Riding Bikes

 

My bike was that rare thing in a house with ten kids: mine. Unlike ball gloves or sweatshirts or rosaries it wasn’t shared; it wasn’t “the blue bike” or “the little Schwinn”, it was mine. This wasn’t because I’d bought it (there was no money) or because it was given to me specifically for a birthday or Christmas (there would have been howls of protest), it was simply a matter of dimensions. My sisters, closest to me in age and size, each had access to newer, larger and mechanically sounder bikes, so they never needed to borrow one. I was by far the smallest -- my hulking big brothers were between seven and thirteen years older, a literal lifetime when you’re a kid -- and my bike was the smallest and therefore out of the pool of the borrowable.

 

And that little single-geared Schwinn was freedom. 

 

It was a more-or-less convincing blue, multiple sloppy paint jobs not completely hiding what it had been new (or newer) at some point in Michigan, or Memphis, or greater Buffalo. I didn’t have a bike lock and counted on it being right where I’d left it, wherever I’d left it: at home unborrowed in the side yard by the tire swing, at the town pool at the bike rack, at Sacred Heart in the small yard between the school and the church, at the Little League park -- anywhere, all over town, balanced on its sturdy, after-market hand-installed kickstand, waiting for me.

 

Mostly, though, I was on it. It was something to do – in all but the deepest snow or most dramatic lightning storm or tornado warning, I could go “riding bikes” without asking or telling; between nine and nine, I could just go. Not to go anywhere in particular, usually, was the point; it was just to go. Maybe you’d call a friend and ask if they wanted to ride bikes, but more often you’d ride bikes over to their house and ask, or you’d ride through town until you found someone else who was also, literally and currently, riding a bike, and ask them if they wanted to “ride bikes.” If they said yes - if they weren’t on an errand, say - then you’d ride to the town park, or past the Sacred Heart school playground, or maybe over to the Little League field, or to the town pool depending on the time of year. And when you got to where you were going, you’d ride around it, languidly, and see if any other kids were around who wanted to “ride bikes”, and talk about the next destination.

 

Kids in Fowler in the ‘70s had terrific cardiovascular health.

 

It was safe -- opaquely safe, by which I mean it was so safe we never thought about it as being safe, an all-encompassing safety so complete it was invisible, unnoticeable and unremarked upon. It’s not that drivers were used to looking for pedestrians (they weren’t), or that we were safety conscious (we weren’t) or that we wore helmets (we didn’t own any and no one else in town did either). In town the houses were set in the middle of ample lots, so approaching each corner at little kid bike speed you could see if there was anyone coming. In the country, you could hear (in the summer when the corn was high) or see (the rest of the year - it was flat and tree-less) any vehicle from far enough away to have plenty of time to pull over from your path down the middle of the road to get out of the way.

 

And wave, of course, because you knew them, or you might know them, or they knew you, or maybe neither of you knew if you knew each other but you waved anyway. Why take the chance? You wouldn’t want to seem rude. 

 

There were dangers, I guess. There was a traffic light you could cross against, but it was just the one, and it was set to flash yellow at the cars coming up US 52 and red at those on Fifth Street, and the very – very – subtly undulating prairie meant that you could literally see three miles down the road to the massive grain elevator at Swanington and two miles up the road the other direction toward the bend in the road. It was safe.

 

I don’t remember any parameters on where I could ride. There were no “Don’t go past…” and few “Be back by…” restrictions that I remember. I was the youngest of ten kids in a family headed by two parents who both worked outside the home as they struggled to make ends meet, so triage, fatigue and resignation could have been factors. But Fowler was so isolated no restrictions were needed.

 

How was a kid on a bike going to get into trouble, and would he or she have gone? The next closest clump of human habitation was Earl Park, seven miles northwest up a slight but noticeable-on-a-bike incline on US 52. It had fewer than 500 people in the ‘70s and -- except for the Labor Day Fall Festival -- there was nothing there worth riding your bike seven miles to discover. Oxford, Indiana (southeast, population 1,098, Dan Patch Days) and Boswell, Indiana (south-southwest, 998, Benton County Fair) were both nine miles each, and between them and past them was more of the same. The closest chain retail outlet of any kind was the Dairy Queen in Hoopeston, Illinois -- twenty eight miles away. I never even dreamt of riding my bike there, or anywhere outside of Fowler. There was nowhere to go, and I had no money to spend even if I’d gotten there. Someone with a driver’s license and a car could get to the county fair grounds in Boswell in 12 minutes; for me it simply didn’t exist.

 

Perhaps I’ve been so compelled by island living as an adult because I essentially grew up on one. Fowler was effectively an island, one of an archipelago of small towns set in a sea of tamed prairie and corn and soybeans. Immense, interminable, impossibly fecund fields lapped up against gravel and asphalt shores.

 

I never thought about any of this as a kid, of course. I just knew, after the age of four or so, that I could get on my bike and go: whenever I wanted, as far as I wanted, for as long as I wanted.

 

I didn’t know then what a gift this was, of course – the freedom, the mobility, the safety of it all. And it’s unknowable, as well, how things in our childhood will redound in our future lives. Is it a stretch to draw a line from my trusty blue Schwinn to my willingness to explore as an adult? Am I peripatetic by nature, or did all that freedom as a little boy nurture the confidence to do things as an adult that I found unremarkable but which in which others found involved a modicum of risk?  

 

Years later, I was spending my summer on a friend’s couch in Bangkok when I had a jolt of recognition reading David Malouf’s gorgeous “Southern Skies”: His narrator comments “Looking back on those days I see myself as a kind of centaur, half-boy, half-bike, forever wheeling down suburban streets”, and that was exactly right. Every day in the summer and many days the rest of the year I was welded to that old hand-me-down Schwinn, safe and free. 

GOP Hypocricy - Again

In the tidal wave of news this week you might have missed this nugget: The Pandemic has created a coin shortage. Even though fewer Americans are using cash -- for lots of reasons that predate Covid-19 -- somehow there aren't enough coins in circulation.

Why do I possibly care about this? Because in the depths of that article in the Washington Post alerting us to the issue is this:

Rep. John Rose (R-Tenn.), however, said he has been hearing concerns from banks in his district that are receiving only a fraction of their weekly coin orders.

Rose mentioned one particular bank that may run out of coins by the end of this week or weekend and asked if the issue was on Powell’s radar.

I had never heard of John Rose (though it's too bad it's not Johnny Rose from Schitt's Creek) but I knew - I just KNEW, before I even looked - that Rep. John Rose (R-Tenn) was an implacable small government asshole because, well, he's a Republican and he's from Tennessee. And I was right.

What surprised me was just how implacable and how much of an asshole he is.

John Rose (R-Tenn) was

• One of TWELVE people in the US House to vote against extending the 9/11 victims compensation fund - it passed 402-12 and President Trump signed it into law. His reasoning? Cost too much. 
• One of 22 House members to vote against the NATO support act -- giving Trump a free hand to pull the US out of NATO if he wanted to (remember when that was on the President's radar? Thankfully he has the attention span of an over-sugared 7th grader). 
• One of 22 House members to vote against the Ocean Acidification Innovation Act of 2019, which authorized "...Federal agencies to establish prize competitions for innovation or adaptation management development relating to ocean acidification." 
• One of, well, one to block a disaster relief bill fast-track -- not because it wouldn't ultimately pass (the disasters had hit Republican states and GOP congress members' principled stand against relief funds, which they so firmly believed after Sandy, vanished) but just to make some kind of cranky point about how members votes should be on record. (And, since we're keeping score, wrote a letter to President Trump asking for tornado relief funds "as soon as possible.")
• And the least effective member of the Tennessee US House delegation, passing 0 bills out of committee for House consideration and co-sponsoring the fewest bills. 

But hey, if you run a bank and need (literal) change, call your boy. He'll answer. A radical small government, less regulation guy, yes, unless a literal banker needs literal government intervention because they're literally running low on coins. Then John Rose (R-Tenn) believes in govt.

What an asshole. What a hypocrite. What a 2020 Republican. 

Going Deep - Reflections of a Gay Football Fan

I’ve always loved sports.  I grew up in a rural town in Indiana, and sports were one of the things that boys talked about.  I sucked at talking about some of the others – most obviously girls – but I could talk sports.  While technically I played sports in middle school - football (cornerback, where I watched a lot of guys run by me), baseball (where I spent a lot of time in deep center and right), and tennis (where I’d swing for the fences every time the ball came at me far more effectively than I ever had in baseball) - my love of sports was from watching them, almost any of them.

I loved watching high school sports – and nine older siblings gave me lots of opportunities to do that – and then college and pros as I got older.  In high school in the 80s I had a job selling soda in Purdue’s Ross Ade Stadium (capacity, 69,000; average attendance, 17,000) and I loved it, even when I’d get heckled by disappointed, wet, cold fans who would tell me to go find the hot chocolate guy as the home team lost, yet again, in the 35°F-grey-and-sleet of late November. 

When we moved to a town closer to Indianapolis and I could catch Colts games on the radio, that’s when I really fell in love.  I would listen to every down of every game if my parents let me, sometimes in the car parked in the driveway because that’s the only radio that could get reception.  Despite the 3-13 seasons and the freezing temps of three hours sitting in the car, I knew the roster, I knew the schedule, I knew the verbal tics of the announcers.  

And I really loved it.  I would read everything about the team I could get my hands on.  I couldn’t sleep on Saturday nights before big games, I’d be too excited.  I consumed so much football knowledge that years later, sitting in my regular sports bar with other transplanted Colts fans, I’d be the one they’d ask about a decade-old game score or the players involved in that three way trade with Minnesota and Cincy that went bad.  I really loved it, and still do. 

Some of my friends, my gay friends, don’t get it - certainly some boyfriends haven’t - and sometimes they’ve been super judge-y about it.  I didn’t get that, at all. Not at first.  If it’s not your thing, fair enough, but why is it a problem that it’s a thing for me?  Why, for some queer folk, is it okay to know every Academy Award nominee, but knowing the tie-breaker rules for how teams get into the NFL playoffs is off-putting? 

In 2013, I watched the Super Bowl at a (straight) couple’s house; they have a lot of gay friends and there were a lot of people over. During halftime Beyoncé performed - and I cleaned, restocked beer, and freshened drinks.  I wasn’t that interested in (2013) Beyoncé - though I did learn that she had been in Destiny’s Child, whom I’d heard of, and that she was married to Jay-Z, whom I'd also heard of  - I was far more interested in the game. After the power outage got resolved in the second half (the lights went out in the Louisiana Superdome for 35 minutes, leading to a suspension of play) I was excited when the teams finally re-took the field so we could unmute the TV and, you know, watch the game. One of my gay friends, who is usually lovely, said: “Like there isn’t enough football. They’ll be hours of it to go, we don’t need to hear this part.”  I looked around the room – a room full of guests at a Super Bowl party – and realized that at this moment most of the people in the room were gay, and in assent.  Thankfully there was another TV in the house. 

If this were the only time I’d heard something like this I would have chalked it up to circumstance or a lapse in manners. But queer friends have told me “you’re not really busy” when I say I can’t go to a movie at the same time my team is playing – in the playoffs.  That I’m wasting my time on a Sunday “sitting in a dark bar, watching football” when I've begged off going to brunch.  And, most annoyingly, some - including some who I have just met, have given that look and said that acid, arch, reductionist, tired “Oh, that’s so butch,” when I’m off to the bar to watch sports. As if it were an affectation. 

Why the disapproval? 

As I’ve thought about it, I’ve realized that in at least some cases the dismissal and disapproval that I’ve felt from gay friends weren’t from bafflement as much as from discomfort or even intimidation.  I’ve come to learn that some gay men would feel very uncomfortable walking into a sports bar on a Sunday filled with football fans; it’s not that they’d be bored – though there’s that, too – it’s that they’d feel they didn’t belong. 

A few years ago if you’d asked me to walk into a crowded gay Oscar party I’d’ve had a few drinks before I got there for sure – I’d’ve felt very out of place.  I’d’ve been keenly aware that I lacked a shared experience and thus things to talk about; that opening my mouth would reveal my ignorance; that I wouldn’t know the cultural markers – sartorial, conversational, behavioral – to fit in.  I get it. 

For some queers, though, athletic contexts hold even deeper challenges: they are fraught.  They bring back a moment in junior high when a conversation came up about sports that they didn’t follow, or when a dad or an older brother told them to try out for a team with an implication that this was a chance to show they were a man, and they were terrified.  I get that, too.  I was not and am not a graceful athlete, and athletic prowess is one key way in which males are evaluated in adolescence (and later). Some of that – feelings of evaluation and judgment – can linger, and can affect how we see ourselves as men.  And my love of sports perhaps puts me on the other side of the divide from other gay men.

Not all, of course.  I’ve dated ex-college athletes (hoops and soccer), I’ve had gay football-watching buds, particularly in the Midwest, I had an ex once look at me across the table in a sports bar in New York City during a playoff game surrounded by other fans of my (and now his) team and say, “Thanks for giving me this.  I had no idea it could be so fun.”

So how did unathletic me develop this love of sports – all sports, but especially football, that most macho of American sports? I can't help but wonder if I love football so much, a love that really took root in early adolescence, as a reaction - using the internalized stereotype to counter my inability to deal with my own queerness. I had inklings that I was gay; in my narrow, rural world view most gay guys don’t like football; I love football; therefore I must not be gay. I don't think that's the case, but it's certainly possible. I've read enough queer biography and hooked up with enough Marines to know that there is a type of gay male who on some level tries not to be gay by doing the most stereotypically un-gay thing he can think of.

Was that what I was doing?  Did my eleven-year-old self let heteronormative stereotypes define him, even in a counter-typical way? We all have normed expectations that we marinate in from birth, so what do we do as burgeoning queer children when we begin to understand that we don't fit – fundamentally can't fit – our mandated roles?  Is that why I love sports, and in particular why I freakin’ love football?  Is that why this particular entertainment interest of mine is discomfiting to some queer folk?

I don’t know.  Maybe?  But there really isn’t and can’t be an answer.  I’ve learned to be a little patient with gay people who are inadvertently ignorant or rude about my particular way of being entertained by baseball on summer afternoons at Chavez Ravine and McCovey Cove or any of the 26 MLB parks I’ve been too; by basketball as I tweet incessantly about the Pacers and my college team; and by football on Sundays in the fall.  

It’s a big part of who I am, and I love what my love of sports has given me.  Like talking to group of four ladies of a certain age from Cleveland in big hats, sharing their brandy with me on the Amtrak bound for Milwaukee where they were going to watch their team play the Brewers.  Or going to the same sports bar with the same gear for 16 Sundays in a row and becoming part of a community.  Or walking into a bar in a Pacers hat when I’m in whatever city and immediately getting included in a conversation.  Or sitting bleary eyed in Guam, watching a playoff game at the one open bar on the island at some ungodly hour. It’s comfortable for me in a way that an Oscar party will never be, and it’s easy, and fun.  It’s my church, and despite what my team might be preachin’, I’m faithful.  

And if you have a gay friend who’s sports-addled, well, first, it’s just what he’s into.  He’s not judging you for not being into it or drawing any conclusions about you, but it’s a hobby, however ridiculous (and he may well admit that it’s ridiculous), and we like what we like.  Second, he’s got superstitions to maintain and a schedule to plan around upcoming games, and that shit ain’t easy.  If his team wins on a week when we doesn’t have his cell phone, then he’ll never again bring his cellphone to the bar to watch a game.  That’s just the way it works.  And finally, maybe ask to watch a game with him.  Not a big game, maybe, not a playoff game his team is in, but a game.  Maybe you can tell him about Destiny’s Child during timeouts while he tells you a little about what’s going on during the game.  Maybe you’ll both be a little more comfortable.  

Senate shenanigans

Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is on record as saying that the next President of the United States - the one we'll elect in November - should nominate the next Supreme Court Justice to replace Justice Scalia after his sudden death last weekend.  

Here's the quote, from Politico: 

“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

A couple of things here.  First, the job of the President, as explicitly outlined in the US Constitution, is to nominate a Supreme Court justice. The Senate's job, as explicitly outlined in the US Constitution, is to vote on them. (I mention the explicit thing because the deceased Justice Scalia loved nothing more than to say that the US Constitution was a dead document that should be taken at face value and not interpreted for current exigencies.)  

Senator McConnell made this statement an hour after the justice's death was confirmed - when people like Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Bernie Sanders (D-VT) were offering condolences to the family of the recently departed - which is a dick move, but that's besides the point. 

The point is that the American people do have a voice now.  Senator McConnell might not like it, but we - the American people - voted for the current president. Twice. And he still has over ten months left in office.  

And another way that Americans - FAR more Americans, as it turns out - have a voice, is by for whom they voted in the last election.  And overwhelmingly, more of us - the voice-ful American people - voted for Democratic members of the US Senate than for Republican members of the US Senate. And when I say "overwhelmingly" that's not hyperbole: it's over 24 million more votes. 

That's about the entire population of Ghana, or Australia, or to put it in terms perhaps more comfortable to the GOP Senate, that's more than the entire populations of: Tennessee, South Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana and Alabama combined. 

Not voting age populations of those particular traitor states, but their entire total population.  

That's staggering. 24 million more Americans voted for current Democratic Senators than Republicans. 

And I can hear some people saying, "Well, that's California and New York, so what do you expect?" Like California and New York don't count, but whatever, okay - delete California and New York vote totals and it's still FOUR MILLION MORE.  That's more than Oklahoma! 

So who the hell are these "American people" that Senator McConnell wants to hear from?  And is he sure? I don't know, but Senator, you might want to be careful what you wish for. 

(Raw data below the jump.)

Observations from KSA - II

I don’t know who flipped the switch, but the weather suddenly got gorgeous – cooler, sunny, low humidity, cool nights.  It was broiling hot, and then we had a dust storm.  The students said it was mild, about a 3 on a 1-10 scale with 10 being the most severe, but it was, without doubt, the single least pleasant meteorological experience I’ve ever had – and I lived in Chicago the year all those people died from the heat.  We were buffeted by high, hot wind gusts, sandblasted (literally), and effectively breathing grit.  The visibility dropped, and honestly it felt like walking through a blast furnace and it was hard to breathe - just oppressive.  And the next day was clear and sunny and about 10'F cooler, and since then it’s been really nice. 

The ratio of Tagalog to Arabic I hear daily is roughly 1:1.  The Filipinos I talked to that work in the Saadeddin pastry shop said that working on camp is much better than working off – "people are friendlier" they said.  They only get one day off a week.  The one guy has been here 17 years.  The bus driver – not on camp, but on the Saudi public bus – was Filipino who’s been here 16 years.  My Pinoy taxi driver the other day has been here 20 years but says he’s going home at the end of this contract now that his kids are out of school.  He's been with his family two months a year for the last 20 years.  I’ll never work as hard as they do.

Saadeddin Pastry Shop makes the best goddam cheesecake I've ever eaten.  It's light and fluffy and heaven.  There are a surprising number of chubby-to-obese people here.  Don't know if it's the loose clothing, the fact that nothing is legal here EXCEPT sugar and tobacco, or that they have an American lifestyle (no mass transit, drive everywhere) but there are a surprising number of overweight people.  Maybe it's the Saadeddin cheesecake.  That wouldn't surprise me, actually. 

Arabic text is read right to left but numbers are read left to right.  So in a block of text with a number, they read the number as a whole word, just backwards.  Good luck if you've got dyslexia - no idea how you'd manage. 

 

We use Arabic numbers, right?  Not Roman, not Chinese, but Arabic?  I'd always thought so.  Except we don't.  Or, well, they don't.  Or something.  A dot is zero; a zero is 5; what looks like it could be a seven is a six - well, here they are <---- .="" font="" nbsp="">

What this means is that I flail at the register, every time, and that I pay with a lot of purple 50s and thus have a passel of 10s floating around my wallet.   

 

I was a few steps behind a woman in an abaya and full face veil and head scarf walking out of the commissary at breakfast on Saturday.  The foyer was a little darkened and the electronic eye didn’t “see” her. She had to take a couple of steps back and then side to side to get the door to open.  That seems to me to be an apt metaphor.

There is a debate raging at Dammam University about women whose abayas are not all black.  They should be, evidently.  The police have urged the school to clamp down, and they've gone to abaya sellers encouraging them to sell black, all black, and only black.  Sinners. 

I don't know if the TV I've seen on camp and in the hotels here is the same that Saudis get, but there's a lot of violence - a LOT of violence, most of it crap US films - broadcast here, and a surprising amount of sex.  For a country with a "Nudity not allowed in the locker room" policy, I sure have seen some on TV.  Filipino soap operas and sports are on half the channels; stern looking Imams are on a few (I think they're imams - maybe they are sternly discussing cricket?), and stations out of Dubai show lots of HBO, and unedited movies like "Wolf of Wall Street" and German dramas.  Odd.   

Bahrain is a separate island nation 30 miles, 3 hours by bus, and a world away, but it’s a world that Saudis flock to every weekend (along with Dubai and Abu Dhabi, according to two of the drillers in one of my classes, or more correctly, according to one driller who said of Dubai “I go every weekend – and I see THIS guy there too” pointing at another driller) for a drink, for bacon, for vanilla, for a drink, for a flirt, for a drink… On the 13th floor of my hotel in Manama, Bahrain's capital, I could still hear the “mm-ch-mm-ch-mm-ch” from the club on the ground floor down the block.)

I didn’t expect Saudi Arabia to be multiethnic, but according to my students there are a lot of distinct cultural variations around the Kingdom: Jeddah and Mecca are more cosmopolitan and open, and far more diverse, while Riyadh is more traditional.  The two black students I’ve had were both from families from Jeddah, on the west coast, and looking at a map it makes sense: that’s the port where people come through for the hajj, and the Red Sea isn’t that wide; Sudan is *right* there.  (I'm in Ad Dammam, in the northeast on the Gulf, and the city nearest Bahrain.)

One Sudanese guy I met here was born in KSA of Sudanese parents and he doesn’t have a Saudi passport – only a Sudanese one, though he's only been to Sudan once.  He can’t get Saudi citizenship, either, unless he marries a Saudi woman like his brother, and even that isn’t easy - both parties have to be over 35, which is considered ancient here.  He has to renew his residence visa every year, and the cost has recently gone up from about $500 USD to about $1500.  If he gets convicted of any crime beyond traffic violations, tests positive for HIV, or any number of other things, he’ll be deported.  I didn’t ask my black students, obviously, if they were Saudi passport holders. 

There are plumeria (frangiapani in the UK and the empire) everywhere around the camp, making it redolent of Hawai'i.  It's surprising given how much water they need.  And I've just learned that Vanilla is a haram – or forbidden – as liquor is used to make it.  Tobacco use is fine.    

There are shuttle busses from camp into town – to both malls, the Mall of Dhahran, a sprawling affair with some shuttered store fronts that’s seen better days but that has an Outback Steakhouse and Paul’s, a French (?) chain with amazing bread; and Al Rashid Mall, the more exclusive of the two with a bookstore and a GNC.  The shuttles will also drop you off at Ikea or in the downtown shopping district, if you’re so inclined.  The malls are malls.  Well, except that they shut down at the call to prayer, a call which most of the shoppers gleefully ignore as they mill around the locked doors and security grates waiting for the all clear.  And it’s not just us and the Filipinos who are milling around (though, true, some of the Pinoy are Muslim too) – you’ll see Saudi women in full Abaya, head covering and even face veils, and Saudi men in the traditional thawb and head covering (shumagh – usually red and white in this part of the kingdom), milling around too.  Few people seem to pay the call much heed.  My favorite sight from the mall has to be the early 20s Saudi guy, traditional thawb, and Texas Tech baseball hat.  On backwards. 

Morty Seinfeld has NOTHING on me.  The other night I was milling around the commissary at 3:50 PM waiting for them to open at 4 PM so I could eat.  Our day starts at just past 7, we break for lunch at 11:30 – and the whole company does, which is, frankly, annoying, as there is a resulting scrum in the lunch lines and outlandish din in the caf, but prayer time is at 12:30 so there we go – and we wrap up at 3:30. 

 

And as I’ve been telling my colleagues, since we go to bed, wiped, at 8 PM, we just need to think about the schedule being 2 hours later and then it makes sense: we work from 7:00 9:00 to 3:30 5:30 so dinner at 4 PM is really 6 PM and it’s less crazy.  (Saudis are horrified – they eat late, like 9, but by that point I’d likely be dead.) 

 

It’s important to be on time at the end of the day as the female students who don’t live on the camp need to know what time to tell their drivers to pick them up.  

Nearly every car I've seen still has the plastic over the seat covers.  It gets over 110'F routinely here, and often hits 120'F with high humidity.  KSA has one of the highest rates of road fatalities in the world.  Maybe it's just from people men trying to scooch around on the plastic over the car seats in a billion degree car interiors?    

Me pretending that I know anything about Saudi Arabia after four weeks here would be like someone new to the US going to Mountain View, living on a Google housing complex, eating in the Google cafeteria, and taking a bus to San Jose 3 or 4 times and pretending they knew what the US was like.   

The Best We Could

It's hard to write about my dad.

It would have been his 84th birthday today, and I've thought about him and our relationship a lot since he died last year. I've kept coming up short when I try to write about him, though, which is as apt as a metaphor for our relationship as any: he and I, despite our efforts, kept coming up short. But upon reflection I've come to realize a couple of other things, too, despite it all: we both kept trying, and we both did the best we could.

And since writing was how we kept in touch over the last two plus decades, writing seems apt as the best way for me to remember him.  

I'd try, sometimes, to be in touch in other ways. We had sports (if not many teams) in common, but even then it could be tricky. Baseball players had unions against which he would fulminate, and there were other, unlooked for challenges. One perfect NorCal afternoon, buoyed by the weather on my walk to the bar to watch Indy play a Monday Night game, I called Dad with what I had presumed to be some safe topics lined up. I started with the past weekend's Notre Dame game, but I got "I don't follow them now since they invited that baby killer Obama to campus." Deflated, I quickly wrapped up the call.

He'd try sometimes, too. He'd call and I'd see the caller ID as I sat freezing in the UH library, or while reading or doing laundry or smoking on my tiny back porch in Honolulu or on my roof in San Francisco, and I'd let it go to voicemail. The time difference and our respective travel and work schedules gave us a fig leaf to cover our mutual wariness.

Letters were safer. Writing multiple drafts gave me a chance to see and excise some of my anger and self-righteousness. (Some, though not all, I'm embarrassed to say - some of what I'd written in the letters I found when cleaning out his house made me cringe.) I'm not sure if he wrote multiple drafts or not, but his letters were angry, paternalistic, deliberately hurtful, and often oscillated between the forced-friendly and the furious.

But he read my letters, or at least some of them -- I knew this because I'd hear from those people we had in common that Dad was pleased about a promotion I'd received or a recognition I'd earned. And I read his -- or at least some of them. I learned that a quick analysis of the envelope could reveal something of the tone of its contents. GOP elephant on the return address label and a President Nixon stamp? Likely bombastic, confrontational, and political, with the added bonus of quotes from Rush Limbaugh. A Knights of Columbus or Right to Life return label? Milder but still hectoring, and likely to include quotes from The Catholic Answer or the Pope. A collection of stamps in different denominations (i.e., a 23 cent, an 11 cent, a five cent, etc.)? Likely playful and familial, without anything about the baby killers or how my sinful lifestyle was going to result in my terminal sickness and early death.

He also made copies of his outgoing correspondence. Each of the ten of us had a file, we found, and in mine, in addition to a number of my letters to him, were copies of at least some of his to me. And other things. My folder held funding appeals from organizations like Focus on the Family talking about how "homosexuals" - always "homosexual", never "gay", a convention he followed - were imperiling the moral fabric of America; how crimes committed by these homosexuals were never reported in the press, how homosexuals were pushing their - well, to be clear, "our" - agenda through the godless courts and via the godless Democrat (sic) party. These were all things I'd heard before. They land differently when you hear them from your dad, though.  

I came out to my mom when she was already dying from cancer in 1991. She cried, and we had some difficult conversations about it, but she said that she loved me -- and she also said, "Don't tell your father." I waited a decade, in part with my mom's words in mind, in part because I believed that coming out -- especially to a parent -- should be an act of kindness and not of anger. It took me a while to get there with Dad. And I was nervous about how it would go. I finally decided, when living with my then-boyfriend, to give my dad "the opportunity to do the right thing" as I'd put it to myself and my friends. Wanting us to have a more honest relationship, if nothing else, I came out to him. In a letter.

It didn't go well. 

First the questions: was I gay because he had traveled so much for work and was an absent father when I was growing up? Was I gay because my mom had a strong personality? And my favorite: was being gay why I was no longer a Notre Dame fan?  

And then the statements: your sinful lifestyle will result in your early death, due to HIV/AIDS. You shouldn't work in education because you'll molest kids and infect them with your sinful lifestyle. Don't come home unless you come alone, and only then if you have pre-approval from siblings so they can keep their kids away from you if they choose to. And then, after about a year of this, another letter with this question: did I become gay because I'd been molested by a priest? Dad wrote that he had been: a Catholic Brother molested him when he was 13, and "...let's face it, at that age, pretty much any sexual contact is pleasurable." I was deeply shocked, even though it's all too common a story. I just ached for him -- it broke my heart, and pulled back a curtain to reveal so much. I'd never known that, and I doubt if he'd told anyone else. Ever.

What effect had that trauma had? Survivors of untreated sexual abuse often suffer long term effects -- what had he suffered because of this? What had this introduced into his personality? How had this warped what was there? Had he ever talked about it? He never mentioned it again and never answered any questions when I asked about it. I'll never know.   

We never have a complete understanding of someone else -- we can't, it’s always imperfect -- and I'd aver that most of us don’t have a complete understanding of ourselves. I hope that this knowledge about my dad's journey made me less angry, more patient, gentler. I like to think it did, when I brought it to mind, and for a couple of years I thought of it often. 

Despite his towering temper, after I was nine or so he never hit me, and I remember the spankings I got as a kid being forewarned and a result of my actions. We never went hungry - none of the 12 of us - when we were under his roof. He worked impossibly hard - long days, many nights, many business trips to El Dorado, Arkansas, of all places - to make that happen. He never drank, ever: I saw him have one beer, once, before I graduated from high school. He never swore, ever: I heard him swear only once, after a storm destroyed the roof, the siding, and every pane of glass on two sides of our house in Fowler, and then it was a simple, exhausted, "damn."

But it wasn't easy. Through his illness and death I've been surprised by others' recollections of my dad: a cousin mentioning in passing how he was intimidated and nervous around him; a brother I'd always thought of as a favorite of his recounting Dad’s petty and mean-spirited bullying; forgotten letters from my mom telling me not to take his anger to heart. I took comfort in these recollections. It wasn't just me. From the available data, it was just dad.

And I'm sorry to say that I didn't help matters as much as I could have. I knew how to push his buttons, and I did - certainly in some of my letters to him, but also in person. Some small part of that might have been healthy since so many people tiptoed around him, a learned response to his bullying, and after all, what did I have to lose? I was never going to meet his expectations unless I signed up to be a priest; since I was gay I was beyond the pale, I had tremendous freedom from his opprobrium. In one letter, asking after his recovery from a car accident, I didn't stop myself from asking if he was getting his pain med prescription filled by sending his housekeeper (which he didn't have) to a parking lot with a cigar box (which he didn’t smoke) full of cash like his buddy Rush Limbaugh had. Like many of his generation he was notoriously tight -- even though one of his sons was a builder and submitted a bid to build his retirement home, he went with the guy who submitted the lowest bid. When I went to the house -- before I came out to him and was thus effectively banned -- I’d eyeball a wall and asked if he’d paid extra for its pronounced warp. When he was showing a group of us the blueprints for this house before its construction, he pointed out where the pool table would go in the basement. I looked at the drawings and said "I'm no expert but it looks like something's missing - where's the change machine?"  

I remember many instances of his support when I was a child. He drove me and a friend down to Tennessee one weekend when we were doing research on Confederate POWs who were captured at the Battle of Fort Donelson who were housed -- and died -- in Lafayette during the Civil War. He encouraged me in Scouting and came to a troop meeting to show the other kids how to carve leather work, and even though I had no real skill at it, he encouraged my interest in his hobby as well. He helped me anytime I needed it with homework whenever he was home, no matter how tired he must have been, without a word or gesture of complaint that I remember.

In fact I never heard him complain - about work, or his hours, or anything. (The Cubs, sure, but that's like distant cicadas buzzing on a summer night - part of life for many in the Midwest.)  He put his head down and worked hard, very hard, as a matter of pride, and expected that we all would, too. At many points in my life I've stopped and thought, "When Dad was my age he had to provide for x children." It was never a small number, and it was always nearly viscerally daunting.  

When I was a kid on Sunday mornings he'd get me up at 5:30 to do the paper route around Fowler, which we'd finish in time for the 7 o'clock mass, then come home after church and make waffles from scratch and play hours-long military strategy games, just he and I, until everyone else got home from church.  When I was in the 5th grade he took the day off - something he almost never did - and we rode a bus up to Chicago to see Pope John Paul II say a mass in Grant Park, just he and I.  (Well, and about 7 million others.)

I don't know when or why we began to drift apart. I hit adolescence and began to rebel, though it was nothing like what he'd been through with my brothers: I didn't smoke, flout rules, or show any signs of being counter-cultural. I served daily 7 AM mass intermittently through high school and was a devout Catholic - to the point that I fought with a church youth group leader to make sure we could attend mass on a weekend camping trip - but still, Dad and I drifted apart.

By the time I got my ear pierced my junior year in college we weren't on great terms. I'd timed the piercing so that I could take it out before I came home for Christmas, but mom was sick with a vague but worrying malady so I came home for Thanksgiving with a fake gold stud in the hole so it wouldn't close, though I knew that hell would likely break loose. It did. That was it. He didn’t speak to me for a few months.  I stayed in Milwaukee and worked over Christmas break; in February I only learned Mom had been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer when I called a brother to bitch about my course load and he asked me how I was doing with mom's news. And after mom died that November, quite understandably, grief subsumed him.

He had a car accident and broke his back two years ago, and each of us ten kids took turns going to spend time with him to help his convalescence.  I was nervous about my week there, but honestly it was good. He was still mostly lucid, and I asked him about family stories, about his siblings and childhood, about my mom. We didn't talk much about me, and we certainly didn’t talk about anything in my life after I turned 22 - he didn't ask and I didn't offer - but we had time to be together, and I got to thank him for all of his effort and hard work.

Before that week I looked back and thought about my father's life, and I tried to understand the stress he must have felt about money, the shame he may have felt at taking charity the years we qualified for government support and the kindness of neighbors, the never-ending fatigue that he must have had so often so deeply in his bones. I thought about how the abuse that he experienced from a member of the Church might have contributed to his extreme rigidity, or his temper, or his emotional paralysis.

And I realized, painfully, that I could have done better. I could have been more mature, more thoughtful, and kinder in my letters; I most assuredly could have connected more often. I could have more often let sleeping dogs lie and not comment on something in a vain and futile attempt to make or score a point.

But there was a context for these actions and reactions, for both of us. If we were petty and churlish, easily offended or bullying -- and we were, both of us, all of those things -- well, we're human. In the end, we didn't act from malice. And, in the end, critically, we made the space -- and took advantage of circumstances -- to arrive at something like détente before he died. And in the end, that's enough; it has to be, but it is.

And at the end, here’s what matters: we did the best we could.
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