them to us, too, but then one of them crossed the line for my brother, Joe.
In September of 2008, [email protected] forwarded my dad a viral email that had bullet points with conspiracy theories about Barack Obama. One of them was:
HIS MOTHER IS KANSAN, ATHEIST, AND WHITE. SO—WHERE ARE ALL THOSE PICTURES OF HIS NICE WHITE MOTHER AND HIS NICE WHITE GRANDPARENTS—THE ONES WHO RAISED HIM ALL THOSE EARLY YEARS?
Another one was:
SOMEHOW, SUDDENLY—HE WENT TO THE BEST HIGH DOLLAR PREP SCHOOLS IN AMERICA, AND LATER HE GOT INTO A TOP IVY LEAGUE COLLEGE AND LATER, INTO HARVARD LAW SCHOOL—HOW? WHO SPONSORED HIM? WHO PAID FOR ALL THAT SCHOOLING?
This email didn’t go over well with anyone in my family. But it particularly crossed a line for Joe. He was angered at Vince, who at that time may not have understood that forwarding a chain email includes an implicit endorsement. My dad spent sixty years in a world without email, so the idea that he would understand all of its nua
nces was a bit of an unfair expectation. But it was something Joe was willing to teach him, and he did that by replying directly to [email protected], cc’ing everyone on the email chain.
Joe addressed all thirteen bullet points. He started with:
Tom,
Let’s talk about your email a bit:
First off, there is a button called “caps lock,” it should be to the left of the “a” key, you’re going to want to press that, so you’re not yelling all the time. I took the liberty of numbering your claims for easy reference:
Then Joe took on each claim one by one and refuted them with facts. My favorite moment in Joe’s email was when he explained how Barack Obama might be funded.
Barack Obama has written 2 books, which have sold millions of copies. I’m not sure millions of people want to purchase your CAPITALIZED EMAIL RANTS.
This email from Joe was not well received. It created tension in my family for months if not years. But it’s an example of why our family simply can’t discuss current events. We don’t believe in the same truth. Vince believes email forwards more than he believes journalism.
It’s seven years later and I’m walking with my dad.
I accidentally stumble into a conversation about journalism, and my dad quotes something from one of these pass-along emails he recently received. He spouts off one of these theories that I know not to be true and so I cite a fact that I know about that specific theory.
And he says, “I didn’t know that.”
I say, “Right, because they don’t fact-check email forwards.”
My dad walks in silence for a few minutes, stewing. Then he says, “You’ve really gone another way.”
That was the end of the conversation. The next day Jen and Oona and I headed home.
Since then Vince and I have had positive conversations where we don’t bring up current events. But we both know that these differences between us lie beneath the surface and that one false move from either of us could turn into a very tense conversation. And I know that my dad is in the latter half of his life. He’s had more than one heart attack and this year battled a painful bout of pancreatitis. So we both know that it’s possible that a tense political conversation could end up being our last. And I don’t want that to happen.
I think that’s why I can’t get that childhood line out of my head:
Can I have this house when you die?
It seemed so logical at the time, but now it makes me sad. I don’t connect with that statement anymore. We’ve long since moved from that house. I have no personal attachment to the house my parents live in now, and I certainly don’t want them to die.
I’m driving home with Jen and Oona and thinking about how Oona will someday be my age and I will hopefully be my father’s age and I may not grasp something Oona’s telling me because I simply can’t.
If and when that happens, I hope she’ll be able to separate that difference in opinion from love. But there’s no way to be certain.
My dad will die. Everyone does. And I hope it’s not on a day when we disagree about current events. But it might be. And I don’t know what to do about it. My dad’s not going to change. But I won’t wait for that tree to grow. I won’t wait for my parents to die.
So I’m writing it here:
Dad, I love you.
No, wait. I’ll say it in all caps:
I LOVE YOU. I APPRECIATE EVERYTHING YOU’VE DONE FOR ME. AND I’LL ALWAYS REMEMBER OUR DAYS AT HOLY CROSS COLLEGE IN THE FALL.
Last Meal
Nom-nom-nom—
Mommy, I ate you.
And you died in my tummy.
That would be a nice place to die.
IX.
SO WE DON’T CRY
One night in February of 2016 I’m sitting on the couch with Jen watching the movie Spotlight.
I’m crying. A lot. That kind of crying where if you were in a car in the rain you’d have to pull over. I’m crying so hard that I actually have to pause the movie—for fifteen minutes.
The moment in the film that breaks me is when a man, sitting in a diner, reveals to a reporter that he was molested by a priest when he was a child. There’s something about this scene that is so vivid and real and painful that despite the countless articles and documentaries I’ve seen on this subject, this is the scene that breaks me. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I now have a daughter. I don’t know.
I’m crying so hard that Jen asks me if I was abused as a child. I wasn’t. I was an altar boy. I even have a joke about it: “I was an altar boy as a kid and the answer is… No. I wasn’t. I think it’s because they knew I was a talker.”
This joke usually gets a big laugh, but it’s also the joke that has provoked my most hecklers over the years. One night in Boston, I told this joke and a man in the audience shouted, “Come on!”
To which I replied, “What do you mean come on?”
He said, “Haven’t we heard that enough?”
I’m not sure we have.
I think what I respect most about Spotlight is that it doesn’t shy away from the topic at all. It deliberately shines a light on events without apology or fear. I think comedy can do this as well. I think sometimes comedians are able to tell the truth about things other people won’t talk about.
There’s a George Bernard Shaw quote where he says, “When you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh. Otherwise they’ll kill you.”
But “make them laugh” isn’t universally agreed upon. Some people don’t want the comedian to rain on their lighthearted comedy parade. And other people feel that jokes about sensitive topics normalize the behavior.
It’s a complex problem, I get it. The normalizing argument is compelling.
A few years ago, when driving in Los Angeles, I was T-boned by a drunk driver on the driver’s side and it nearly killed me. The drunk driver’s car struck an inch from my head. It was traumatic. A year later, a comedian opened for me and, not knowing this, told a joke about drunk driving. Something to the effect of, “Don’t drive drunk… unless you’re having a really good time.”
This joke got me thinking: Does his joke about drunk driving normalize drunk driving?
I don’t know the answer. Maybe it does. I can’t be certain. But it’s also possible that it starts a conversation between a couple in the audience who is sharing a car home about who should drive. I’m afraid of normalizing abuse, but I’m also afraid of normalizing silence. I’d guess there aren’t a lot of jokes in cults about the cult leader sleeping with all the women and their daughters. But I’m guessing the silence that surrounds the abuse might perpetuate it.
In 2015, a film came out called Call Me Lucky. It’s a documentary directed by Bobcat Goldthwait that follows the life of the late great comedian Barry Crimmins, who was sexually abused and raped as a child. He talks about it candidly in the film and onstage as a comedian.
In defense of his own sensitive material, Crimmins says, “If these kids had to live it, you could at least say the words out loud.”
His final statement in the documentary is: “We have to take care of innocents in this world and we have to be brave enough to tell the truth about innocents in this world. So tell the truth. Tell everyone the truth. Tell anyone the truth. Because your lives depend on it. My life depends on it. And people who really can’t be heard really depend on it.”
I think the goal of jokes is to make us laugh and hopefully open up the conversation to topics we don’t really want to discuss. Can a joke be a spotlight in the darkness? Can a joke make room for a discussion of that darkness?
I’m sitting with Jen on the couch as we turn the movie back on. Oona is asleep in the other room. I’m thinking about the heckler in Boston. I can’t get his words out of my head.
“Haven’t we heard that enough?”
I’m not sure we have.
X.
525,600 PHOTOS
A day before Oona’s first birthday, Jen assembles a photo slideshow of our
daughter’s first year, a last-ditch effort for us to prove to Oona’s relatives that we are decent parents.
As Jen and I lie in bed scrubbing through photos on her phone she pauses to make an observation: “I took all the photos.”
I say, “No, you didn’t.”
I pull out my laptop. Over the next sixteen hours, I look through my iPhoto and find 4,326 photos and 345 videos of Oona totaling seven and a half hours. The way I sort through the photos is with a facial-recognition software called Faces that comes standard with every Apple computer. It’s terrifying. I identify my daughter’s face as “Oona” in one photo and then it presents me with 3,000 other possible photos of Oona. My computer turns into a creepy magician. “Is this your child? Is this your child? I want you to pick a child, and remember that child, and I’m going to put that child back in with the photos… Is this your child?” The whole thing feels like the inciting incident in a sci-fi thriller about duplicating Oonas. I fear that at some point iPhoto will say, “We’ve gathered enough data, Michael. Would you like to 3-D print another Oona?” I saw the eighties film Weird Science, and they basically printed a lady, and my computer is ten thousand times more powerful than the computer those guys had.
I sit down on the green/gray couch and watch hours of these videos.
June 25, 2015—Oona is two months old, her arms and legs move like an animatronic doll. She sneezes, not knowing what a sneeze is, momentarily concerned that her head has exploded.
July 7, 2015—Jen is in front of our house securing Oona into a stroller. The stroller, which was a gift from Jen’s brother Jordan, will be stolen in two months. We won’t mention that to Jordan. His copy of this book is redacted.
August 30, 2015—Me and Oona on this very couch. She is leaning on my knees and grasping my finger. A mess of toys and baby junk litters the living room floor in the background. I sing in an operatic voice:
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