Suffer the Children; The Congressional Fund for the Children of Closeted Bi-sexual and Homosexual Republicans

It's always the kids that suffer the most. Nobody thinks about them. Mom, stoic, a smile frozen to her face, bravely standing next to her husband during the press conference, even though racing through her mind is the terrorizing thought "did he at least practice safe sex?"

And the politician is surrounded by his children, proving that he is a man, a virile man, a man firmly planted in the biblical tradition of fruitfulness and multiplication. A fruity and mathematical man.

But what about the children? Do they ever join the congressional junkets to the Caribbean, where their fathers go to frolic friskily? Or to countries where the market for sex is so large, it is calculated into the gross national product? Do they ever get to fly through Minneapolis?

No, the children are left behind. Stuck at boarding schools, reading about their father in the newspapers, as one by one, their friends drop by their dorm rooms, confessing to having had their thigh or butt squeezed on a visit to the house, "which is why I just won't do another sleepover at your house," they say, adding, "nothing to do with you, dude. Your old man just gives me the creeps."

The children suffer.

Well, there is something you can do about it.

By contributing to The Congressional Fund for the Children of Closeted Bi-sexual and Homosexual Republicans, you will make it possible to send these deserving, long suffering kids to a mixed gender camp for two weeks in the summer.

Burdened by the family secrets all their lives, the kids will be able play games in the sunshine, sing around campfires, and most importantly, with the help of qualified professions learn that moral hypocrisy is not hereditary, it is an acquired behaviour. And that social scientists already have identified dozens of "hotspots" where the malady is rampant, and can be avoided. There is a treatment for it, and these suffering children will learn that they are not condemned by biology to live the lives of hypocrisy of their forebears.

We will work with those kids and teach that statistically, the longer you live a lie, the more likely it becomes that it will reach up and bite you in the rear. Or an even more sensitive spot.

Contribute, and ease the suffering inflicted on these children by a father whose adulterous sin is not loving too much, but too many, and not being specific about the gender they chose to lay with. Or get laid by. Or lay. Something like that.

All checks should be made out to The Congressional Fund for the Children of Closeted Bi-sexual and Homosexual Republicans; you may put my name in brackets, I'll see that it goes where it should.

Thank you, on behalf of the kids.

Holding Down the Fort

One result stemming from our wet and cool spring has been the ever-present challenge to entertain the kiddies indoors. My attention span is far too short to consider board games; I was forty before I learned that they weren’t spelled “bored” games. Indoor soccer is incompatible with a houseful of “chotchkies” (a Yiddish word for “fragile junk”). You can only dress the dog up in a “Who Let the Dogs Out” t-shirt so many times before the elusive charm of it wears off. What’s left?

Indoor “forts” are left. Admittedly, outdoor forts are a warm-weather diversion; the indoor variety can be a year-round activity.

I use the word ‘fort’ guardedly. To sidestep becoming aligned one way or the other with our militaristic pre-occupation of these recent days, I revert back to the late 1950’s meaning of the word, which was interchangeable with “hideout”. A hideout was somewhere we went to avoid being hassled by parents, who were forever bothering us about things like lunch and washing our hands. The very essence of a ‘hideout’ was that parents might have suspected where it was, but they didn’t know for sure.

A “hideout” became a fort when our parents discovered where we had built it, and intended to lay siege until we agreed to break for a tuna-fish sandwich and a glass of milk. Who knew about mercury back then; I’ve always felt that my own resistance was a matter of principle and not self-preservation.

Anyway, forts were one of the few remaining cards in my tattered parental miracle deck. And then it rained. And rained. And my wife Julie had some sort of meeting. And it was still raining. The kids, four-year old Sam and seven-year old Lily, kept looking at me with those “Daddy, I’m bored and I can’t entertain myself” eyes. I felt cornered; my resolve buckling.

So I told them to scour the house for blankets, and bring down sundry and un-sundry pillows. I moved the piano chair into the center of the living room, and as the rain beat a martial tune against the windows, I moved a chair from the dining room so that it was back to back with the piano chair. A few artfully arranged blankets, some rubber bands to secure the blankets, and we created a two-room hideout, with a small common area.

The kids were delighted. They spread some pillows inside, each bringing a book to read by flashlight and several trusted toys. As for me, I put the CD player on shuffle, stretched out on the couch, opened a book and sighed. I never read a page.

“You’re on my side!”

“Am not. And you have my toy!”

“Do not! You gave it me!”

“To play with, not to keep. Give it to me!”

I’m something of a connoisseur of pointless arguing, being on the School Committee, so I listened with some interest. The two siblings went on like this for a short while, and I waited anxiously for one or the other to toss out the ‘tie-breaker.’

It was Sam this time.

“Daddy, Lily is sitting on my side!”

Now, there are a number of ways a parent can respond to this sort of dilemma. Some would take down the fort and send the squabblers to their rooms. Some might hand them raincoats and ask them to play in the compost. Still others might find it a teachable moment, and work with them to resolve the conflict peacefully.

Then there is me. I moved five more chairs into the room, pulled comforters out of storage, and expanded their humble fort into a virtual condominium. They each ended up with three rooms, and a small common area. My living room looked like Bed and Bathroom Shop that had exploded, creating a multi-colored panorama of textiles, down, and sheets haphazardly arrayed.

I was pleased. So were the kids. For about fifteen minutes, we were both pleased. Then, they decided to watch thirty minutes of their allotted television time. Arthur trumps the berserk and unfettered creativity of desperate Dad. Happens all the time.

So I was left alone to consider what had transpired. I realized that I had, in a microcosm, built my own little 40B project, my own sprawling uber-development. I had filled all the available space, on speculation. Not for money, but in the hope that my kids would stay entertained… for at least a chapter or two. Something better than money.

Unlike the results of speculative development, though, I was able to clean up, and restore my living room to its original, if cluttered, presentation. And in the den, my kids watched Arthur, subconsciously trusting that there will always be natural places nearby for them to explore, and understand, and experience. I know that probably won’t be the case and that we are literally losing ground every day because of greed and apathy, and a profound loss of communal reverence. Once the land is gone, it is gone; what happens is a sort of modern day alchemy that turns land into gold for a few, creates a municipal burden for the rest, and sheds the natural history of the area, bird by bird, bush by bush, acre by acre.

It’s a lot harder to hold the fort than it used to be, I guess. Still, that sounds like a lousy excuse to give my kids when they ask me these kinds of questions in a few years.

A Mighty Wind

Well, my newly-minted five-year old son Sammy floored me with a question the other day. Usually, I can be pretty unflappable about his relentless quest for knowledge and understanding but this one about knocked me flat.

“Dad,” he asked. “Does God break wind?” That isn’t exactly how he asked me, but you get the idea. After pausing to regain my balance, I responded by telling him that if we were made in the image of God, then I suppose you could say that breaking wind was invented by God. And I might have mentioned something about thunderstorms, I just don’t remember. You can laugh, but how many of you would have done any better?

Sammy has been really exploring the idea of a higher power, and doing so in that delightful combination of seriousness and absurdity so characteristic of fiver year olds. The other day, lugging his birthday-present-new, monogrammed & overstuffed pilot’s case up the stairs, he was calling out for assistance; “help me, God, help me!” Not for Dad, but for God.

He wants to know about God’s family. “Does God have any sisters or brothers?” then he looks at his eight-year bold sister Lily, and I suspect he’s hoping the answer is no. He wants to know some of the specifics of God’s working day. “Is God everywhere at once? Even in Florida? Even at Montessori?”

The wife and I come two different spiritual persuasions. But that doesn’t seem to matter to Sammy, who is really all about understanding what he has in common with God. Do they like the same foods? The same baseball teams (Red Sox and the Marlins)? The same kind of candy?

I think the boy is onto something. Me, I worry that mankind has gone too far around the bend to warrant divine intervention anymore. We kill in the name of God, hate in the name of the higher power. We thank God for the ability to make obscene profits and don’t feel called to share our good fortune with others. We believe that God has made us stewards of the environment, so we turn up the heat like the climate was a global hotpot. We really believe that there is a line drawn in the cosmos by God where the love between two human beings can be parsed and parceled out based on gender and preference. But not Sammy. He knows love when he sees it, and love is what counts to him. I know, because a half-dozen times a day, he grabs me and hugs me and tells me he loves me.

His construct of God allows for the leaving of treasures on the sidewalk for him to find as we walk home from school. Sammy’s God is part buddy, part ever-present, and can be found in the dancing greeting of his dog Rufous when we get home. Sammy knows Rufous is getting a little older, and can conceive of a time when Rufous will “go to God.”

“I will be very sad that day, very sad,” he tells me. He pauses, shaking his head sadly at the thought of the loss. And then, he tugs on my sweater and says “Dad, after that happens, can we get another dog and a hamster?” He doesn’t sweat it; he knows the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh, and can therefore be expected to giveth again. As an adult, I do sweat it, because I never know if at any part of the deal I will deserveth.

Sammy is teaching me about God. He teaches me to find the joy in each new discovery, to find the newness in each experience. He teaches me to listen, to play, to respect the process of learning and growing. Above all, Sammy teaches me about the sanctity of questions, of faith.
And for my wife and I, we have come to realize that Sammy and Lily are both our prayers, and God’s response to our prayers.

So here we are, the 21st century family, all under one roof. Christian and Jew, neo-pagan and Buddhist student, spiritual explorers and meditators, participants in men’s and women’s spirituality groups; trying to find out what the rules are and live them fully.

Did I just hear thunder?

The Scarecrow's Reverie

These are the dog days of summer, which around here often means that there are two dogs serially marking one of Sam’s neglected toys in the backyard. I’m not sure I really understand this aspect of doggie behavior; the two dogs are friends, and they take turns marking the toy.

They each sniff gingerly at the other’s nether areas before taking their turn, as if something could have possibly changed in the last thirty seconds. Four and a half year old Sam, of course, is laughing too much to tell me what they are doing until they have finished.

It is muggy, and hot, and it rains every afternoon, right around the time I have stuffed the car with needed beach supplies and have inserted the key into the ignition. I stare through the rain-splattered windshield, listening to the kids yell in unison “where are we going now, Daddy?” I don’t have the heart to tell them the truth, that I have exhausted all options outside of the house. It is simply too damned hot and muggy for me.

As a kid, I didn’t really experience these kinds of summers, petroleum-fueled and artificially inflamed. My summers started with cool and foggy mornings, and grew warmer gradually, civilly. Later, as a young man noticing the changes taking place in the climate and being more engaged in preserving the environment, I always suspected there would be a special place in hell waiting for those who sustain Global Warming, the ones who torture good science and profit by the misery of others. I’d like to think the head of the beast is in D.C., but I know the tail and rationale extends deep into our culture’s values.

Still, while Nero pumps oil, we must persevere, and that means getting the kids out and exercised. At the recent Homecoming Family Day held at Atkinson Common, we had another one of those “hey listen to what my kid said” moments, which I share with you modestly. Don’t be surprised; if Arnold Schwarznegger can be Governor of California, then I can be modest.

Hungry, Sam and seven and a half year old Lily waited on line at the food table for about forty minutes. The kids came back to the table staffed by my in-laws, the Forneys (peaceful play) with empty hamburger buns and a bag of potato chips in each happy little hand. Sam, our four and a half year old, opened the bag and started nibbling the bun.

For many years, as the only non-meat eater at family barbecues, I would take potato chips and place them between the slices of a bun, sort of a “chip sandwich”. I shared this with Sam, who with the wonderful abandon of childhood immediately created one. Within seconds, he was experiencing the singular wonder of crunching chips embedded in soft, doughy bread. I returned to talking with the grownups.

A few minutes later, there was a tug on my t-shirt. It was Sam, and he beckoned me closer, so I leaned in. “Dad,” he said, mouth brimming with chips and roll, “you’re a genius.”

Well. I beamed. I didn’t tell him that I could put him in touch with many people who would disagree, and didn’t tell him I wasn’t. I didn’t qualify it in any way. I told him that I loved him. And not because he believes my culinary improvisation makes me a Mensa candidate. I did it because he is my son, and I love him; it is what fathers are supposed to do.

He will figure out soon enough where I stand on I.Q. spectrum, or sit. Or even recline sleepily. He’ll learn that there are many different types of smarts, and just as many types of stupids. He will learn, in fact, that a smart can become a stupid pretty quickly, although going the other way happens much less often, and is much more difficult to accomplish.

He’ll learn that being too smart can be a problem; how big a problem being too stupid is always depends on where you are on the food chain. He may learn that those wallowing in the waters of stupidity are often over-represented in political life, and tend to be under-represented in community life. He will learn that as you get older and open your mouth less and your ears more, you can get smarter.

Maybe he will even learn these things: one of the smartest things you can do is love your family. He may learn it is smart to love your community, to ask questions of power, to listen deeply, to respect elders, to respect the land and the water and the air.

All that may come. For now, Sam already knows two important things, that his Dad is a genius, and that it is stupid to throw a basketball at a skunk. The rest is a piece of cake.

My Wish

I have a wish. Wishes are such ephemeral things, here today, gone tomorrow. They have no substance in their larval stage. The length, depth and breadth of them don’t really matter. A wish is a deeply personal thing, so you can keep your judgments to yourself, thank you. My wish is no better than yours, and yours no better than mine, even though they might be separated by a bajillion dollars.

Wishes move outside the dimension of time, or at least the metric of time like the day, or the hour. You can make one anytime, and nobody needs to know, unless you choose to tell. Telling is what heads them off at the pass—it’s the only surefire way I know to drop’em dead in their tracks.

We all have years of practice not telling, of course.

“So what did you wish for,” they all ask, as the smoke from the candles floats lazily towards the ceiling.

“I ain’t saying,” we reply. We are firm in the conviction that any birthday wish, revealed so soon after it has been released, will fall to earth with the velocity of an armored chestnut, nettles and brown icky stuff seeking the nearest body part to strike.

“What was your wish, c’mon, tell,” our sibling says, after the satisfying crack of the wishbone fades into the rich smell of turkey and cranberries and stuffing that clings like lint to the walls of the dining room.

Sometimes we just smile, and don’t respond. Are we smiling because the likelihood of our wish coming true is enhanced by the heft of the turkey bone in our hand, or simply because we have bested our sibling? For once. Or for the fortieth time.

Again, the answer resides in that little secret place where we formulate wishes.

I wonder, though. If we have just made a wish, and then allowed ourselves to indulge in rascally thoughts, is the wish fatally tainted aborning? And what happens to wishes that don’t get answered. Are they recycled? Do they morph into prayers?

And how different really is a prayer from a wish? I suppose a prayer should be a combination of supplication and maybe a little craving of indulgence. Is a prayer a conditional wish?

“Yeah, Spirit who guides us all, I love and honor you. If you love me too, please convince Nancy La Grange to give me her phone number.”

As opposed to a straight, formally structured wish.

“I wish I had Nancy La Grange’s phone number.” There is a slight difference in form, that’s true. But maybe a wish is shorthand for a prayer. Maybe we just assume that a wish knows it is being addressed to some entity greater than ourselves.

But when you cut them both to the core, the little dishonesty of each gleams like a pearl.

We don’t want Nancy La Grange’s phone number to have and to hold in perpetuity. We don’t even want Nancy La Grange’s phone number. We have wished and prayed for Nancy, although we could never admit that. The phone is merely the most socially convenient way of beginning a process of gaining access to Nancy that will ultimately result in, well, gaining ACCESS to Nancy.

And do we really think that the Spirit is going to appear in Nancy’s mother’s prized rose bush, all aflame, and go over the pro’s and con’s of releasing her number to us? No, that isn’t what we really want, even though that is sort of what we prayed for.

What we really want, sans prayer or wish, is to have Nancy say, suddenly and we hope uncharacteristically, to herself or a friend, “I’m going to give my phone number to Melvin Karpowitz, because he has the cutest butt in school. I hope he calls, because I have these urges I can’t control.”

When you really start to think about it, you can see what a slippery slope this is.

Remember what we said about the ethereality of wishes. With no depth, length or breadth, we have no real basis on which to make a judgment regarding the morality of a wish. In the realm of wishiness there is no difference between a Porsche and a bowl of popcorn; you’d have a hard time weighing the relative goodness or badness of the wish. Is it good for a hungry person to wish for a cheeseburger? What if they have no money? What if the cheeseburger they wish for is the one on your plate? What if a person who isn’t hungry wishes for a cheeseburger? Is that bad? And what about the impact of such a wish on your cholesterol? Does that make a wish bad?

And what happens if two people wish for the same thing at the same time? Does that increase the likelihood of it being granted? I know of many prayer circles, where people of deep spirit and genuine faith are convinced that the power of prayers increases exponentially when they are all cast into the universe at the same time. Is it the same with wishes?

I’m not sure. I still remember when Abbie Hoffman gathered 50,000 people at the Pentagon in the sixties to try to levitate it. Aside from two people in the crowd getting spontaneous hernias, the building didn’t move. Much.

You can see that this line of discussion is the equivalent of the angels dancing on the head of a pin contretemps.

So here is my wish.

I want to be on a Rolodex card, sitting on someone’s desk.

No fancy blackberries or hand held PDA’s for me; I want to be in a Rolodex.

I want someone to get on the intercom to their secretary, and say, “Marty, get me Menin, right now.”

They’ll want me because they have a job they know I can do. A problem they can’t solve. They’ll want me because “getting Menin,” means something positive, clearing a logjam, getting something off the ground, pulling the fat out of the fire. They want me because I match what they need.

They want me because something I have to offer is exactly what is missing. And they want me badly enough to reach across their desk, and fly through a Rolodex filled with the cards of insurance brokers from ten years ago, dry cleaners who’ve been out of business for fifteen years, the deli that stopped delivering last year.

And there I will be, the card still as clean and crisp as the day they put it in, a simple name and phone number, unused, waiting patiently for me to make this wish.

The Family Bed

Morning in our household is something of a movable feast. Sometimes it happens at 2:30 AM, sometimes at 4:00 AM, sometimes when the sun rises. When I was younger, the early morning was mine; I claimed it with vigor and confidence. I’d get up and run the dark streets of this city, I’d write, I’d watch old horror movies and listen to music. I’d toast the sunrise with a cup of tea.

Now, most early mornings I roll over and look into the sleeping face of Sammy, our four-year old. Often next to him is his seven-year old sister Lily, and next to her is Julie, my wife. If she and I want to whisper things to one another, given the crowd, we need to use a cell phone. Somewhere, stretched across the many Menin limbs, is Rufous the wonder pup. Stuffed animals and small plastic figures with sharp points litter the blankets. Often, I have no recollection of when the wave of immigration has occurred; it is just that nightly magic, with kids appearing at all hours in search of security and snuggles.

I don’t dare wake the little ones; my side of the family harbors surly, not-morning people. A family story that has taken on legend involves my brother Glenn, who was on a family vacation in Florida with some of our younger cousins. One of them, Bertie, was a teenager with a narsty streak who was eventually expelled from a college for tossing parachute-wearing mice from a fourteen-story dorm roof.

He decided to wake Glenn up early one morning (10 AM) by pouring cold water on his face. My brother grabbed the offending relative and suspended him by his ankles from the motel balcony until cousin Bertie nearly fainted. Knowing the danger coiled in their genes, I let the little ones sleep on.

As we pass the night, I will often have bizarre little conversations with the kids. At 3 AM one morning, Sammy tugged on my beard and asked me to read him a story. I started reaching for a book. In the darkness. Instinct. And then the little guy fell back to sleep, even after I turned the light on. So, I read the book myself. It was very exciting, about fire engines, and I found it difficult to get back to sleep, I was so jazzed.

Sometimes, they will need a refilled glass of water. This one I'm always hesitant about, knowing that my little darling may very well continue to nap next to me for several more hours. Lily and Sam have never had any nocturnal problems of this particular nature, but I think I might have as a child, and I am very susceptible to influence.

This ersatz family bed can be little disorienting. I’ve woken up to find Sam sleeping sweetly, holding tightly onto my nose or ear. I am then faced with the parental dilemma. Do I remove his hand, and risk waking him up? Or do I wait, hoping that he will do it himself, while I run the risk that for the better part of the morning, my nose will bear the imprint of his fingers? Vanity or sanity? Luckily, while I am agonizing over the decision, I usually fall back asleep, and trust to gentle nature. I can use the extra sleep, anyway.

Lily is moving into the age of dental eruption. I wonder how this will affect her nocturnal pilgrimages to our room. She will have to face a logistical problem- will the tooth fairy still ante up if her tooth is in one room, and Lily is napping in another?

I suppose I should have seen this phase coming. Perhaps the progeny were just warming us up with their sly little Christmas strategy of wandering into our room every forty-five minutes on Christmas Eve, wondering aloud if it was time yet.

Well, it’s a scary old world out there right now. I’ve figured out that if the kids sleep easier, so do I. If on occasion they need a security recharge by listening to Daddy snore up close, or curling up next to Rufous the wonder pup in our room, so be it. Julie and I can catch up on lost sleep later. Like twenty years from now. And I know things will change this summer, if we can afford to put an air conditioner into Lily’s room. Then it will probably be Daddy, knocking lightly, sleeping bag in hand, looking for some space on the floor.

So for now here we are, huddled together some nights like Eskimos on the chilly coast of New England. Is it a three dog, or a four dog night? Sometimes, the whole pack just climbs under the covers. I think I've spotted the neighbor's kid, as well as that German Shepherd from up the street.

As the kids grow, these moments, when they are utterly safe from the dangers of the world and I know exactly where they are, will become much less frequent. For now though, I can listen to the family snore softly- all right, the truth is I’ve woken myself up by snoring loudly, and they are breathing softly in the night. The dog snores too, though. Sometimes. And passes gas.