Half Cleveland Dad

Winter morning commute

This is the interesting part of my morning commute.

It's great here in the snow.  Grimy, stark motion below; above, an ambient, soft, winter grey.

One morning a storm was clearing, moving north.  On the right, an intense winter sun poured horizontal light through a small cataract of blue sky, but to my left, it was still swirling night.  Ahead, the city was sharp and bright against the black sky, and over the lake gulls glinted like tumbling gold.

 

Camo Jacket

Walking around in a big city, I’d be on the street with everyone else in the city.  In a small city, like Cleveland, sometimes it’s just me and some bums.

First of all, I don’t know how to refer to these folks spending all day out on the street.  It seems presumptuous to call them “homeless”; and “street people” is awfully categorical.  So, without much more consideration, I've reached for an out-dated term, and taken up “bums.” 

I’ve resisted writing about bums here because I hadn’t been able to make the tie-in to being Half Cleveland Dad, but every time I sit down nowadays I think about them, and I think of Sweet Potato, and our world, and the future, and our place embedded in the endless brilliant continuum of suffering pulsing through the rich sticky biomass slathered all over the whole hopeless surface of our hopeless earth. 

A few times a week I used to see a guy in a cotton camo jacket.  He had a particular limp, in which his left leg would describe an outward, circular stride.  Stomp swing-out, stomp swing-out.  He would get a bowl of cereal from the Salvation Army truck across Superior Avenue from the Renaissance Hotel, then take his jaunty, swinging strut over the bridge spanning the Cuyahoga River, to St. Malachi or West Side Catholic.  We did the “all right” nodding thing for a couple of years; then began exchanging morning salutations.  At some point we addressed each other as “brother man,” which led to greetings that involved something of a hug, like politicians do before a debate.  I do not know his name.  In the early summer I saw him at lunchtime, in the library garden, where he declined to share my lunch.  He looked like he’d just put his lunch into his arm.  I missed him for a couple months, but then he overlapped my schedule again.  He looked about 30 pounds thinner, with spit in his beard, and an unfocused fear in his eyes, like he’d had a stroke.  When we did whatever that tripartite handshake is called, soul-shake or whatever, he held my hand for a while, like an old man needing to get steady and take a breather.  The last time I saw him he was standing on the sidewalk, facing a parking lot fence, stiff and drooling, pants at his calves, wet foul shit down his leg. 

Now the hard weather’s come in, and the men are keeping their faces down on their daily, migratory drift over the bridge.

More fall

For leaves, fall this year was particularly beautiful.  I’m not quite sure how to write about leaves; I’m not that much of a nature guy, and I haven’t thought about it much before.  The colors were particularly intense, and the sky was soft enough to let them glow, and the weather was mild enough not to blow all the leaves off right away.  One day we drove past an orange tree (not an orange tree), and Sweet Potato said wow!  ...  I was talking with a Burmese man who’s learning English.  He said, autumn.  I said, yes this is autumn.  He said, beautiful.  ...  In the car you notice that the leaves are a little different in different places, maybe because someplace gets more sun or a wetter breeze or something, who knows, but you notice it along I-77 or near the zoo.  And you notice that it changes noticably, over a couple of days; leaf peak is quicker than I had thought; its contour passes over the landscape like a slow wave.

Sweet Potato’s been collecting natural objects all fall:  rocks, sticks, leaves, berries.  Acorns.  The back seat of our car makes me think of a raccoon’s nest. 

Beeb the Mom’s been quiet and steady and her mellow beauty seems to be growing richer.  She knits and we watch movies and read books we check out from the library. 

I’m busy with work and sometimes when I'm by myself I wonder if I'm acting like a dick.  I guess I could ask around.

Dawdling

In the old days we knew when we were supposed to be going somewhere because my dad would be out in the driveway revving the car for twenty minutes before my sister, my brother, and I finished going potty and having some water and getting our things and getting our hair combed and whatever else was supposedly appropriate to that particular excursion.  He seemed to take it personally when we failed to respect some deadline or schedule, and responded by creating anxiety all around.  I’m kind of like that, too -- I tend to schedule and do things on time, rarely suppressing a sneer for the tardy (sorry, Beeb) -- but my poor dad could have saved himself a bunch of teeth-gnashing and kiddo-whining if he’d taken two seconds to look at how old we were around that time, which was probably, like, three, six, and eight. 

 

I don’t suppose I was different from other kids in that I dawdled for pleasure and from curiosity.  I liked to do things like watch bugs, throw rocks, kick cans, mix foods together, read books, and draw.  Sweet Potato’s no different, either.  She likes to go up and down (and up and down) stairs and ramps, pick flowers, smash things, watch bugs, walk on grass and grates, and stomp puddles.  Her dawdling was driving me a little crazy until I remembered my dad and decided to try being a dawdle-watcher, or a dawdle-enabler.  Recently, for instance, we made the half-mile walk to the market to pick up some groceries; it took something close to two hours and twenty minutes.  Frankly, it was still driving me a little crazy:  if I'd had five bucks in my pocket at the two hour mark we would have dawdled into a bar for one of us to take an elixir for paternal rectification. 

 

Dawdling is an expansive pleasure, though, isn’t it?  It’s a way of taking the world as it is, without narrowing it.  Your pleasure conforms to the pace of the world, and you just try to feel them moving together. 

 

I still love dawdling, and the funny thing is, my dad’s a dawdler at heart, too.  He and I spent a few days together in Chicago recently, just hanging around, letting naptime and snacks set our schedule, talking about family and fiber supplements.  It was like taking more than two hours to go to the market, but including the stop at the bar.  We had the nicest time ever, and I've never felt closer to him. 

The Obvious

We think about how our parents shape us; we worry about how we shape our children.  But how about how our children shape us?

 

I always wanted to be a dad, but it took longer than I initially imagined.  I think I assumed that it would just happen, but by the time I was able to marry Beeb I had already crossed that certain point of maturation which might be defined by an inclination to roll over and fall asleep before sex, or the ability to discuss fiber supplements; and when we had Sweet Potato, I think I was nearly the age of some of my grandparents when I was born. 

 

So I felt a kind of relief at the chance to be Sweet Potato’s dad.  It meant (and I think still means) having the opportunity to have a particular kind of love, a love I always thought I wanted, or rather, thought I wanted to give; it was the shape of a strategic piece to my lifelong sense of being a person.  Sweet Potato catalyzes my dad-ness.  As she grows she shapes my love for her, and my love for her is also a big part of my own idea of who I am.  I’m a different person by being Sweet Potato’s dad.

 

One of the nice things about being middle-aged fertility-assisted parents is that we don’t worry too much about having to shaping ourselves at the same time we worry about shaping old Sweet Potato.  We don’t try to defend ourselves against the way that she shapes us; we are not inclined to compete with her for the force she has over us, maybe because we can tell it’s the force of our own love that we’ve missed for so long.

 

***

 

While drafting this post I came across an NYT blog post about a study on the particular psychological stress incurred by parents of autistic children.  The researcher concluded that the extra stress came not from the “hard work of parenting,” but also “from the behavior side.”  The comments from readers were moving: 

 

“[I]t is that he can’t interact, but never the less, the most stressful early days (when he was 3-4 years) were the worst because I was with him and loved him so much but being with him was like being alone in a room. I wanted him to look at me or interact with me so much and he wouldn’t. He couldn’t.”

 

“[H]aving a child completely disconnected from you, your family, as well as the world, combined with living in a home where life is unpredictable from one moment to the next is extremely stressful.”

 

“It’s as if all the love, the concern, the caring, the fear, the effort, the heartbreak … it all goes into an abyss.”

 

These parents are shaped by their love for their children, too. 

 

The comedic gap between the clueless researcher and the straight shots from the comments also reminded me of something I once heard attributed to Angelo Dundee, the legendary boxing trainer.  Dundee was telling a reporter that fighters go into the ring scared.  The reporter expressed some surprise.  What would these boxers, who are big tough guys trained to fight -- what would they be afraid of?  Dundee gave her a funny look: They’re scared of having the shit beat out of them!  It reminds me to stay in touch with the obvious.