Thunderstruck

Big thunderstorms today, which means my son A.J. spent half the day walking around the house with his hands over his ears. I can’t blame him. Weather makes me anxious, too.

The other half of the day he spent whaling on a new inflatable Sponge Bob punching bag. He punched it. He kicked it. He sat on it and pummeled it. He laughed the whole time and kept asking me to come watch him.

Then the thunder would return and his hands would go back over his ears.

Fear and anxiety punctuated by episodes of explosive aggression. He is an American male.

What really bothered him was having to leave the house with my wife for a 20-minute drive to the next town over.

“I don’t think we should go in the car,” he said, as thunder rattled our windows.

“Why not?”

“Because metal conducts electricity.”

“We’ll be fine,” my wife said. “The rubber wheels will take care of that.”

That seemed to satisfy him. He flipped his hood up and ran out into the downpour to get into to the car.

House Anxiety

This morning, while we looked through the paper and had breakfast, my wife and I talked about what we’ve talked about most mornings for the last few weeks. Our downspouts.

Actually, I was the only one talking about our downspouts. My wife, bless her, just listened patiently and only rolled her eyes once or twice.

I’ve developed a little bit of an obsession with our downspouts over the past few weeks. It was a brutal February where we live—long stretches of below-zero cold, some big snowstorms, and in general, there was a feeling of being under siege. Winter always makes me a little crazy, but this year my anxieties rose to a whole new level. My downspout obsession is a good example. One of our downspouts froze solid for a stretch of about seven feet and stayed that way for a few really cold weeks. The seams of the downspout were splitting and water seeping out and freezing again and big icicles running down the house. I had never seen such a thing happen before, and I was pretty sure it was a bad thing. In fact, as long as I had that big block of ice attached to the back of my house, I really couldn’t bring myself to believe that my world was a safe one. Something had to be done. I ended up detaching the downspout from the gutter and using a board to direct the meltwater away from the house. It worked pretty well, but as my wife can tell you, I still went out back to check on the arrangement approximately hourly.

Like I said, I was developing a little bit of an obsession.

You have to understand that home repairs seldom seem like simply home repairs to me. They often seem more like a kind of threat to my family.

We moved into this house, our first house, not long after my son was born, so that the new house and the new family seemed all part of the same momentous and life-altering event. Like most novice parents and homeowners, I was overwrought and self-absorbed and got way too wrapped up in my domestic world. Our house started to seem like the very substance, the manifestation of the life our family was trying to build together. This was going to be the place where we watched our boy take his first steps. This was going to be where we romped in the yard and dozed on the porch. This was going to be the perfect place to launch our new lives.

Put that kind of ridiculous burden on a house and of course it’s going to start faltering. And when things start needing fixing, that registers for me as some kind of test. And so what for most people might be ordinary house trouble--the kind of thing you take care of in a few spare hours, or call someone to take care of for you--ends up being a source of anxiety for me, having to do with my ability to protect my family.

When the thaw finally came, about 18 inches of snow started running off our roof and down the gutters. The downspouts were thawing, too, but they were dumping this flood of water in places that didn’t want any more water. And so I started messing around with the downspouts again, rigging up some extensions and redirecting things to move the water away from the house.

If your eyes are glazing over as I tell this downspout story, you can probably appreciate what my wife has been through over the last few weeks, watching me act out my downspout obsession and then having to listen to me explain why my latest solution was a brilliant piece of engineering.

The good news is that the downspouts are working perfectly now and the ground is firming up and everything seems to be getting back to normal. The family is safe.

Except last night, the furnace sounded kind of funny.

The Overinvolved Father

The Christian Science Monitor has this news of my struggle with Overinvolved Dad Syndrome.

Men Without Women

My wife spent the last four days in Pittsburgh at a conference, which left A.J. and me on our own. We’ve been through these father-son weekends before, and I always think it’s going to be a perfect binge of takeout pizza, trips to the arcade and repeat viewings of SpongeBob. But something always comes up that somehow sinks the plan. I think the first time A.J. and I were on our own, he spent the entire weekend on the couch with a fever. I can still recall how badly that weekend shook my confidence as a parent. I became convinced that I was going to give the child the wrong cold medicine or something.

This last weekend went much better. We skated, we went to Dunkin’ Donuts, we had lunch at the diner, we went to the hardware store. We went to the fun fair at A.J.’s school, where his prowess at carnival games won him a whoopee cushion. He then spent the remainder of the weekend blowing up and sitting on the thing, then laughing hysterically.

On Saturday, he played in his first all-star basketball game, which, as a special occasion, featured pre-game introductions of the starting lineups. (A.J. was introduced as “a 6-7 forward from Loyola University.”) I’m pretty sure he appreciated the honor and enjoyed the spectacle of the whole thing, but all he kept talking about was the free popcorn after the game.

That night he asked me if I missed Mommy as much as he did. I told him I missed her a ton. He thought about it and said, “I miss her two tons. And I don’t miss you at all, because you’re right here.”

Right there was a very good place to be.

Junior Scientist

My son A.J., who is five and in kindergarten, just completed his first science fair and earned his first Achievement in Science certificate. It’s on display in his room now. On the certificate are drawings of a Bunsen burner, a test tube and a frog--the three icons of scientific inquiry.

I had thought that science fairs were the kind of thing you started doing in, say, fifth grade. But I’m still getting used to this Age of Accelerated Development, where kids get early starts at everything. Around here, kids start playing soccer at 4, t-ball at 5 and by the time they’re in kindergarten, they’re wearing their Pee Wee Football jerseys to school on Fridays, just like the high school jocks. (The little girls wear their cheerleading outfits.)

Something in me wants to be alarmed by this accelerated pace, but still we’ve dived right in along with everybody else. We’ve signed A.J. up for most of the sports, music, and other extracurricular activities that seem to be standard fare among his tyke rat pack. And, the thing is, just about without exception, he has loved them all. He played in a basketball league for five-year-olds this winter, and at season’s start I was convinced that this was a bad idea. I was sure that neither A.J. nor any other five-year-old was ready to play a game of full-court basketball without breaking down into hysterics after two minutes. And that’s to say nothing of the likelihood of anybody being able to dribble, pass or shoot. But as it turned out, by the end of the season, A.J.’s team was looking like, well, a team. They were passing the ball to each other, pulling for each other, bumping fists whenever someone scored. And A.J. had a blast. When he saw the clock and scoreboard at his first game, such an expression of awe came over his face, you would have thought he had just walked onto the floor of Madison Square Garden. It was as if he had finally reached the big time, the stage that he had always longed to play on.

He was pretty excited about the science fair, too. He and his mother worked up an experiment that would test how much our sense of smell affects our taste. Each subject had to wear a blindfold, hold his nose and try to guess what flavor Lifesavers candy he was given. I think the main finding of the project was that smell played a critical part in the ability to taste; but really what we learned was that five-year-olds will willingly submit themselves to experiments again and again as long as they are given handfuls of candy.

The image that stays with me from the science fair is of a grade-school gym packed with little kids wearing lab coats, goggles and junior scientist badges. They all looked a little like Dr. Frink from “The Simpsons.”

Rereading The Moviegoer

To celebrate Fat Tuesday, here’s an excerpt from Walker Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer, set in New Orleans during the week leading up to Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday.

Here’s Percy’s hero, the suburban stockbroker Binx Bolling, describing his quiet life.

In the evenings I usually watch television or go to the movies. Weekends I often spend on the Gulf Coast. Our neighborhood movie theater in Gentilly has permanent lettering on the front of the marquee reading: Where Happiness Costs So Little. The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

Writing in The New York Review of Books in 2005, Joyce Carol Oates identified Binx as one of a string of solitary, cool, self-absorbed males in American fiction—other examples including Saul Bellow’s Joseph from Dangling Man, and the narrator of Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision. Oates’ essay was perceptive, but I thought she was a little hard on Binx, playing up his pathology but failing to give him credit for at least being a little charming and acidly funny in his alienation. But then, I’ve been a Binx fan since I first read the Moviegoer for an English class in college. (20th Century American Fiction. On the syllabus, I think The Moviegoer came right after Invisible Man and right before Armies of the Night.)

In fact, I’ve been re-reading The Moviegoer annually at Mardi Gras ever since that first reading in college. I usually try to time my reading to coincide the action of the novel—beginning on the Wednesday before Mardi Gras and ending on Ash Wednesday. That’s just the kind of geeky lit-stunt this novel seems to inspire. Binx would call it a “repetition,” which he defines as “the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.”

That’s the kind of the thing that used to have me furiously scribbling notes to myself in the margins of one of my four copies of the novel.

I remember identifying intensely with Binx when I read first read The Moviegoer. His ironic withdrawal seemed the ideal stance for the smart young man to adopt, and I know I spent a lot of time trying to be as cool and sardonic as Binx.

I probably just succeeded in seeming confused.

Locations

Let’s start with a confession. I spend a lot of time in public libraries.

I like libraries, but that’s not something I would ordinarily brag about. Being a library regular is not the sort of thing people bring up on, say, a first date. There is something a little musty about public libraries, a little creepy. The books have all those mysterious old stains on them, and the periodicals room is full of dozing senior citizens. And then there’s the lonely guys cruising the stacks, muttering to themselves.

Still, I keep coming back. I depend on libraries for my work, and to feed my addiction to magazines and out-of-town newspapers. And I like to think of my time in the periodicals room as good training for my approaching old age.

But mostly I keep going to libraries because they’re open. I work out of my home, but I have been making an effort lately, for my sake and for my wife’s sake, to find other places to work. (The assumption here is that there is such a thing as too much togetherness.)

Getting out of the house is no problem when I have meetings and appointments and interviews to do, but some days I just need to sit somewhere and get my assignments written. Today is one of those days. And out here in the remote suburbs, there just aren't that many places that seem like a good place to spend a few hours with a laptop. I sometimes go to a local coffee house, but I feel a little conspicuous there—often I’m the only guy typing away at a laptop. Often the only guy at all, in fact. I’ll try hotel lobbies, too, though they have their own problems.

So I end up at the library. It’s a good place to work. There’s one near my house with a couple of good fireplaces, a nice view of some woods and some small study rooms that I sometimes use as a temporary office.

But still, it’s a library, with everything that implies. And I wonder if there isn’t part of me that slightly undervalues my work because it’s done not in an office building or a conference room, but in a public library.

This is one of the dilemmas of being self-employed and working at home. Each day you have to resolve the question of where to physically situate yourself. You have to figure out where you belong.

I love working on my own and I consider myself unpeakably lucky not to have to go into an office every day. And, yes, it's ridiculous to complain about working in a comfortable home, surrounded by a loving family. But here's the thing: As a male, I’m not sure that I’ll ever feel entirely at home in the domestic world. There’s always this sense that I’m an interloper in my wife’s world, in my kid’s world. I work at home, but I don’t quite feel like I belong at home.

Social scientists talk about kids needing a “third place.” Not home, not school, but another safe place to go be a kid.

What I need is a first place.