War, sex, kids, cops, baby beds and Islam

If that title is not random enough for you, allow me to explain. This will have to be a stream of consciousness post tonight, because I feel over-stimulated. At times like this, even though I want to write, I must start with no clear idea where this is going.

I picked up a baby crib tonight for my grandson, because my daughter is in her final trimester. Our mutual friends have two young daughters, both cute as can be, one with dark brown eyes and one with bright blue eyes. Both parents are attentive. These were the first really young kids I've seen lately and I felt drawn to them.

I realized something. Even though I never gave much thought to being a parent (it just never occurred to me as something I particularly wanted), I came to know it is what the women I loved wanted, badly. And so it gave me a lot of pleasure to help make that happen.

But from the start, I was not much suited to be a father, really. At the age of 29, when my first child showed up, I was probably the emotional equivalent of a young teenager. Part of my problem was I was mainly brain; I approached life from a cerebral place, and had not yet worked out how to integrate any of my physical needs with my over-active imagination.

Worse, I did not yet even have a language for emotions; if you'd told me that the things we call "feelings" mattered, I would have (privately) dismissed you as a fool. How could something as ambiguous as a feeling have any validity whatsoever?

I didn't think so.

But I also was hopelessly naive and inexperienced. I'd married my first sweetheart on the day we graduated from college. I did notice that my knees had quaked uncontrollably during our marriage ceremony, but I had nowhere enough self-knowledge to understand why.

Thoughtlessly, I repeated the patterns of my father in my youthful marriage. I never even thought about it; I just did as I'd seen him do. Although my father was an inherently gentle man, he somehow knew that was not how he was supposed to be, so I believe he fought against his own nature almost all of his life.

He certainly feared any question of his own masculinity, which is very sad, because he was naturally drawn not to the world of manly men (locker rooms, the Army, power) but the more subtle worlds of art, music, and teaching. I came to think over the decades that he fought all of this as hard as he could, letting out his natural impulses only in private moments.

He always wanted the world to see him as he actually was; in fact, he craved that attention, but he never got it. The world pressed in on him. His Dad died when he was ten. He was the youngest child. His older siblings disappeared across the border to America. He and his Mom auctioned off all the farm implements and moved into an apartment in "town," which was London, Ontario.

Soon, the two of them joined the flood of "nickel immigrants" grabbing the ferry across the river from Windsor to Detroit.

He held what are (almost) unimaginable jobs -- at the notorious River Rouge factory, Detroit's answer to the night flames of Gary, Indiana. He worked in a paint factory. Back to the auto plants. Finally, the onset World War Two put an end to this working class nightmare that had ended The Great Depression, and he enlisted as a fighter pilot in training.

But he washed out of that for "psychological reasons." He had met and married my mother and adopted my older sister by this time. As he told me, by the age of 26 he didn't have enough of a "killer instinct," to be a successful war pilot. He said it was because of his wife and daughter back home, but I knew better.

It was his essential nature to not kill and not die needlessly. Though his formal schooling ended with graduating high school at age 16, he was way too smart to fall for the lines that the old-man empire builders have employed for generations to exploit youthful hormones to conquer other nations.

My Dad became a stenographer instead, which led to his being present at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, but that is another story.

Suffice it to say that since he was my main male role model, and I was his main male witness, I knew things about my dad that he never would have been able to admit about himself to anyone else. I have come to think of these qualities as his beautiful side.

Like all young people, however, he was not my preoccupation -- I was. "Me, myself, and I," is how he would have put it. Compared to him, I was easily an order of magnitude more attracted to the arts and music and self-revelation. It has taken a long time to work all of this out, and find the socially optimal way of presenting myself to the world, but each generation has to do the best that it can. I never, ever had any sense I was a "normal" man, as our culture presents that stereotype to be, nor do I today.

However, finally letting those differences out in my 40s and 50s has been the key to the relationships I have developed at this stage of my life. I can't help but wonder how my life would have been different had I started recognizing and expressing my emotions at, say, age 20, instead of at age 40...

***

Having children, as I've said, was never my idea. But having children is what ultimately provoked me to discover my emotional side. Had I been more clued into myself, I would have been able to explain my propensity to fall in love. I don't mean lust, I mean love.

But since I headlined sex in this post, let me say, briefly, that this is and has been my favorite exercise for all time. My oldest son walked in on his Mom and I once when he was probably too young to now remember. But his concern was that I was "hurting" her. We assured him I most certainly was not.

I've loved sleeping with every girlfriend I've had. It makes me sad to read about this new supposed disease, ED, but I can't help but wonder if this isn't what happens when a man is inserting himself somewhere his heart doesn't want to be? I don't want to offend anyone, but I strongly suspect the problem lies elsewhere than in the organ, and I doubt any little blue pill will fix that!

Anyway, maybe when I grow old, I'll find out what that is all about; so far, that is not a state I have experienced.

***

Do you know why babies like me? Because I am animated when I talk. I speak in paragraphs and I make lots of gestures. My eyes sparkle.

I don't ever speak down to babies. I talk to them in the same way I am talking to you. Why condescend and make foolish noises when the eyes you are gazing into are every bit as intelligent as your own?

I don't get it. And I really don't get people who claim they don't like kids. I think they are kidding themselves. The greatest privilege of aging is to still be able to affect the young ones.

They, not you and I, will carry this life, this society, this language, this emotional narrative forward. Ignoring children is tantamount to saying you don't think you are part of history.

And that, my friends, would be the saddest statement of low self-esteem you could ever choose to make.

***
Addendums:

* I am reading Karen Armstrong’s excellent “History of Islam” for my book club.

* The campus police shot a UCLA student tonight with a taser because he couldn’t produce his ID: LINK-- http://www.dailybruin.com/news/articles.asp?id=38958.

Stay tuned, this may undue the Patriot Act, eventually, once the Democrats take control of the hearings process in Congress.

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