No, Not Yet

A twelve-year-old is singing along with "Title and Registration" by Death Cab for Cutie:

...where disappointment and regret collide
Lying awake at night...

"Do you have regrets, Agent 97?"

"No."

Ah!

Your Mom

“Agent 97, I believe I’ll need the computer in a moment.”

“I believe your mom will need the computer in a moment. Dissage!”

His late grandmother!

He and his brother give each other “your mom” lines frequently.

What Are You Looking At?

Ten a.m. Agent 97 wakes up, drags himself to the living room to read the latest volume in whatever fantasy adventure series it is this month. I take a ninja stance, arms up, wrists cocked, wagging my fingers menacingly with a “Come on, what have you got?” look.

“Shut uppa you mouth,” he says. “Go to the store right now and get cookies.”

“Ha! I mock you” I say.

“Go get cookies!”

Cool gray Saturday morning, the second chilly day of the season. I love this weather, it makes me imagine I’m in New York or the Bay Area. It lets me wear my new favorite sweater. I’m sitting near the open window, sipping my second half-decaf au lait from a ceramic mug that Agent 83 doesn’t remember giving me when he was a child. I may take a walk to the library, or I may just imagine it. I watch a squirrel with twin nuts in its mouth run the length of a telephone wire, its back undulating. It speeds up when a little bird flies near it, though the bird can’t do it any harm.

I can see what the wire looks like through the squirrel’s eyes. The wire moving under him, and the tops of the green and tan bamboo under that, and the gray cloud-light in his peripheral vision. Pure sensation of movement, no words, pure sight and motion. Life, absolute life.

I can see what the world looks like for this Richard, too. A wide dark space with thoughts zinging across it like meteor showers that make him go, “Ah.” A space infinite but bounded; within its borders everything fits: cities, hosts of people, entire literatures, out to the galaxies. And him little in the center of it, taking in all the messages and sending ones back. Absolute life.

“Get some cookies! There’s nothing to eat around here, what’s a person to eat? What are you looking at?”

Thirteen Ways to Kill a Mockingbird

Agent 97 began seventh grade recently, and I asked him whether his English class was reading anything good. Yes, he told me, there was a poem he liked:

“’Thirteen Ways –- ‘” He twists his mouth to remember. “’Thirteen Ways to Kill a Mockingbird.’”

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is the highest-brow poem middle-schoolers can enjoy, and To Kill a Mockingbird is good-tasting cherry-flavored medicine, but “Thirteen Ways to Kill a Mockingbird” –- now there’s some practical reading.

photo credit, I’m trying, no such word

1. Agent 95 is stunningly insouciant about his photo credit on the Althouse blog. With an ironic yelp, he rushes back to the video screen to play Fallout 3.

2. In Fallout 3, a game about a postnuclear world of radiation poisoning and machine-gun marauders, a chirpy, Midwest-accented female black-marketeer gives advice to the player: “Try not to die!”

3. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary Unabridged does not have an entry for “unflappable.” This discovery throws me into an uproar.

Flowered Van, New Tire, Who’s There?

1. An old blue van painted with huge yellow and red flowers drives by the café window: it’s my kids' day camp van! They’re going to their lives.

2. Suddenly there’s a scent of clean rubber in the coffeehouse. I look around -– a student walks by, a new bicycle tire slung over his shoulder.

3. Unlocking my front door, I accidentally press the doorbell. Hearing it ring inside, I tense up and wonder, “Who’s there?”

It's a Wise Child

Whenever possible I pour drops of paternal wisdom into my children’s ear canals. This time I bought Agent 97 a copy of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Teens. Skimming it, I thought that many of its lessons would be useful for adults too, one of the good ones in the series rather than the useless pablum.

97 reads down the table of contents and responds to the chapter titles:

“’Don’t Throw Up on Your Friends!’ I wasn’t going to.

“’Don’t Sweat the Breakups’ I don’t have a girlfriend.

“’Practice Mental Aikido.’” (Snorts, doesn’t deign to reply.)

“’Avoid the Words “I Know” When Someone Is Talking”’ I already know that.

“’Check Out These Odds! (The Likelihood that Everyone Will Like You)’. Everyone does like me.

“’Get Out of the Emergency Lane.’ I don’t drive.

“’Be OK With Your Bad Hair Day.’ Every day is a bad hair day for me.”

I think he’s got it!

Virtual Car Wash: A Stopgap Post

"Hey, Agent 97, are you still interested in washing my car?"

(transfixed by game screen) "No."

"Are you interested in washing your Sims family's car?"

"Yes."

successful rootering, an Agents’ week, brainwave habit

1. My kitchen sink line has been cleaned of at least a decade’s worth of sludge.

2. The Agents are leaving for their mother’s house this afternoon after eight days with me. I’ll be able to emerge from my room soon.

3. I like my rest ritual when taking a break during work. In a state of tension, I lie face-up on the couch or bed, breathing evenly from my diaphragm, with my arms stretched past my head. Slowly my arms, of their own accord, make their way to my abdomen, by which point the tension is gone. My arms continue until they’re at my sides, the hands completely relaxed. I’m in a deep alpha state, and after a few more breaths I stand up and return to my desk. Unless I’ve gone as far as a theta state, in which I lie still, pressed into the mattress, sailing.

White Powder

When I come back from the restaurant bathroom, Agent 95 hurriedly turns to hide what he’s doing. I hear the unmistakable sound of something illicit being ingested.

“What are you doing, 95?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” I look to the authority on all things 95 -- his younger brother. “What is he doing?”

“Nothing,” Agent 97 says blandly, “but it has something to do with white powder.”

I shift my glance from one to the other. It’s not time for this problem yet, is it?

“Want to see?” Agent 95 asks. He opens his mouth, curling his tongue down toward his chin, and it is indeed heaped with a white powder: a packetful of sugar.

“Can I have another one?” he pleads. “Just one?”

Sure, it's on me!

missing supplies, friend's son, micropreemie

1. When I’m drying off from my shower there are footsteps in the hall. Throughout the week, pens and paper disappear from my desk, and my mouse is attached to someone else’s computer: the kids are here.

2. My friend’s son, visiting with friends from Europe, is driving around the West. I start to shake his hand, but he initiatess the hug that I hesitated to. I make a point of not exclaiming about how big he’s gotten; he asks me what I’m working on, seems really interested. Picks up his part of the check when we go to his childhood’s favorite barbecue joint, which we love showing off to his European pals. Then miniature golf: five teenagers and me, and I get the best score!

3. Agents 95 and 97 are old enough to see movies I would have considered too disturbing a couple of years ago. Children of Men, a dystopia in which the human race has gone infertile. When the first baby in the world is born after eighteen years of global childlessness, battling soldiers cease fire and kneel in wonder, abused refugees press forward to touch its foot.

The wife of a friend of mine has given birth to a sixth-month baby, Charlie, who weighs a pound and a half. My friend sends photos of the child in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, glossy purplish-pink, diapered and electroded and breathing-tubed, growing every moment in its sleep. Charlie’s head is as long as his father’s thumb. He wears a pink and blue knit cap, on which his father’s head rests lightly in the recommended comfort hold. His twin brother died. Suddenly, it is difficult to imagine a world without Charlie.

Bet on the Fly

Agent 95, a youthful character who figured in many posts from the earlier years of this blog, asks me, "How much does my love cost you?"

"Your love doesn't cost me a thing," I vow.

"Yes it does. If you don't get me an iTouch I won't love you. I'll stop speaking to you. If you talk to me I'll act like it's a fly buzzing."

"Yeah? How long are you going to do that for?"

At first they say "forever," he and his younger brother Agent 97, but they settle on next Thursday as a reasonable goal.

"You can't," I dare them. "You can't do it."

"Did I just hear a fly say I couldn't do it?"

"Go ahead, try," I laugh. It's the surest bet ever.

Two minutes later he's asking, "Dad, can I use your laptop?"

Translation

The kids –- should I keep calling them Agents 95 and 97? yes –- watered the lawn this morning, the older one wearing his favorite pants, black and peg-bottomed, with an allover print of white swords. He wears them almost every day. Their mom’s going to pick them up for Mother’s Day, and they did the lawn to pay me for paying for her present. Now they’re watching a disc of the TV series Smallville, and I’m reading Book 5 of the Iliad in a translation-in-progress by a friend of mine, who’s already sold it for big bucks to a major publisher. It’s so good and he’s so painstaking, I can only send him a few little corrections per book. For me, it’s like watching an Olympian being born from the sea.

Carlos, the Honduran guy who mows my lawn, weeded my wildflower plot and mulched my trees without my asking. I thought he was overcharging me for mowing but I see he wasn’t. We each have about twenty words of the other’s language, and we understand fine.

Everything we perceive or communicate is a translation. My eyes, optic nerves, and brain translate the lawn when I examine it to see if the Agents gave it enough water. My linear, one-dimensional words translate the multiform thoughts and physical impulses, far beyond what I can perceive, that come to life when I review the lawn-watering, which is already in the past. This written message translates my "soul," a word which is an awkward, inaccurate translation of something I barely glimpse through a distorting mirror. Translation is all we have, and it’s why Plato was right in thinking we live in a cave watching shadows on the wall. Whether there’s an ideal world or not, that’s necessarily true.

Superstrings

We sit in the living room, both of them with their heads deep as well buckets in the latest fantasy series, the nth and xth volume of the such-and-such saga, while I’m running my hand over old phonograph records (Sinatra, In the Wee Small Hours; Monk, Monk’s Mood; Charles Lloyd, Forest Flower), or hauling stray balls of dust to the garbage pail in the kitchen, or rushing to the study and lifting the lid of the computer to find no emails. We hardly talk. Or else they laugh and try to kick each other off the couch while one is challenging the other to name the clans of all the feline warriors in one of their books, and I’m telling them Don’t kick the furniture, and I’m telling them again Don’t kick the furniture, or else we’re deciding which Monty Python disc to watch and taking turns doing the silliest walk. But sometimes I drift away, I check the rice and linger in the kitchen putting dishes in the dishwasher and flipping through the movie listings and forgetting that the boys are a room away, with me for a short time only. I might even take a book and a glass of Lillet to the front porch and read in the rocking chair while they’re out back, a whole house away, throwing dodgeballs into each other’s guts. Then I ask myself, Why aren’t I with them every possible second? Why aren’t I seizing and storing every vanishing glimpse of them? I only have them less than half the time now, and their childhoods will soon be ending, the older one’s almost twelve, a year from now he might be a whole different creature, one who doesn’t stretch up from his bed to throw his arms around me and tell me I’m the perfect father for him, some other kids wouldn’t be as good a match with me. Sometimes I think I ought to run back and tell them, I didn’t forget you!, and fix my greedy stare on them and not let an instant go by.

But I let myself stay away. Because when they’re out back and I’m on the front porch, I’m still with them. When they’re in their feline warrior fantasy worlds and I’m a Royal Navy ship’s doctor in 1803, we’re all in the same place without hovering over each other, without turning every gesture into a photograph, without videotaping every word for a future when we’ll have nothing to do except look back. If we put a frame around ourselves, if we lit ourselves with stage lights, we’d be starring in a re-enactment of our lives rather than living them.

This is the life of a family. This self-absorption, this shared separateness in the same room, this silence and slow time. We are three galaxies expanding side by side, we are entangled particles at lightyears’ distance. We are connected by superstrings.

Bishop Berkeley, may I introduce Agent 97.

We were hanging around in the living room yesterday evening when Agent 97, lying on the couch, speculated,"If I can't see something, I can't prove it exists. Like if you're sitting on that chair and I can't see you from here, I can't prove you exist."

Roused to suspicion, I immediately interrogated him as to the source of his idea. "Did you read it somewhere? Did you hear it from someone? Did you learn it at school?"

"No, I've just been thinking about it."

I leaned forward, ready to trap him in an admission. "For how long? Why'd you start thinking about it?"

"For a while. I don't know, I just did."

But what if he didn't see me but he heard me, I queried.

Well, any of the senses, he readily agreed.

I tousled his hair for having independently invented a major philosophical theory, and told him to brush his teeth before bed.

Agents of Metaphor

We’re in Din Ho Chinese Barbecue -– barbecued pork, sizzling beef with black pepper, clay-pot-baked eggplant in garlic sauce, vegetable lo mein – when it occurs to Agent 97 to ask me to remind him what a metaphor is.

“Well, do you know what a simile is?”

“Yeah.” He seems mildly offended -– he’s in fourth grade, after all. So I explain that a metaphor is like a simile except you take out the like or as. We start thinking of metaphors and similes: the lake of sauce in the serving dish, the strands of noodle are like Agent 97’s hair, and so on and so forth.

“I’ve always thought that similes are pretty childish,” Agent 95 puts in.

“Well, er, um,” I stammer, trying to grasp at justifications for my use of similes over the eons. All I can come up with is that a simile sometimes sounds better than its equivalent metaphor. It’s true, similes are on the whole less sophisticated than metaphors.

Scary. It’s like being perfectly happy with your clothes and then being told they're so twenty years ago.

I’m becoming concerned that Agent 95 has taken his first steps down the road to perdition. He saw my copy of the coffee table book The Writer’s Desk, which shows various famous writers pretending to work (looking out their garden windows thoughtfully, abstractedly petting their dogs, etc.) the other day, and lunged for it and yearningly asked if he could have it. Yes, of course. So I had to start explaining to him who Richard Ford and Eudora Welty were. God knows where it will end. I feel like Fagin in Oliver Twist, teaching an 11-year-old to be a pickpocket.

Lost in Plato's Cave

We’re coughing away at breakfast time under the influence of our colds and talking about what makes horror movies scary -- is it the building of suspense by the writer and director and editor, is it special effects, is it the audience’s preconceptions about what scares them – when Agent 97 makes a turn in the conversation:

“Did you ever notice that the actor who plays Jack on Lost looks just like Jack?”

“Huh? What do you mean? He is Jack. There’s no one else who is Jack. He looks like himself.”

We tried to think of times when that isn’t true: when the actor is playing an alien, such as a Klingon, or when the actor is playing a historical person. We can say that Henry Fonda does and doesn’t look like Lincoln, that Spencer Tracy does and doesn’t look like Edison. But can there be a case when the character is a fictitious human being and the actor doesn’t look like the character?

That’s where casting comes in, I told them. The actor who plays Jack is perfectly cast as that type of person: a regular guy, a skilled doctor with human flaws and doubts, handsome enough but scruffy and not a matinee idol type, strong but a little soft-looking. He looks like a man who has too wear a suit professionally but always looks a little shlumpy in it. The actor who plays the snivelly British rock star is perfect too. Some of the others on that show aren’t as perfect: they’re too goodlooking. Sawyer and Sayid would be perfect if they were a bit less handsome.

This problem affects the casting of female roles especially. The actress who plays Kate is too beautiful for what Kate would be in real life. The real one would be sexy, of course, in order to pull her cons on men; she might be a facsimile of a girl next door, convincing to the easily gulled; but there’s an element of tawdriness missing from the actress’ persona. The real Erin Brockovich, who plays a waitress in the movie Erin Brockovich, is perfectly cast for the role of Erin Brockovich, while Julia Roberts is just the Hollywood version.

Can we be imperfect versions of ourselves? Are there Platonic ideals of ourselves, whom we in real life fail to realize fully? Am I perfectly cast to be Richard, and what could I do to fit the role better — or should the reverse be true, should the ideal be adjusted to match the reality? What would the world look like in which we were all the Platonic ideals of ourselves?

Most important: does the ideal me have to sit here all day typing his brains out?

Sunday Phone Calls

Phone calls with my parents used to happen on Sundays. I’d call my father or he’d call me, and we’d exchange trivial information about recent events – about who had a cold, and who had gotten an A on a test, and where we’d driven the day before, and whatnot. Occasionally important things were said, but not very often. I didn’t trust my father’s advice very much. He meant well, but I thought he didn’t know enough about life, or about my life, to steer me right. Sometimes I purposely did the opposite of what he said, on the theory that that was more likely to work. But I enjoyed talking to him about my kids and my work, and finding out how he was doing in his post-divorce life.

Phone calls with my mother were more problematic: so many boring complaints. But I liked it when we talked about the characters in our family, their meshuggener histories, her sharp acerbic assessments.

Now that they’re dead, I sometimes have a funny feeling on a Sunday morning: “It would be nice to talk to Dad on the phone today.” Yesterday morning I even caught myself thinking in the old half-annoyed way, “Maybe Mom will call this morning.”

Sometimes I imagine my kids, in the future, thinking the same thing about me.

While I’m writing this, Agent 95 zips into my study and points a finger at me: “It’s my archnemesis, Dadman!”

He’s already learned what I never did: to take it comically.

Two Sketches of Sameness

If you happen by McDonald’s on a Thursday morning, Agent 95 will be the one with an Egg McMuffin meal and milk, Agent 97 will be the one with hotcakes (no sausage) and milk, and I’ll be the one sitting at their table with a sausage biscuit and orange juice. It’s a ritual we’ve instituted, and many weeks we see the same people there: the burly man taking his two daughters to private school; the clean, articulate homeless woman at the corner table holding court with homeless men; and the Mexican-American counter workers, always making me repeat the word “milk” in my Yankee accent because I didn’t say “coffee.” Agent 97 always putting on too much syrup and almost spilling it off the Styrofoam plate, and always cutting pieces so large he has to struggle not to spit them out. Agent 95 always eating the hash browns first and leaving a quarter of his sandwich, a bite-marked crescent.

I looked at us and asked, “Do you think we’ll ever order anything different?”

“Not likely,” said 95.

“I doubt it,” said 97. “Maybe if we enter a parallel universe.”

And they resumed the same excited conversation as every other time, about the powers of video game characters and the current Happy Meal toys.

2. Happy Groundhog Day
I received a mass “Happy Groundhog Day” email yesterday from someone who’s known my family and me recreationally for half a dozen years. It contained a link to an admiring critical essay about the movie Groundhog Day, a favorite of mine and of almost everyone who’s seen it. In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray wakes up every morning to find that it’s still February 2nd, as it was the day before. Trapped in a nightmare, he tries to change fate and make a new day arrive, but something always goes wrong – until the happy ending.

I emailed a thank-you, and the sender replied, “For some reason I was thinking of you when I sent it to everyone, and you’re the first one to email me back.”

Of course, I thought. My life is the same every day: I try to coexist with myself and my loved ones, I try to do my tasks to make a living and keep up a household, I try to form a few simple sentences into a clear picture. And I took the thought with me for a little while as I went about those tasks.

But who am I kidding, and who is Groundhog Day kidding? Nothing ever stays the same.

Agent 95 Secedes!

After school, Agent 95 told us, “I’ve decided to secede my desk from the other three desks at my table. We’ve been learning about how the South seceded and I want to try it out.”

“How can you secede your desk?” his mother asked. “You can’t move it away from the rest of the table, can you?”

“Well, did the South move when it seceded?”

A good point, I thought. His mother asked, “What’s the matter, don’t you like the other kids at your table?”

“Two of them I like and the other one’s okay. I just want to secede, that’s all.”

Probably as true a reason as the ones in the history books.