Ping Pong

Michael had just beat Tom: thin, white-haired, sweet-spirited. They had returned to the half-circle of chairs near the fire pit discussing their game. 

“What sport?” I asked. 

“Ping pong,” Michael said. “You play?” 

I do. 

“Want to play a game?” 

I did. 

We set off, leaving the fire pit and the patio and the indefatigably stick-chasing German shepherd, Susan, past the fresh-spring pond on the property’s southern border to where a table stood amid clouds of mosquitoes. The table, flecked with tree detritus and insect wings, was perched on a mildly sloping patch of muddy lawn fronting a narrow street a few miles north of Route 28. Guests flowed naturally from the street to the patio and fire pit near the kitchen door, past the outdoor shower and north-facing octagonal wing with its first-floor bathroom crammed with paintings and paint cans and cartons and sharp-edged metal advertisements for departed circuses and brands of soda pop and a walnut roll-top desk and a wheeled walnut slat-backed office chair which held the toilet paper roll and with uncurtained windows through which patio denizens could peer and with a second-floor I didn’t see -- the master bedroom, I’d guess. If the house had a front door I never saw it. 

“World’s greatest bathroom,” I said to Jon: tall, with wide eyes and a sharp nose that reminded me of middle-aged Philip Roth and thinning hair curling sloppily down his neck and a host’s way of placidly affirming all his guests said. 

“Come use it any time,” Jon said. 

“I might,” I said. “It’s worth the trip.” 

Michael and I warmed up, he lobbing shots with an underhanded waist-level flick. A vulnerable backhand, I guessed. Our pace quickened. He could hit but showed no evidence of being able to slam.

We started. I made mistakes, acclimatizing. He made mistakes, too. I kept score out loud. We talked: California, San Francisco, the Central Valley, my childhood home. I edged ahead. His serve. 

“Nine-six,” Michael said.  

“Six-nine,” I said. “I’m up.”

“I had seven,” he said.

“No,” I said. “It was 8-6, and you hit into the net.” 

“Right,” he said. “Nine-six.” 

“Six-nine,” I said. “It’s your serve.” 

“Right,” he said. “Too much wine. Too much pot.” 

“I get it,” I said. “I just got here.”

We talked less. I kept score. I started to hit the ball where I wanted. 

“Twelve-seventeen? Really?” he asked. He blew out his cheeks. I won the next point, then the next two. He won three. I closed it out. 

“You’re good,” he said. “You’re the best I’ve played today.”

“Let’s go again,” I said. “Switch sides.” 

“I’m pretty tired,” he said. “OK.” 

I asked questions: his seven grammar schools in three years, back and forth, Minnesota, France, Minnesota, France. Our mutual love of Montreal. His daughter graduating from college, maybe McGill? A joint degree in something: human engineering? My game got sharper, his fell apart. I ended with a couple of forehand slams: 21-3. 

“Wow,” he said. “I’m done.” 

We walked back to the fire pit. 

“You beat Michael?” someone asked. “21-3?”

“The first game was close,” I said.

“If you beat Michael, you’re the king,” someone said. 

“I’ve had too much to drink,” Michael said. 

“Have you played a lot?” someone asked. 

Our house in Stockton had a table we unfolded on the back patio. My father played us left-handed until we beat him once; then he switched to his right hand. By the time I was 12 I could consistently beat him and my brother, four years older. 

“In high school we went to my brother’s friend’s house,” I said. “We’d smoke pot and drink beer and play for hours. He always had on Bob Marley and Little Feat. Rastaman vibrations. If you’ll be my dixie chicken, I’ll be your Tennessee lamb.”

“I like that,” said Chris. Chris, who made art of some kind, had a black cowboy hat, a shaven head, and a handlebar mustache curled with precision. “I’ll be your Tennessee lamb.” 

Peter asked, “Have you ever beaten me?” 

I laughed. I had come with Peter, my friend of 30-odd years. The hosts, Becky and Jon, knew Riley, Peter’s partner of six months. Riley had recently moved in with Peter. This weekend was partly about me getting to know Riley. I liked him. Riley had convinced me to ignore pending obligations and stay for the party: “You’ll have fun. Very cool people. A lot of artists, people doing interesting things. Kids running around. Wine, beer, pot. Good food. Very relaxed. Come.” 

Peter can beat me at Scrabble at least half the time. He’s stronger; we wrestled once, in college, to my humiliation. We’ve never played ping pong. 

“I’m sure I’ve never beaten you,” I said. “Should I try?”

At the table, a father (Brad? Tall, wispy beard, relaxed vibe) was playing his teenaged daughter. We strolled back to the pond, where Peter joined Riley with a bucket of soap and a rope contraption making impressively large bubbles. I chatted -- about journalism, the inescapable Trump -- with another soft-voiced man and a spirited French woman (not Valerie -- Valere?). Valere was with Michael. The party’s heterosexual component was all soft-spoken middle-aged men and their more vivacious partners.

Brad lost to his daughter, who didn’t want to play a stranger. Peter and I began knocking it around. Play intensified. I had forgotten the depth of his competitive spirit. He won a string of rallies. “Let’s play a game,” I said. It was close for a while, then I pulled away: 21-13, or something. 

We went back to the fire pit. A half-dozen kids from 9 to 14 sat on the ground making S’mores. 

“I kicked his ass,” Peter said. 

“Really?” someone asked. Peter shook his head.

A man (Alan? Maybe from the Pacific islands? A broad face, punctuated with thick black-framed glasses) said he’d lost to Michael but that Michael had already played several games. 

“Exactly,” Peter said, in mock dudgeon. “Totally unfair. You can’t come in cold and win under those conditions.” 

“Plus I was on the low side.” 

“Don’t forget the cross breeze,” I said. “The way the light was glinting off the pond. And the mosquitoes are way worse on the far end.” 

Peter laughed. Alan smiled thinly.

Dinner: pulled pork, fresh bread, cheeses, a couple of potato salads, green salad, carrot salad. I was ravenous. The pork was terrific. 

Riley introduced Peter and me to our co-host Becky: raven hair flecked with grey, dark eyes attractively lined, no makeup, whiskey voice. She was a costume designer. She and Chris had a space (not exactly a gallery, not exactly a performance space) in the East Village whose name I was expected to recognize, where Riley had shown up and instantly connected with both. Everything with Riley was contingent, serendipitous. He had done work in their space, maybe painting. Maybe he lived there. I couldn’t figure out anything. 

“I make commercials for money,” Becky said. “Everything else I do for other reasons.” 

“For art,” I suggested.

“For love,” Riley said. 

Becky had a great laugh. I decided she would be relaxed but brook no bullshit: exactly the energy I sought. I decided to wander before my need became too naked.

I played another game against another tall, calm male (Richard?). It wasn’t close. 

The late May sky, overcast all day, darkened. Chris’s partner, Anthony, roamed the grounds barefoot picking up kindling to stoke the fire. Desserts: a chocolate torte, Becky’s pineapple-upside-down cake. 

“My dad’s favorite,” I said. “This is amazing.” 

“Caramelized fruit and cake,” Becky said. “The perfect dessert.” 

I found Peter and Riley inside, Peter lying on a pillowed window bench looking beat. I decided to take the 8 o’clock bus from Phoenicia. We could leave at 7:40, Jon said. I decided to use Peter’s one-hitter for the road and went searching for a lighter.

I didn’t want to ask anyone but had no choice. On the patio, in a group of five men on two chaise lounges, Chris handed me a heavy silver lighter studded with turquoise and red stones I couldn’t identify. The one-hitter was tiny, the flame near my eyes. I focused, inhaled. The one-hitter was awkward; should I offer it?

“You beat Michael,” said Anthony, languid on a lounge chair with Tom. 

“I think he was high,” I said. 

Sitting beside Chris, Michael -- had he been there the whole time? -- said, “I get tired more easily. I’m older. I’ve had to focus a lot at work -- on the computer, but focusing for hours, where I can’t fuck around. I’ll be glad when this job is over.” 

The wind shifted, blowing wood smoke. The pause was awkward maybe only in my head. I asked what Michael did but got distracted by how the etched lines around his mouth moved in concert with those between his brows. His affect was less exhaustion than anger.

The party fringes stirred. A couple of nice men came to hug goodbye. 

“I have to take off,” I said. 

Chris said quietly, “Can I have my lighter back?” 

As I hastened Anthony said, “Your precious lighter!” 

Chris had inherited it from his uncle, having admired it for years. The uncle, his father’s brother, lived in the desert southwest: an important figure in Chris’s life. He didn’t know where his uncle had got it.

“You would have tackled me before I got 10 feet,” I said. 

Beneath cowboy hat and tinted glasses Chris’s face was unreadable. 

“Great to meet you all,” I said. 

In a cluster near the kitchen stood Becky. 

“You throw a great party,” I said.  

She touched my arm. 

“Come back for more ping pong. I played myself out against the kids earlier. But I hear you’re the guy to beat.” 

“Oh, you know,” I said, looking down. “People talk.” 

“No,” she said, serious. “Fuck that.” I looked up. “You’re the best player here. Own it.” 

We looked at each other. I was in high school, she my coach.  

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s true. Anyone who wants to win has to come through me.” 

Did I step forward and hug her? I know I said, in earnest, “Thank you.” 

“And when you come back,” Becky said, “I’ll kick your ass.” 

“The fuck you will,” I said. “Go fuck yourself.” 

Laughter floated with the wood smoke as I turned. Her words echoed: through a walk to the car and a hard hug for Riley; a 15-minute car run down the hill and a harder hug for Peter; a 5-minute sidewalk wait for the Trailways; a chat with the driver (six days a week and double shifts Fridays and Sundays, 5 kids between 18 and 6, new wife, strict rules on screen time); a stop in Woodstock that picked up Al, a Brooklyn streetwise petty crook returning from a Sunday drum circle who told stories nonstop; a 50-minute wait for the 9:30 p.m. southbound from Kingston featuring a walk to the 24-hour CVS to replace forgotten glasses (“Real glasses or readers?” Peter had texted, four words that, I decided, sum up too much of middle-aged existence); two more southbound hours beside Al, who worked on the fringes with Wise Guys none of whom I knew and who shared his dark chocolate and who had written a screen play now a movie for which he had a laminated postcard with his name credited three times and who asked, as the bus wheezed through the Lincoln Tunnel, “So where would you rank my stuff? On a scale of 1-10?” and who seemed pleased with the honestly given grade of 8; through a Times Square platform wait for a southbound C and a slow haul to Brooklyn and a misbegotten transfer to a G at Hoyt-Schermerhorn; through that night and the next morning and the days and weeks and months that followed. “Fuck that. Own it.” They dripped through accumulating layers of work and tedium and depression, continuing, with surprisingly little diminishment, to make my spirit percolate.

Clearly, I need to play more ping pong. 

An Uncle Tom memory

My Uncle Tom died this week. My father’s younger brother, he was the sixth of seven siblings and the last of them to survive. Following a lingering illness, his death came as a relief, and as an occasion for reminiscence.

Perhaps because he never married, or perhaps because he lived for years in his parents’ home caring for his aging mother, it seemed to me that Uncle Tom held more strongly than his siblings qualities that I perceived as quintessentially “McCormick.” Among these were generosity; a sense of purpose and duty, including to family; and an ethical core unwavering in its sense of right and wrong. Uncle Tom was kind, friendly, and a font of engaging stories; he remembered every birthday; he took nieces and nephews on extravagant trips (including my brother and me to the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal). We always enjoyed his visits. But, like all McCormicks, his judgments could be sharp. And he harbored a steeliness that could edge into severity, which at times cowed me.

One Uncle Tom memory holds a distinguished place in my trove of family lore. Its taproot, as with any Uncle Tom story, is kindness and generosity: he flew across the country, along with my parents and my mother’s stepsister, Sheila Dowd, to celebrate my college graduation, in the Hudson Valley of New York, in 1988.

After the ceremony, that quartet of adults took a friend and me on a week-long trip through upstate New York and New England. We rented a van. My father and Uncle Tom handled the driving and sat in front; my mother and Aunt Sheila consulted maps and sat in the middle seats; and my friend and I sat in the back: a congenial group.

One day featured a long drive through New Hampshire and a good distance into Maine. As was typical, Mom and Aunt Sheila maintained a lively conversation, sparked by observations from guidebooks that littered the middle seats. We stopped for an early lunch, then began a long trek up I-95 to our next hotel, with Uncle Tom at the wheel. At some point, the two women agreed, we should break up the afternoon by stopping at a local tourist destination. They busied themselves researching possibilities. I can’t recall what they selected: a maritime museum, a gallery, a Victorian mansion. But it was right off the interstate, and we could stretch our legs for 20 minutes. It was coming up, in just three or four exits. Uncle Tom drove on, silent. Aunt Sheila read aloud one guidebook’s description; Mom read another’s. Now it was just one exit away. We barreled along. The exit approached. “Here it is!” Aunt Sheila said. Uncle Tom kept his foot on the accelerator. Mom leaned forward. “It’s this exit, Tom,” she said. Uncle Tom said nothing, aimed the van straight ahead, and sped past. “We need to -- ah, well,” Aunt Sheila said, craning to glimpse the road not taken, then slumping in her seat. My friend and I looked at each other, eyes wide. My mother and Aunt Sheila formed a formidable pair; I couldn’t recall anyone ignoring them in quite this way. And Uncle Tom was usually so solicitous. No one spoke. Then, perhaps five miles up the road, Uncle Tom announced, “We’re going to get to the hotel, and we’re going to have a drink!” Which, an hour or so later, is precisely what we did. We checked into the hotel; Uncle Tom or Dad pulled a bottle of Irish from a suitcase; I filled the ice bucket; somebody brought out the mixed nuts; and we all sat in the hotel suite and had a drink. Sitting in a padded chair, holding his sweating plastic cup, Uncle Tom let out a long exhale and said, “Aaah, baby!” with what seemed particular satisfaction.

I took a solo trip in Scotland last summer, walking for a week across the southern lowlands, sleeping each night in a different town. In the mornings I stopped often, taking pictures, admiring scenery. But after lunch as the sun lowered and I grew weary and my destination beckoned I would up my pace and pause less, pulled by visions of the Scotch I would soon sip at the local pub. Uncle Tom, I realized, knew of what he spoke: We’re going to get to the hotel, and we’re going to have a drink. Each evening I drank a silent toast in his honor.

Gratification Delayed; or, Why Last Night’s Mets Game Matters

Over a lifetime, I’ve pruned my sports watching. As a boy in the 1970s in a sports-obsessed household I watched everything U.S. TV networks offered and read my weekly Sports Illustrated as if it would save my soul. The 1972 Munich Olympics cost me innocence -- the killing of Israeli athletes and the officials’ theft of the gold-medal men’s basketball game (which, to be honest, affected my 8-year-old self far more deeply) made me forever skeptical of nostrums about “fair play” and “character.” In my teens I gave up college football and most college basketball, sickened by the NCAA’s Avery Brundage-level hypocrisy about the “student athlete” while a cadre of men in suits made millions. Hockey was never part of my Northern California sports culture. In my 20s I gave up the NBA regular season -- my team, the Golden State Warriors, was generally awful, and little mattered until Playoff Theatre. (I have good company; LeBron James said last week, “I’m not one to get caught up in the regular season.”) I stopped watching tennis, a sport that has never figured out its calendar. (Now a New Yorker, I do buy an annual grounds-pass for a day at the U.S. Open.) The Seoul Summer Olympics in 1988 were my last, killed by NBC’s soap opera treatment. (If I could attend a Games alongside a knowledgable companion with a nose for competition -- say, Bob Ryan of The Boston Globe -- I’d go.) My dad and brother loved golf, but I never got the bug and at some pre-Tiger point realized its country-club culture was irredeemable. In my 30s I won a March Madness pool, decided the winnings weren’t worth the work, and shut down my last vestige of college spectation. In my 40s I weaned myself from the NFL: the league’s corporatized greed put too many bales on the camel, the tipping bale being its tobacco-industry-like treatment of players with brain injuries; I felt like a Roman enjoying the spectacle of lions ripping apart criminals and Christians. 

Baseball remains. It suffers from the problems afflicting all major U.S. sports: rich-boy owners reminiscent of Russian oligarchs; league officials unable to rein the oligarchs in; an addict’s relationship to TV money; casually cruel treatment of its athletes (see: steroid use); routine disregard of its fans. Too often the game’s poohbahs are short-sighted to the point of idiocy. The 1994 lockout and World Series cancellation put at least two stakes in my heart. (That then-Commissioner Bud Selig won recent election to the Hall of Fame sickens me.)

But each spring, the games impel me to push open my crypt. A key reason: the regular-season grind of 162 games matters. Granted, it matters far less than it used to. The 10-team playoff format evens the field; a 106-win behemoth may well fail to show its edge over an 85-win wild card entrant over five or seven games. But daily ball from April to September, the unspooling of a hundred stories (the aging star, the fireballing phenom, the flawed middle-infield defense, the inexplicable pinch-hitting prowess, the absence of a capable lefty in the bullpen, a string of late-inning comebacks), make for a winnowing process that rewards close attention. The game’s narrative richness allows me to enjoy a sparsely-attended September tussle between also-rans. (Growing up in the ‘70s as a San Francisco Giants fan, I got a lot of practice.) Watching good teams play meaningful games is a bonus.

Regular-season integrity partially explains the one spectator sport I’ve added as an adult: English Premier League football. The structural imbalance between the league's dregs and its Rich Six (Tottenham, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea) is offset by its perfect schedule (each team plays each foe twice, once at home and once away); its race not just for a title but for the four top spots to qualify for the enriching European Champions League; and the simultaneous race to avoid a bottom-three finish that will “relegate” a team to a lower division (to be replaced by the top-3 finishers in the division below). When each game matters, great theatre results. 

All of this is meant to explain my response to an idiotic idea being bandied about by the Major League Baseball Commissioner’s office. To cut game times (a commissioner obsession that has already resulted in a wrong-headed rule allowing automatic intentional walks), the league is pondering the contamination of extra innings. The rule was used at last month’s World Baseball Classic tournament: once you reach the 11th inning, each team starts with a runner (the batter who made the last out of the 10th) on second base. This of course promotes scoring, hastens a game’s conclusion, and sends impatient fans to the parking lot and to bed. 

As a counterargument, allow me to present a single piece of evidence: last night’s Mets-Marlins 16-inning, 5-hour-and-38-minute, Einstein-On-The-Beach epic. The 9-inning preliminary was crammed with event: a Marcell Ozuna 1st-inning grand slam; an immediate tying Mets riposte, highlighted by a bases-clearing triple by catcher Travis d’Arnaud; a trio of middle-inning Mets solo homers, two by Yoenis Cespedes; an answering 4-run Marlins rally, ending with d'Arnaud body slammed but holding on to a Jay Bruce throw to cut down a runner at the plate; a Mets’ bid thwarted in the 7th when Cespedes ran past a coach’s stop sign, declined to slide, and got thrown out at the plate himself; and, an inning later, a tying 2-out rally (d’Arnaud single, pinch-hitter Michael Conforto double): Mets 8, Marlins 8.  

Then, as so often happens in baseball’s multi-act dramas, the Peckinpah reel turned into a Bergman retrospective: aimlessness, exhaustion, gathering darkness. After 10 innings the strapping 28-year-old d’Arnaud, wracked by four hours of squatting and pitch calling and ball blocking, needed help to descend the dugout stairs. Ninety more minutes passed. Innings 9 through 15 featured a parade of feckless at-bats, with no Mets and a lone Marlin reaching as far as second base. Amid the gloom came sparkles of light: Mets reliever Josh Smoker, barely hanging on to his roster spot, pitched three spotless innings; righty Hansel Robles, promised a night off after pitching in three straight games, told Manager Terry Collins he could go and trotted out to pitch a clean 15th. (It was either him, Collins said later, or backup catcher Rene Rivera.) 

Leading off the 16th, d’Arnaud deposited a 1-0 fastball into the left field stands for his fourth hit, third run, and fourth RBI: the game of his life. Robles trudged back out and walked the leadoff batter. Dangerous Giancarlo Stanton lined out to right. Dangerous Justin Bour struck out. Manager Collins then faced a choice: pitch to the dangerous Marcel Ozuna (two walks and two hits in seven plate appearances, including the grand slam, and 16 RBIs in the season’s nine games)? Or walk him intentionally and face, in Miami’s jury-rigged and depleted lineup, Adam Conley, a starting pitcher with 9 hits in 61 career at-bats (.138), no extra base hits and 32 strikeouts? Miami had no alternatives. Collins spun the wheel and instructed Robles to face Ozuna with only breaking pitches, preferably off the plate. Robles proceeded to throw a non-sliding slider that hung over the plate; Ozuna crushed it 400 feet, where it dropped to earth 8 feet in front of the center field fence, into the glove of Juan Lagares. Mets 9, Marlins 8. Had ‘em all the way. 

In the scope of any baseball season, a win in the season’s 10th game is of little note. But, come what may, any recap of the 2017 Mets will feature d’Arnaud’s weary legs trotting home in the 16th (“I think the excitement and adrenaline of the home run helped”), Robles’ dangling arm, Collins’ decision. And then: how will the teams bounce back? What will happen to the Mets bullpen should their starters falter over the weekend? How will they muddle through this series, and the next, and the next? Will any of it matter in their drive for an unprecedented third-straight playoff appearance? None of this would come to mind had Michael Conforto and then A.J. Ellis started the 11th inning standing undeservedly on second base. 

Is your average fan likely to stay in her seat or on his couch for five-and-a-half hours and 16 innings? Of course not. But baseball, by definition, is about gratification delayed. (Sometimes for as long as 108 years.) This isn’t to say all change is bad. Cut game times by enforcing existing rules (on time between pitches, say) and limiting mound visits. (See the Arizona Diamondbacks for a team that turns every game to a late-inning slog, with catchers often running to the mound several times in one at-bat.) But the sport is not in crisis; certainly its owners’ wallets have never been fatter. Why damage its integrity to chase misguided notions of what fans want? Why not allow its stories to unfold, then celebrate them? Why not teach a new generation of fans to appreciate its long haul? 

"The Underground Railroad"

In the week that it won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, I finished Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad." Whitehead tackles a massive social ill -- the devastation of the nation's soul wrought by American slavery and American racism -- by charting its effects on individuals. The story is gripping, its fictions (an actual railroad beneath the soil; a state-by-state response to slavery's impending demise that is bone-chillingly believable) as instructive as its grounding in historical research. The strength of its plot and its characters, including the unforgettable slave hunter Ridgeway, makes it clear why producers are turning it into a mini-series.

The book also offers quieter pleasures. I found myself moved by a pair of late-book passages. Cora, the protagonist, who has found harbor in an Indiana settlement for runaway slaves and other diasporic Africans, listens to a visiting poet and is left cold: "Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world." 

Then, on the very next page, a friend gives her a gift of a new almanac, a form of book foundational to her haphazard education. "She grabbed his hand. The almanac had a strange, soapy smell and made a cracking noise like fire as she turned the pages. She'd never been the first person to open a book."

Cora's fierce will to be educated, and the quiet description of her love for the book as physical object, left me wondering if, a generation or so hence, her descendants would find a more peaceful place to open themselves to the passions (of poetry, of prayer) that Cora must find "regrettable." In the midst of the novel's unsparing vision, the scene demonstrates a cultural indomitability that's as close as Whitehead skirts to hope.

"Maggie's Farm"

Scene: G train. This morning's commute to the 9-year-old's writing class.

Kid: Who do you think's the worst person in the song? I think the dad. He puts out his cigar in your face. And you try to escape through his window, but it's made out of bricks.

Dad: I always thought the mom. Pa's the muscle, but Ma's the brains of the operation. Plus she's sanctimonious -- all that "man and God and law" talk.

Kid: The brother at least hands you money.

Dad: Yeah, but that's just to lure you in. He's a functionary for the farm. Every evil system needs functionaries.

Pause.

Kid: I know who's the worst.

Dad: Who?

Kid: Maggie.

Dad: But we never hear about Maggie. She's the hole in the song's donut. Why is she the worst?

Kid: It's her farm.

Happy Warriors

In January 2009 each day’s paper, each swipe of the president’s pen, seemed to bring hopeful news. Wars winding down. Guantanamo closing. State Department abortion gag orders rescinded. Smart, sane cabinet appointees. Competence and caring throughout the executive branch. OK, economic appointees disappointed liberals hoping to decrease the power of  and hold to account Wall Street bankers. But overall, what refreshing changes! Springtime in Washington! 

Now it’s January 2017, and my social media feeds are filled with despair from the sort of people who hit U.S. streets Saturday in the large Women’s March protests. Among the concerns (in addition to those against a half-dozen or more cabinet appointees): 

Pulling out of international trade agreements threatens U.S. leadership in the world. The White House is trying to gag federal workers. The notion of civil service itself is under assault -- not surprising, given that Newt Gingrich, among others, has touted the G.O.P.’s desire to end the practice of civil service. (The 19th-century good-government policy holds that those working on the people’s behalf should be shielded from political winds as they do their jobs.) 

Meanwhile, members of Trump’s inner circle leak news of their boss’s instability like flowing spigots -- entertaining, perhaps, though I again wonder if such leaks feed a reality-TV narrative that serves to distract from actual policy.

And, back in the losers' locker room: how can Democrats resurrect political relevance? 

In any event, it’s clear that the Trump Administration intends to wage war not only with the press but with factual information itself. Example: If unemployment is not 4.7 percent and perhaps not countable at all, that makes possible the 2020 “Morning In America Redux” campaign, since things will certainly have gotten rosier since the 2016 days of 42 percent unemployment and American carnage.

Bloomberg columnist Tyler Cohen distinguishes between what a friend calls "bullshit" (political shading, diplomatically nuanced truths, doublespeak, deceptive rhetoric) and the sorts of bald-faced lies in which the Trump Administration has to date trafficked. Cohen opines that the usefulness of lies is manifold: to serve as a loyalty test for new underlings; to damage the credibility of those underlings and thus tie them closer to the leader; and to help push through policy changes fast, gambling that long-term credibility damage is negligible or irrelevant.

Academic Dawn Gilpin points out that the lies paint a picture needed to justify future policies. Millions of illegal voters? Runaway violence in Chicago? Unchecked immigration? Bloated government staffs? Rising abortion rates? "Politicized" scientific research on climate change? "None of these claims are true," Gilpin writes, "but they have to be said to lay the groundwork for specific actions."

Though mostly predictable since Nov. 9, this news flood has depressed or enraged a sizable number of Americans. My friends on the Trumpian side have noted lefties’ dismay with derision, glee, and bafflement. A friend with whom I sparred on Facebook wrote: “I understand the discomfort that you all feel. I felt that same way eight years ago. But you know what? I refused to allow myself to ride the roller coaster of depression like some of my friends. Take a wait-and-see attitude. Verbally protest that which concerns you. But for heavens sake, relax! I love all of my friends too much to see them in self-imposed agony.”

His comment led me to alter my outlook before hitting the Manhattan streets on Saturday. Without lessening my determination to be counted among those opposing the new administration’s plans, I decided to do so joyously. What surprised me about the event was how many marchers shared high spirits. No violence, little anger, lots of patience among people densely packed for hours. The crowds expressed not irritation but solidarity: Look how many of us there are! From where I marched folks were friendly, ebullient, wry, steadfast: Not in our names. We stand for another way. This is what democracy looks like. 

Such energy is almost absent on my gloomy social media feeds. So in the spirit of the happy warrior, I humbly ask concerned leftists and centrists to consider the following examples of engaging with those with whom we disagree. 

For starters, deep perspective matters. The indispensable press critic Jay Rosen demonstrates that understanding the political views of opponents helps him withstand the daily social media storm. 

Jeff Tweedy, boss of the rock band Wilco, spiritedly invites trolls into his tribe: “Sure, we live in a bubble. I'd love for more of you to share our bubble though! It's awesome! In our bubble I know cops and rappers and grocery store cashiers and artists and garbage collectors...so many decent people that don't really care that much about people being different than they are. ... I grew up in what I think might be something like your bubble. You should at least try this one! Come on in!” 

Most instructive: this piece from a Venezuelan reflecting on lessons of fighting a populist authoritarian, Hugo Chavez. My inadequate summary: 1). Chavez labeled his enemies in ways similar to the G.O.P.‘s war against “coastal elites.” 2). The goal of political engagement with the leader’s followers needs to be “Don’t feed polarization. Disarm it.” 3). Don’t try to force the leader out through non-democratic means, which only feed his message of populism and polarization. (“See how the elites hate me/us?”) 4). Find counterarguments that demonstrate to the leader’s enemies that we all in fact belong to the same tribe. Show that you’re human, that you share some of their concerns. 

When I responded Saturday morning to my Facebook friend, I agreed with his suggestion to relax. I noted that I was “not in agony; I'm concerned about the future of our nation, including the ability of all to march and protest and speak freely. That's why I'm out today.” 

His response: “We agree on more items than we probably realize. Including being concerned about the future of our nation. March on brother! Be safe out there. Peace!”

The New Regime

David Remnick, now editor of The New Yorker magazine, from 1988-92 covered Moscow for The Washington Post, where he won a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award for his work documenting the breakup of the Soviet empire. A fellow American correspondent arrived in Moscow midway through Remnick’s tenure and wondered at the famously indefatigable reporter’s behavior at press conferences and other public events. Remnick would uniformly attend; but, standing or sitting at the back of the room while the luminaries made their presentations, his notebook would stay in his pocket. What the hell is the guy doing?, the reporter thought. It took a couple of months to realize that Remnick had done all his reporting in advance, knew that the dog-and-pony shows were news free, and that he attended merely to confirm what he had already learned. 

Remnick exemplifies expert foreign correspondence; American news organizations gladly allow their coverage of foreign lands, including those controlled by authoritarian regimes, to reflect news of moment rather than pomp, noise, and circuses. The best U.S. business coverage, too, routinely ignores the official product rollouts (save Apple’s) and finds news behind the scenes. But coverage of American political institutions has operated on different principles. Certainly the Fourth Estate trails a long history of brilliant political investigations that have uncovered corruption from Tammany Hall to Abu Ghraib. But the press has also long assumed that coverage of daily political events, Capitol Hill hearings and White House news briefings and Pentagon pressers, requires energy and industry. “Holding the powerful to account,” rationalize the press poobahs. While every campaign season U.S. news organizations investigate candidate backgrounds and analyze policy implications, at least since Theodore White’s heyday in the 1960s daily “horse race” coverage has dominated, especially on television. Who’s up? What’s the latest poll say? Who won the last 24 hours? 

The age of Donald Trump requires us as a political body to examine our first principles. For the news media, this needs to include such fundamental questions as, What is purpose of our coverage? How can we best inform the American people about what our leaders are doing in our names? It’s clear that the Trump administration will require creative responses; so far, I’m less than sanguine about the press's choices. 

Saturday, the first full day of the Trump Administration, featured the first White House briefing by press secretary (and Dickensian Name Of The Week nominee) Sean Spicer. Watch it (the stream starts 1:33:28), if only to witness the extent of Spicer’s righteous imperiousness. He took no questions but delivered an excoriation of press behavior of the past 24 hours. Interestingly, Spicer started by pointing out that a reporter had incorrectly tweeted that Trumpians had removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., from its public place in the White House. (The Time magazine reporter later tweeted an apology, saying that security staff had blocked his view of the bust.) One tweet featuring a modest mistake by one reporter over a matter of little consequence would have warranted public mention by no past White House. But Spicer and Trump play by different rules. In the absence of an immediate political campaign, the media represent Trump’s prime adversary; on Saturday the President called his relationship with the press a “running war.” His main strategy: full-on propaganda blitz. Stories the White House dislikes are to be branded “fake news”; press errors are to be relentlessly documented in the service of tarnishing the entire Fourth Estate; and the press itself is to be branded a self-interested opposition party whose disclosures are meaningless because motivated only by hatred of the President. Each day will offer a chance for power to be defended aggressively and the adversary weakened. 

To this campaign truth, of course, is irrelevant. Spicer filled his presentation with mischaracterizations, half-truths, and falsehoods. Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway later characterized these as “alternative facts.” We’re all just self-interested players batting around balls of information, Trumpians say; you’ve got your data, we’ve got ours. Nothing is true, and so nothing matters, except power. One can describe Trump as a master media manipulator. Or one can say that such manipulations are child’s play so long as the manipulator has no shame. 

The immediate response of (to take one example) The New York Times was amusing to read. Its main story on Spicer’s performance prominently labeled several of his claims falsehoods. (This would have been standard practice under no previous administration.) Since Spicer’s lies had concerned the number of Trumpian inaugural attendees, it also ran a story citing two "crowd scientists," a field of whose existence I had heretofore remained ignorant. 

Longer-term, I wonder if chasing such stories, even with journalistic relish (which is to say a relish for accuracy), contributes to distracting us from matters of more moment. Perhaps the news organizations have no choice: Trump's confrontational, Roger Ailes-style disinformation campaign may demand immediate response. Certainly Spicer will leap each day to the tune of his master, and following news in the Trumpian era will surely mean being tied to the president's desiccated ego. The spectacle would be comic were it less consequential.

Conservative analyst Eric Erickson (creator of Red State, now at The Resurgent, no fan of Trump) fills this post with invective against the press. But he points out that actual news transpired Saturday while the media wallowed in Spicer’s mire: the White House vetting likely candidates to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat. 

So I wonder if we would better adopt to Trump’s performances a Remnickian pose. (Jay Rosen, an NYU professor of journalism who is tracking our new era with insight, has started a hashtag to define what he thinks should be the Fourth Estate’s response: “send the interns.”) Trump will never tire of these machinations, will never run out of bright, shiny objects to toss. Will media magpies tire of fluttering about in response? 

A friend and former Washington Post reporter posted on Facebook this weekend that she has hesitated comparing Trump to despotic governments she’d covered, or of comparing his media strategy to those of foreign Ministries of Information. “But it is familiar,” she wrote. 

The time of hesitating is past. The Ministry of Information is here. 

Physiognomy

Brooklyn, Clinton/Washington station, waiting for a C train. 8:15 on a recent weeknight. I see a 30-something white man on the sparsely populated platform. Wiry, fidgety, he looks up from his study of a subway station ad, catches my eye. "What's the same about all these people?" He gestures to 30 or so portraits in a grid, all faces seemingly enthusiastic about reporting suspicious activity to authorities. "Just look. It'll come to you." I look. "It's easy!" Well, I say -- they all look happy. "Their noses! Look at their noses!" His words burst from a restraining dam. "See how they're all wide and flat?" Though the racial and cultural mix of this public service campaign has always struck me as exemplary, at a glance the many-hued noses do seem similarly shaped. "They're victims! See how their eyes are spread wide apart? The noses all flat? They're prey, not predators. Victims!" He paces on the platform, spins. He seems eager to expound. Lank hair curls from under his knit cap. I check: his nose is hawkish. I hear you, I say, moving on, not pausing to determine the distance between his eyes.

"No Such Things As Facts"

The political news comes in waves; it’s hard to chart one before the next comes crashing. That’s a truism of the stretch when presidents-elect name cabinet members and make decisions with years or decades of consequences. But in the Age Of Trump the waves seem mightier. 

And the president-elect, as is his wont, continues to toss bright shiny tweets that media magpies can’t resist -- a horde of pop-culture trash. (Hamilton! SNL! Three million illegal votes! Flag burners!) Friends debate whether this is a distraction tactic of Machiavellian brilliance or evidence of an egomaniacal simpleton with the impulse control of a hormonal teen. The debates themselves distract. I’ve already declared my intention to ignore, to the extent possible, Trump’s bluster. The smartest take I saw this week was a Storified set of tweets from Elliot Lusztig. 

Journalists, meanwhile, rip hair and rend garments and try to create strategies for covering the new president. Here are a few takes I’ve appreciated this week. 

1). NYU prof Jay Rosen makes a point we should have all learned from Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s fact-free accusations: Focus, when warranted, not on the charge itself but its absence of evidence. 

2). James Fallows notes that contemporary U.S. news media “are not built” to cover a leader with no evident capacity to distinguish truth from lies. One of his three suggestions echoes Rosen; a second highlights the need to “fight for reality” (and democracy) by citing another terrific essay by Ned Resnikoff at Think Progress; and a third suggests the media should call narcissistic behavior by its proper name. 

3). Fallows encountered this week on the Diane Rehm radio show a Trump stalwart, “journalist and patriot” Scottie Nell Hughes, who opined “there are no such things as facts.” (You can hear Hughes’s remarks around the 14:40 mark of the show.)

That was echoed by former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowsky, quoted in The Washington Post: “This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up."

4). So facts neither matter nor exist. The answer? According to WaPo Editor Marty Baron: Do our job. “The ultimate defense of press freedom lies in our daily work.... Because holding the most powerful to account is what we are *supposed* to do. If we do not do that, then what exactly *is* the purpose of journalism?” 

5). Adding vital context, Matt Lees in The Guardian has a terrific piece on how the sexist Internet trolls behind Gamergate acted as a precursor for far-right Trumpians on how to terrorize foes and influence the press and control a story, all in the name of “ethics” and “justice.” It’s a lesson in contemporary propaganda. 

6). Bonus links: Lees refers to Umberto Eco’s New York Review Of Books 1995 essay outlining 14 elements common to fascist regimes. (Eco calls it “ur-Fascism.”) 

One rule: Ur-Fascism uses Newspeak (from Orwell’s “1984”), “an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” That resonated with me especially after reading this Atlantic article by Andrew Simmons, a creative Marin County high school instructor, on teaching “1984” in the Age Of Trump. I have encountered students similar to the young woman who breezily tells Simmons that the novel is “too long, too confusing, and too full of words no one used anymore.” 

I wish you all a week filled with complex syntax and enriched vocabulary. 

All The Rage

I sing karaoke. Three years ago, that’s a sentence I’d have fashioned only in mordant irony. Now it’s a commonplace: I like watching baseball, walking New York City streets, and singing karaoke. Credit or blame can be assigned to my friend P, an artsy fellow with serious vocal chops known to end a stressful workday by walking into a midtown Japanese karaoke club, the type with private booths, and spending a rigorous hour belting pop standards to himself. A great stress release, he said; you’d enjoy it. This first struck me as ridiculous. Now it seems intuitive. 

As I can’t always get to my favored karaoke club or piano bar, I on occasion release stress in my living room, camped close to my speakers and, I trust, not disturbing the neighbors. (No complaints so far; my building’s solid construction -- high ceilings, solid walls, thick floors -- favors their tranquility.) Last week, trying to shake my dark post-election mood, I was learning Rufus Wainwright’s “California,” a sunny-sounding melody that I’d enjoyed but whose lyrics I’d never plumbed. I knew it wasn’t a love letter to my home state; the way at the end of the first chorus Rufus drags out “California, please” is nothing if not sardonic. But further attention reveals deep scorn for its cultural vapidity -- a rainbow postcard etched in acid: 

"Ain’t it a shame that all the world can’t enjoy your mad traditions. 

Ain’t it a shame that all the world don’t got keys to their own ignitions. 

Life is the longest death in California."

Discovering anger as the song’s motivating emotion made it more satisfying to sing. 

This week, seeking more set pieces for my Self-Delusional Cabaret, I listened to the Billy Bragg B-side “Sulk,” another upbeat number whose bitter content -- boyfriend in late-stage relationship meltdown -- perhaps kept Bragg from adding it to a studio album: 

"Why do I want to hide whenever you show up?

You know your moods just make me want to throw up.

Why don't you just bloody well grow up?

You just sulk."

I texted my friend G, a guide for all things pop-culture related. “‘Sulk’ is terrific but kind of hostile,” he wrote. “The audience may be put off. The song makes you the sulker.” Exactly why I like it, I realized. 

By then I’d moved on to Elvis Costello’s “All The Rage,” which overleaps the high bar Elvis has set for angry relationship songs. You can’t pen words to an ex- much more vicious than this: 

"Alone with your tweezers and your handkerchief

You murder time and truth, love, laughter, and belief. 

So don’t try to touch my heart, it’s darker than you think.

And don’t try to read my mind, because it’s full of disappearing ink."

I texted G: What about a set with those two back-to-back?  “Jesus,” he wrote. “Delusional Alienation Cabaret.” 

I recalled a recent first date on which I’d suggested we meet at a karaoke club. (She had sung a bit professionally and seemed kind; I was feeling brave.) We were getting along pretty well, chatting and trading songs, until I broke out my big number, a passionate lament of Chris Isaak’s called “Please”: 

"I keep listening, very quietly. 

You’re discussing your philosophy. 

There’s a long list of what’s wrong with me,

And you go on talking endlessly...

Please. You’re killing me with all these questions."

“Wow,” she said. “Maybe we need to change it up.” She sang “Que Sera Sera.” There was no second date. 

I’m versed in theories of white male American anger. By any standard I’m privileged as all get-out; I have little cultural rationale for packing my share. In my 50s, trailing a handful of failed relationships and years of therapy, aware of the addicts' admonition that rage is a luxury we can't afford, and mindful of how it affects my 9-year-old, I like to think that I’m carrying less of it around. And then I see my list of karaoke favorites includes Fountains Of Wayne’s “Maureen” (wanna-be boyfriend warns woman to stop regaling him with her relationship exploits); Radiohead’s “Bones” (guy who used to fly like Peter Pan is now “crippled and cracked, ground to dust and ash”); and Ben Folds’ “Selfless Cold And Composed” (singer tells his ex- to punch him instead of “smiling like a bank teller blankly telling me Have a nice life”).

What does this have to do with the Age Of Trump? I’ve been telling people I’m in shock. Numbed. Scared. My karaoke set list, meanwhile, sings a different tune. 

Westerlies

I moved this fall to the 12th floor of a 14-floor brick apartment building built in World War II to house workers of the Brooklyn Naval Yard. The apartment's best feature is its southerly and westerly views. While downtown Brooklyn's new glass and chrome towers obstruct much of the view of New York Harbor, I can glimpse bits of it, as well as Staten Island and New Jersey (and, looking northward, the spires of the Manhattan Bridge and the towers of Wall Street). I can watch storms roll from the west and close in on the city; any westerly breeze has few obstructions before it crashes into my building. On stormy days the apartment's sound is a rhythmic drone of wind, with staccato smacks as gusts hit the bricks and whistles as they whip through window cracks. That's been my soundtrack this weekend.

Earlier in the week I picked up from the borough library Victor Klemperer's "I Will Bear Witness." I was ignorant that the diary came in two volumes and ordered, it turns out, the second, from 1942-45. To read its opening pages is to be plunged into the quotidian terror of late-stage Naziism. On a tram on his way to buy groceries Klemperer is confronted by a "dogcatcher" -- a police or military officer, I'm not sure which -- quietly ordered off, and taken for questioning at a local police station. He is instructed to avoid trams to that neighborhood and to limit his shopping to the Jewish section, where offerings are meager by comparison. Though Klemperer must wait hours at the station he is not physically mistreated or arrested. The stop's point, it becomes clear, serves dual purposes of terror and segregation. Segregation not only makes Jews easier to track and herd, it also keeps "good" Germans from interacting with any and thus aids propaganda against the sub-human.

The wind and the diary colored my weekend readings from a variety of reporters and Nostradamuses. Those include a NYT account of a weekend white power conference, a gathering of "people of the sun" that included call-and-response chants in German (including "lugenpresse" -- lying media); Azmat Khan's summary of U.S. government actions to track Muslims since 1996; lessons Americans should draw from the failures of the Israeli left to confront four decades of increasingly radical right-wing politics; plus messages of doom from Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Chait.

I'm paying special heed to folks familiar with authoritarian governments. Today that includes Sarah Kendzior, who's studied state power in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. Her piece in the Dutch publication The Correspondent, How to be your own light in the Age of Trump, has powerful words of warning and advice for living as a dissident. She calls on us to write down our moral values, our personal codes and creeds, and to do so now, before the power transition: "Authoritarianism ... eats away at who you are. It makes you afraid, and fear can make you cruel. It compels you to conform and to comply and accept things you would never accept, to do things you never thought you would do."

I was heartened by the stout constitution and working moral compass evidenced in writer Amy Ferris's Dear Trump Supporter Who Called Me A Cunt. She cites her mother as someone who paid for living with small-minded fear, an example Ferris is determined to resist.

Amid the whipping winds, may we all heed the better angels of our nature.

One week into the Age Of Trump

Wading through the shit flows emanating from 5th Avenue and D.C. feels exhausting. It seems important to try. A few post-election articles have helped me navigate.

1). Insight and outrage fill Ryan Lizza's commentary about the president-elect's first week: 

Donald Trump's First, Alarming Week As President-Elect

What's worst? Assaulting the free press and 1st Amendment on a near-daily basis? Ignoring the rule of law and using the DOJ as a weapon against perceived enemies? Suborning U.S. foreign policy interests to Russia? Normalizing white supremacy and hardcore xenophobia (with the appointment of former Breitbart editor Stephen Bannon as senior counselor), not to mention garden-variety bigotry (with the appointment of a man the GOP in another era rejected for a federal judgeship, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, as head of Justice)? Putting paranoid Islamophobia at the heart of national security policy (with the appointment of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser)? Running roughshod over conflict of interest laws (by, among other things, seeking security clearances for son-in-law Jared Kushner and having Ivanka Trump, designated to run the family business and without security clearance, sitting in on Trump's first meeting with a foreign head of state [Japan])?

2). I was heartened by this smart take on fighting an elected, personality-driven authoritarian from an Italian finance professor, Luigi Zingales, who witnessed the era of Berlusconi. 

The Right Way To Resist Trump

Lessons: The GOP scorched-earth policy didn't make Obama a one-term president. Focus on policy, not personality. Find philosophical areas of overlap, and wage battles for distributed systems of power (such as an independent judiciary and an empowered, adversarial press) and Democratic principles. 

3). And this, from Russian and American journalist Masha Gessen, who witnessed the rise of Putin, strikes me as essential reading for the new era: 

Autocracy: Rules For Survival

Her 5 rules: Believe the autocrat; his words reveal his darkest impulses. Don't put blind faith in institutions (such as an independent judiciary and an empowered, adversarial press). Don't normalize the extreme. Be outraged. Don't compromise core principles. 

Gessen's article strikes me the one most likely to be worth revisiting in the difficult months and years ahead. 

4). In a different vein, Farhad Manjoo's analysis on the destabilizing role of social media to our political and media power structures, and the gains in power for formerly marginalized groups such as white supremacists and hacker collectives, is far-sighted and frightening. 

Social Media's Globe-Shaking Power

Summary quote: "It’s time to start recognizing that social networks actually are becoming the world-shattering forces that their boosters long promised they would be — and to be unnerved, rather than exhilarated, by the huge social changes they could uncork."

5). For political lessons the Democratic Party needs to draw from the election, I haven't seen a smarter read than Bay Area writer Ezekiel Kweku's: 

Skin In The Game: How To Beat White Nationalism In The Polls

Key quote, which responds to a lot of energetic and wasteful discussions I've seen on my social media feeds: "The practice of pigeonholing voters into the categories of 'racist' and 'not racist' is counterproductive. A more useful frame is to decide which voters can be persuaded to vote for Democratic candidates and which can't." 

Peace. 

Election Night, 2016

Thinking out loud: Donald Trump is a reality show contestant. What he says is a distraction. It's not that his words don't matter; it's that tracking them doesn't help, it educates about nothing useful, and it's an enormous waste of energy (not least because he generates so much fear). 

So I'm pledging to follow as little as possible of what the man says over the next four years. I'll track his appointments, his legislation, his policies -- indeed, following those (and fighting many of them), and tracking how they affect our fellow citizens and residents, is a civic obligation of the highest order. But the Twitter feed, the TV appearances, the speeches -- no. 

Neil deGrasse Tyson: "This is the end of nothing. This is the beginning of something new and solemn and so important. You must be part of what comes next."

This is my first post in four-and-a-half years. Baby A is now, as she says, five and three-quarters years old -- old enough to have shed the adjective and become, simply, “A.” She starts first grade in September; later that month, she’ll turn 6.

The bulk of this post belongs to A. Yesterday afternoon we were driving home from the birthday party of a friend. Reading is by a decisive margin her favorite activity, but she had no books. So, as we sometimes do, we agreed to tell each other stories. I asked her to go first, and she filled the remainder of the drive with the tale that follows. After we got home, I wrote it down as quickly as I could, using her language as precisely as I could recall. If that strains credulity, let me briefly say that her use of language remains precocious, which I’ll demonstrate with two examples from Friday.

1). When we stopped in a bagel shop she said, with a glance at the establishment’s weak, aged chandeliers, “This room is ill-lit.”

2). As we walked through Castle Williams, an 18th-century fort on Governors Island that had been converted during the Civil War to a prison holding Confederate soldiers, a park ranger noted that 60 prisoners would be crammed into a small-ish room with only a barrel for a shared toilet. After she’d processed that, A asked me, “Did they get mattresses?” No. “Pillows?” No. “A bottom sheet?” No. “A blanket?” Yes. “Was it thin?” Yes. “Raggedy?” Yes. “Threadbare?” Yes, I’d say it likely was.

Here’s A’s story, which I’ll call “Princess Marita and The Pebblestone.”

Once upon a time, there was a princess named Princess Marita. Princess Marita went to Sunday school, which started at 9 o’clock in the morning. There were terrible punishments for students who came late, so she hurried from home after calling quickly “Goodbye, goodbye!” to her mama and papa, the king and queen. She made it to Sunday school on time and had a good lesson. When she returned, only her mama was home. Her mama told her that her papa had fallen ill, gone to the hospital, and died that afternoon.

Some time later, her mama went out on a date, and Marita heard a voice inside her, telling her to go on a quest. She knew who the voice was. And when she started off, she knew she was entering a world of different time -- like in Narnia, when Lucy can stay for a week and return through the wardrobe door and find that only a few minutes have passed. So she set out on her quest: to find the pebblestone, guarded by a fierce boar and lying in the center of a red violet in the middle of a field of red violets.

She called for her fairy friend, who gave her a velvet-lined coach and two fine horses. She rode all through the night, and though the horses were tired she urged them on, and they understood, knowing the importance of her quest. She arrived and saw the boar guarding a cave. The boar never slept and could power itself by moving only its eyes. She waited one whole day and one whole night, but the boar did not leave. But the next day the boar set off to hunt for food, and Marita knew she must act quickly. So she hurried into the cave and found the field of violets, where she searched and searched. Finally she found it: the red violet with the purple pebblestone at its center. She quickly took the pebblestone and rode in her carriage back to her land, where she found her mama’s date still had an hour to go.

Marita said a magic spell over the pebblestone, and her papa came back to life. So when her Mama returned she found Marita and her papa waiting for her, and the family was overjoyed to be together again. And they lived happily ever after.

Naming

The following is an email exchange M and I had this week with a friend who, shortly after earning her Ph.D., is due to have a baby this spring. We’ll call her T and her spouse B.

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 3:09 PM, T wrote:

Hey there,

I wanted to send this to you both. We are leaning towards using my last name for the baby, but have come up against some pretty strong resistance from B’s mom and sister when we mentioned we were thinking of it. The whole last name thing is so annoying. Neither of us wants to change our last names or to join last names or to make up a new one, so we have to pick one of ours for the kid. We don’t really care which we pick, so we have been thinking that--all other things being equal--we might as well take the feminist option and use my last name. You are the only people we know who used the mother’s last name. All of my friends who kept their own (ok, their fathers’) names used the male last name for their kids. I think the only answer for the last name problem is diversity--couples making all kinds of different decisions to break the rule that Father’s name goes. So, on principle that’s where we are. But dealing with hurt and unhappy family members is another story (or maybe not, maybe it’s par for the course, but it sucks). Part of it for B’s family is that he is the only boy out of four kids and his dad died a couple of years ago, so his mom and sisters seem to feel really strongly that he should honor his dad by giving his kids his last name. (The last name will continue through his male cousins though, so it won’t “die out” either way). But his family also recently compared us to the Amish because they think we are so unconventional--i.e., we eat healthily and only have one t.v. that we rarely watch (just to give you some context). Anyway, just wondering if you had to weather any flak from the families about using her last name, and if so, how you dealt with it.

The baby is kicking up a storm these days--yesterday, during and after the inauguration, it was partying like mad! :-)

Love,
T

On Wed., Jan. 21, 2009, at 4:32 p.m., G wrote:

T,

I’m cc’ing M on this; I imagine she’ll want to respond herself.

Here’s what we did: If it was a boy, he’d have had my last name, and since it as a girl, she took M’s. The middle names were picked in part because they sounded echoes of the other parent’s last name. I never heard any flak from any family member, nor really directly from anyone; I don’t recall hearing M tell such war stories, either. But there have been lots of blank stares and double-takes, starting at the hospital when we talked to the (female) hospital or county official (I forget which) about the name for the birth certificate. I imagine all her childhood Baby A will have to confront those who assume “Dad” is not really the dad. I can imagine having to convince school officials, for instance, that I’m actually the father. To me, such inconveniences are entirely worth the modest envelope pushing the naming involved. If no male issue from M and me arrives (and we’ve got no plans), I imagine my direct family “line” might die out, since my brother’s son is gay, and he’s the only option. (Of course, he could adopt. And I’ve got, let’s see, eight male fraternal cousins.) But when I think about it..... who cares? What does it signify, and why, beyond paternal social convention? Why wouldn’t it, for instance, honor your dad to have his grandchild bear your (his) name? (Has he got any other grandchildren coming down the pike?) I don’t have to convince you, I know; it’s just that those arguing the conventional line have no ground to stand on aside from “That’s the way it’s done here” and “Why do you want to be different, you wacky Amish weirdoes?”

It’s funny; I was thinking after I sent you the recent email about our diaper selection process that the one piece of advice I’d give to you and B is: Do things your own way. Do the birth your own way. Do the diapers your own way. Do the child-rearing your own way. Everyone has opinions, and it’s remarkable how invested even strangers can be in you doing things “the best way” or “the real way” or, in short, their way. Test for the baby’s gender; don’t find out until the birth. Drugs during labor or none; ob-gyn or midwife; hospital or home birth. Letting the kid sleep with you; breast feeding for x months; keep a parent at home or get a nanny or go to daycare. On and on and on. People are oddly invested in your choices. M says the only parallel she knows of concerned her cancer treatment, and she thought that had to do with other people making themselves feel better, staking some control over her situation and, thus, indirectly, death. I’m not sure what the emotional stake in other people’s child-rearing is, but it’s palpable. I hear you that the familial flak sucks; we were lucky to avoid it. I won’t offer advice, because you don’t need it. I wish you and B peace and calm and good will around the decision; whatever you do will be done with loving intention, and that’s what matters.

Kick, you little Amish Obama-lovin’ baby, kick!

Love,
G

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 7:32 AM, M wrote:

Dear T,

I am so sorry you are getting blowback for the perspective you and B bring to this issue. I personally don’t know of anyone who has made the decision G and I made. So to have you and B make it would be great! Here’s the way I see it: you and I are pretty well educated. OK, let’s be real: there are few women on the planet who have had more advanced education in feminism and equality. This education is what grants one freedom of conscience, thought, and action. If we can’t make this small, small step, who can, and what hope is there for change? It says too much bad about our world for me to think that people like us would not be able to name a child in a way that swam against the patriarchal tide. I don’t want to live in that world.

I like your diversity argument. I also think about affirmative action when I think about this issue. Isn’t it time a bunch of people mixed it up and named their kids after the female? It would take about a hundred years of a solid minority of folks in the U.S. naming their kids after the mother before people would no longer assume the supremacy of the male line.

One other option that I proposed but G rejected: we each keep our own names and the baby gets a blend. Our blend isn’t bad. G didn’t like it. Your blend wouldn’t be bad, either. (But it won’t satisfy the in-laws, whose name is tragically about to die out. Why they don’t pressure B’s sisters to name their kids in a feminist way to keep the line alive, I just don’t know.)

One thing with us that was funny is that G’s last name sounded much better with just about any first name we chose. We wanted a Gaelic name and I didn’t want an obviously gendered name, regardless of what the baby was. Anything we thought of sounded better with G’s name. But we decided that he would get the males and I would get the females (and any intersex children), and that that division, although imperfect and gendered itself, at least seemed fair in the microcosm. In the macrocosm, there was a 50 percent chance we would never have made any feminist statement via naming, but I was willing to live with it.

So I fear I have now painted myself solidly into the corner of “do things the way we did it” that G warned you about--like so many couples seeking validation of their decisions by encouraging pregnant couples to do the same. So let’s just reject all that! Look, G and I love you both. Whatever you decide is cool. If the pressure is too intense, hey, people have done a lot worse things to their kids to shut up their in-laws! :-) Any name of a new child is a good name. My mom’s family used to joke that one of the girls should have been name Ola Hortense in honor of their two grandmothers. There’s a name!

Good luck in facing this, no matter the decision.
M

On Thurs., Jan. 22, 2009, at 12:38 p.m., T wrote:

G & M,

Thank you both so much for your thoughtful and supportive replies. It’s funny how picking a last name really is a minor thing, but it’s so symbolic that people are very invested in it. Even my mom expressed surprise and concern when she asked what we were doing about the last name (imagining, I suppose, that we would either take B’s name or combine), assuming that I must have railroaded B into this decision with my pushy feminist ways. I suspect that is how B’s family might see it as well, which is probably why I’m struggling with the “good girl” urge to please them. But I am in full agreement with everything you said in favor of using my last name, M. B seems to be on the same page too, but we both agree that it’s sad that either one of us has to be the odd-parent out. We think the boy-gets-his-girl-gets-mine idea is a good one, but if we end up with two kids of different sexes (who knows), we would like them to share the same last name. Anyway, more good food for thought—thanks for listening and responding!

G, your advice to follow our own path is wise. But to be honest I’m having a hard time trusting that we know how to make our own path in this parenting wilderness!! I have been feeling COMPLETELY ignorant about anything baby-related (I knew more about babies in junior high when I babysat all the time--don’t think I’ve changed a diaper since) and, given my anal academic tendencies (okay, I’m also a Virgo), I have been feeling the need to gather information on everything. I don’t really believe that I have any instinctual knowledge of how to care for a baby (hell, I’ve been critiquing essentialist, maternalist ideologies for some 15 years now, so no wonder I don’t think I have any maternal instincts, I’ve theoretically demolished them!). B is more confident that we will do fine, but I sometimes stare at him and feel like shouting, “if we don’t do our studying now, we will NOT do fine!!!” (I’ve made a pile of books for him to read--I think he’s read about 10 pages of one of them, much to my chagrin. I’m afraid I’m a bit of a nightmare right now--saint that he is, he’s dealing with me really well.) Accumulating information is also one of the ways I deal with anxiety, of which I’ve got plenty these days! (Have to just share this: at a conference a couple of months ago I was having a meal with a bunch of friends who are all new parents. One of them was sharing a story about how his baby ate a battery from an alarm clock and it got stuck in her throat and they had to take her to the ER, and I asked totally earnestly why they didn’t just hang her upside down and shake her. Everyone roared and told me I had MUCH to learn before the baby is born!!! I took this very much to heart.)

Some time I would love to have a chat about feminism and motherhood—I do find myself confused a lot these days, caught between my long-held feminist views (which, I must now admit, included some latent denigration of motherhood) and totally new desires and experiences (like, I’m seriously reconsidering pursuing a full-time academic career because I want to prioritize family and don’t want to leave the bay area).... This is all such new terrain: to be out of academia for the time being, to be married, to be pregnant, to be seriously considering alternate life routes to the one I’ve so long imagined! I think I want to be home at least part-time with the baby, and I’m struggling to feel okay about that. It’s like I’ve crafted this whole ediface for my life over the past decade plus, and now I think I might not want to dwell in it!

Okay, enough of true confessions.

Gratitude, love, and admiration to you both,
T

On Thurs., Jan. 22, 2009, at 1:28 p.m., M wrote:

This is just so funny. I love your description of devouring texts in order to shore up what must be a weak/nonexistent maternal instinct. I, too, struggled mightily with stepping into the role of “Mother” that I swore off forever--no takebacks!--in the 8th grade. For what it is worth, here’s what I’ve found: It’s not really a question of maternal instinct. It’s about love, which is evenly distributed. G and I both love Baby A ridiculous amounts. We would do anything for that rabbit. He is as good a parent as I am, and better in many ways. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing when we had a baby but we had a few key resources that I hope you can find: 1) an excellent, overly cautious mensch of a traditional pediatrician who you can call at any time of the day or night, and 2) a funny, skilled midwife that you can call any time of the day or night. They come at every single health issue from the exact opposite places. It helps us stay on the Middle Path. Example: She co-sleeps with kids who are 5 and 7. He subtly encourages what he calls “recreational” breast feeding to wrap up by about 18 months (I am ignoring him). She prescribes grapefruitseed extract for the baby’s thrush; he wants Baby A on a full course of antibiotics. Etc.

Anyway, I’d love to talk with you about the nature/nurture question of motherhood sometime. The one thing that has blown my mind is breastfeeding. Nothing has ever been this much of a pain in the butt (nipple, really) that I love doing. It is Baby A’s favorite thing in the entire universe. That is not an overstatement. She desires and adores my body like no other human ever has. And it never gets old for her. It is always a thing of pure delight. Well, to be that for someone else, in a way that is directly related to gender, just throws a big ol’ wrench in my whole “women and men are equal” thing. Damn. Mind you, I don’t think a lot flows from that biological fact--men aren’t supposed to slay the dragon and women aren’t supposed to clean the toilets as a result, but it is pretty amazing to have a somatic experience of one’s certitudes around gender dissolve, or at least get fuzzy around the edges.



On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 5:54 PM, G wrote:

Hey, T,

You’ve probably heard this before, but trust me: you know way more about babies than you think. I didn’t know squat; I’d never babysat, never been around infants, never changed a diaper in my life. (To tell the truth, I was relieved when we chose disposables since I could avoid folding and pins.) My instinct about the battery story was exactly yours. (I don’t know how far down the kid’s throat the thing was -- presumably it wasn’t completely obstructing her airway.) As our family story goes, my dad once turned my sister upside down, held her by the ankle, thrust his hand down her throat, and plucked out a penny. M’s biggest ongoing fear is that Baby A will choke. But kids seem to have good instincts about what they can tolerate in terms of food intake, and we’ve been lucky to avoid Duracells and loose change.

During M’s pregnancy I didn’t read much beyond babycenter.com’s weekly bulletins, and though I’ve since read a couple of parenting books I can’t say how much has stuck. There are still plenty of things for which I rely on M completely: installing car seats, for instance, or altering straps on the high chair, or just about anything that requires construction or tools. (This has always been true, but it comes up a helluva lot more with a baby around.) And I routinely suffer parental guilt -- should I have put Baby A down to pick up the Times crossword puzzle instead of reading “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” for the fifth time? But parents have to maintain sanity somehow. And Baby A is, so far as I can tell, just fine: playful, trusting, engaged in the universe, generally likable. So we must be doing something right. I’d have dismissed these words 16 months ago, but now I firmly believe them: if you never read another word, you and B would have everything you need to be successful parents.

Keep breathing.
G.

On Friday, Jan. 23, at 12:45 p.m., T wrote:

I already feel like pregnancy has “thrown a wrench” into my anti-gender-difference viewpoint, M, so I can only imagine what breast feeding will do to it!! But I agree, it’s not that the biological differences themselves matter, it’s the meanings society ascribes to them that matter and the consequences of these meanings (dragon slaying and toilet bowl cleaning). But that sometimes gets confused when you’re battling gender essentialist “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” crap all the time--you just start rejecting biological difference itself!

And thanks for the confidence in our abilities to parent just as we are, G. Since I can believe that is true for OTHER people, like you guys, there might be a chance that I can start believing it’s true for us as well. My family actually has a similar choking story by the way--my brother got a candy stuck in his throat when he was a toddler and my parents dislodged it by shaking him upside down. So I guess it does work--or at least it USED to in the good ole days--but this group of parents didn’t think it was such a good idea, and of course, I assumed they must know!

Did I tell you how much I relished Anne Lamott’s “Operating Instructions?” By far the best book I’ve read so far on parenting...

Love to you both, and to Baby A,
T

The Cleverest Baby in the History of Western Civilization

9:18 p.m. -- 15 months, 14 days

Forgive the 8-month hiatus, for which I offer no excuses. I'm back at work. Baby A is in many ways a different being, though some traits remain unaltered: her precociousness; her desire for order; her quickness both to learn and to become frustrated; her generally sweet nature. At her 15-month checkup last week -- 36 inches (95th percentile), 24.6 pounds (75th percentile, between 25th and 50th percentile for her height), 19-inch head (98th percentile), entirely healthy -- our pediatrician reminded us that at six weeks he'd noted that she was "a baby in a hurry." That clearly hasn't changed.

Not that we're tracking or anything, but as evidence I present a list of the 180 words used (not just repeated) by one 15-month-old child in an early 21st century bourgeois American household. (Typical 19- to 24-month-olds apparently use 50 to 70 words.) At the insistence of my spouse, proper nouns were included in the count; over my spouse's objections, animal sounds were not. (All proper nouns are relatives except "Keith," a friend of our babysitter's whom she's never met but whose name she apparently likes to say.) Listed in the order we remembered them, the words are intended solely for academic study by linguists, anthropologists, aliens, and family members. The first 45 were recorded on 27 Nov., when Baby A was two days shy of 14 months; the remainder were recorded tonight. Most she has pronounced correctly, though she struggles with "L"s and "R"s and truncates the majority of the polysyllabics ("dishwasher" = "dish-a-sha", "harmonica" = "mon-ih-ka"). But her meaning, at least to caregivers, is lucid. On a couple of occasions she's turned the trick of combining two words: "Mommy nurse" is her favorite sentence.

Oh, yeah: she's also made sign language signs for "more," "gentle," and "sharing," and she's spoken nine letters: B, E, A, O, W, X, Y, D, T.

For sticklers, "duckity" is a family game quite distinct from the noun "duck"; the game's linguistic origins have been obscured by the mists of time.

Hot, hat, heat, cat (meow), baby, daddy, mommy, nose, eye, ear.
Doggie (arf), duckie (quack), bus, more, milk, uh-oh, me, meat, clock, car.
Yucky, yummy, no, bird, buddha, mouth, this, that, these, ball.
Duckity, cookie, geese, down, poop, book, biscuit, toast, you, mole.
Knee, cow (moo), shoes, up, pee.
Hi, bye, chin, cheek, toes, Adrienne, Joseph, Bella, Garrett, feet.
Help, nurse, nipple, boobie, strawberry, carrot, rice, juice, tea.
Ice cream, soup, gas, open, tubbie, oatmeal, smoothie, paper, red, truck.
Butterfly, caterpillar, pumpkin, basket, water, apple, socks, diaper, beef, fish.
Banana, rose, broccoli, happy, bear, music, dancing, monster, gloves, coat.
Yellow, slippers, boots, dishwasher, dish, laundry, lion (roar), monkey (ooo-ooo), sheep (baa), pig (oink).
Clothes, pants, shirt, Craisin, hair, head, we, pen, cup, train (choo-choo).
Tummy, kisses, blanket, drink, muffin, one, two, three, four, five.
Cold, hand, fingers, thumb, ring, sun, bowl, moon, stars, shoulder.
Elbow, flower, some, yawning, fan, bless you, yogurt, button, light, hurray.
Walk, keys, teeth, tongue, go, gate, wall, lemon, popsicle, tractor.
Bead, box, tree, harmonica, drum, owl, bee, zebra, Keith, tampon.
Gentle, beard, phone, laughing, green, circle, on, off, shampoo, bottle.
Snow, penis, shower, splashing, bed.