From the Field

One Year Later and a Father’s Day Memory

June 20th, 2010

I winked out of existence more than two months ago, consumed by a fever dream brought on by the LOST craze and personal pressure to finish a side project long in the making, and now I’m back in time to observe the anniversary post of this humble blog. Look! I made it a year and it wasn’t completely awful, though I realize the highlight reel is rather lackluster. My most trafficked posts to date are the most practical; the kind of posts that show up in Google results when someone needs answers to relatively obscure questions, like how to replace a toilet tank lid or what to do when you burn your eyes with Clear Care. I occasionally get hits for my rant about eMusic, but most of those I chalk up to image requests for The Antlers. Michael Jackson fans stumble onto the Making of Moonwalker post now and again, which is some small comfort. I imagine them reading with rapt attention, the oddity of Moonwalker and Michael combined to form a tantalizing and nearly indecipherable untruth. Did he really want to make all those changes to the video game? Yes. Yes he did.

This blog has remained serviceable over the year despite the ebb and flow of post frequency, and I intend to continue to post about nothing and everything. I recently started a run of daily writing over at 750words.com in an effort to keep my brain-juice simmering, and so far that has been a welcome repository for creative and analytical offal. Take this, as an example:

As you can see, my sub-conscious is a dramatic 16-year-old writer of love notes and woe-is-me prose that is overtly committed to emotional extremes. The point is, 750words helps you put to page whatever is bottled in your head, even if it’s just an exercise in dramatics and wordplay. I highly recommend it, even if you aren’t the journaling type. The heart of the above quote holds some truth, too—I have decided to spend less time in front of a machine and make the time I do spend sitting here more productive. If I’m at the computer, I want it to be a willful choice and not my modus operandi. There is too much in this world to be missed, otherwise.

A Thing My Dad Did Some Years Ago That Was Good

This blog was launched on Father’s Day last year with a phone call from Luke to Darth Vader, and this year I thought I’d add an anecdote about my dad in honor of all the other great dads that I know and love. Being a dad (or a father, or a pop, or an Old Man) is a tough job. The male, by tradition and usually in practice, is the not-very-soft sex—particularly when it comes to the father-son dynamic. Father’s are not often known for their tenderness, their eagerness to hug and dote and fawn over a son, their long emotional sit-downs or their proclivity to cry. In spite of their hardened sensibilities, father’s will, from time to time, show you that they love you, that they support you, that they care for you, and they will do it in their own special way.

When I was about fourteen, I was a relatively minor terror. I wasn’t cracking open bottles from the bar at a friend’s house or smoking dime bags of weed in the woods, but I was hoarding M80s to blow up fish in the reservoir, shooting BB guns at friends in cardboard “armor,” stealing porno tapes from friends’ parents, performing ill-advised stunts on bikes and skates, and mixing all manner of accelerants in an effort to generate some kind of totally awesome explosion. Typical middle-class teenage male behavior to be sure, but it gave my parents all kinds of reasons to ground me, to throw up their hands in frustration, to keep me locked away from friends and the dangers of the world. I was aimless and ungrateful and beginning to despise my parents’ stranglehold on my freedoms, man. I felt like a prisoner in my own home, a young man devoid of privacy or rights, and I wondered whether my parents would ever understand. (Will Smith had officially declared that parents just don’t understand some years prior).

I remember my dad coming up to my room shortly after I was sent there for performing yet another bone-headed stunt. I was undoubtedly sulking and stewing in my state of parental loathing, but this rare visit from my dad sobered me up for the moment—he only handled the Really Serious Shit, and I was sure this particular stunt hadn’t been all that serious. He walked in and told me to follow him down to the shop, which was household code for the cramped basement room on the backside of the house where my dad kept an impressive collection of tools, woodworking equipment, maintenance supplies and whatever project he happened to be working on at the time. It was, in the parlance of our times, a man cave, and it was not a space that entertained invited guests. It was the one space in our house that was generally off-limits to anyone that wasn’t my dad.

If You Build It, They Will Come Together

I joined him there in that long and narrow space, built-in workbenches running the length of the room on both sides, the tops set at waist height and covered in wood scraps, clamps, tools, and all manner of hardware neatly organized into metal cabinets with small, clear-plastic drawers. He motioned to a stack of 2x4s, said, “We’re building you a box,” and that’s precisely what we set about doing for the afternoon. We sketched out the specifications on paper, took some measurements, and cut the wood to size. We set the hinges and routed out a lip for the lid. This was no ordinary box: it had a routed lid with hinges! We hammered and clamped and finished the project, and before the afternoon was out I had myself a two-foot-by-one-and-a-half-foot box that stood about 16″ off the ground. It was an admirable piece of carpentry for the cost of an afternoon.

As I surveyed my work, Dad bent to rummage through a box below one of the workbenches and after a moment he produced a latch and a padlock. “One more piece,” he said as he dug out a couple of nails from one of the clear-plastic drawers. He hammered on the latch and handed me the padlock and key. “It’s yours, and you can do what you want with it. I know you’ve been looking for some privacy and I want you to know that your mom and I trust you. Be smart, alright?” It was a very simple and powerful expression of love and trust—one of the very few times my dad invited me to build something with him, the first explicit acknowledgement that I was growing up and in need of my own space, the leap of faith implicit in the act of giving me my own lockbox. It was transformative, a sudden balancing of power, and I was instantly filled with gratitude and humbled by the solemn acceptance of my parents’ trust.

Knowing is Half the Battle

I slipped the lock onto the clasp, rushed the box to my room, and pushed it into my closet where it sat for much of its time in that house, untended and empty. I tossed a few things in there now and again, but the box was much more than a place to store crap I didn’t want my parents to see—for me, that box was a symbol of my independence, a symbol of my parents’ trust, a physical confirmation of the fact that I had respect in my house and that my parents did, on some level, understand. The memory and experience of building that box with my dad, the thrill that ran through my teenaged bones when I realized that I had secured a modicum of freedom, and the desire to maintain and respect my parents’ trust kept me from doing a lot of dumb things.

So I dressed that box up over the years with stickers and photos and shlepped it from one house to the next, on to college and here to Chicago where it now sits on my back porch. It’s starting to warp from outdoor exposure, but it still leads a noble life as a seat during parties, as a container for grill gear—suitably manly contents, I think—and as a reminder of years past, of freedom, independence, and trust, and of a father’s love for his son.

Happy Father’s Day to one and all!

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