Archive for the ‘Parenting’ tag
The Home Team
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Carter has three baseball hats that he wears on a regular basis: a crimson Indiana University hat with the Hoosiers’ white pitchfork I crossed with a U logo; a navy blue St. Louis Cardinals road hat; and a Chicago White Sox hat that is so sweat-stained it’s turned from black to brown. Each of them is there for a reason. Debbie and I met when we were in school at Indiana, and I’ve followed the Hoosiers ever since I could sit in front of a TV to watch Bobby Knight menace referees on the basketball court. The Cardinals have been my favorite baseball team my whole life, and the White Sox are my adopted hometown team now that I live in Chicago, mainly because they aren’t the Cubs.
One morning last summer I was helping Carter get dressed for his day camp and I asked him which hat he wanted to wear. He picked the Sox hat again, as he had every day that summer.
Aging Slowly in the Big City
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On my birthday last month, I watched with narcissistic glee as the obligatory well wishes piled up on my Facebook wall. I’m not a big Facebook user–I prefer the news sense and black humor of the people I follow on Twitter–but my birthday is the one day of the year I check the Social Network first. It’s not the same as a surprise party or thoughtful gift, but at the very least it makes me feel like someone thought about me for a second, even if “Happy birthday man!” is the most they’ve said to me in 15 years.
Most of my birthday posts this year had the same drive by quality, but of the handful of friends who added a little extra (mostly wise-assery, but still appreciated), my friend Kevin added the comment that struck me the most. “I hope you write something poignant about aging slowly in the big city.” I didn’t ask him what exactly he meant by “aging slowly,” but until then I hadn’t thought much about getting older. I’m 34, and after I passed the milestones of 16 and 21, I stopped thinking much about how old I was at all. In fact, I’ve actually had to stop and calculate my age a couple times in the past few years when someone asked me.
Sunday Mornings
This piece originally appeared at The Millions
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My parents spent the weekend at my house recently, and besides the standard good feelings of spending time with the people who raised me, I’ve come to look forward to these visits because they are two able-bodied adults who can help watch my kids. Once the initial greetings are shared, bags unpacked, and meals cooked, their presence in the house offers the unusual chance to sneak away to check my email unmolested and go to the bathroom without being interrupted mid-stream by a door-pounding demand for apple juice.
Proof
My first day of school is crystallized in a now 30-year-old photograph taken by my father, of me and my friends Mark, Clint, and Chris on our first day of preschool. Ready to become Pooh Bears at the Kinderschule in Wadesville, Indiana, we stand holding hands in front of the entrance. Mark is wearing a powder blue polo shirt with matching shorts. Clint has on a striped tank top. Chris has his mouth open as if he was talking, and I’m about to insert my index finger into my mouth, my version of thumb-sucking. I remember nothing from this day, but the wary, apprehensive look on my face in that photo describes the moment perfectly.
What you remember from your first day of school is cobbled together from what your parents told you, from images in your mind of what the school looked like, which friends were there, and how much you liked your teachers. But most often it’s defined by the photos, which replace the memories themselves. When I was a kid, I assumed my dad took pictures like this expressly to torture me and my sister. No trip was complete without a family photo posed in front of a row of bushes at my grandparents’, standing against a railing over a scenic outlook in the Smoky Mountains, or backs to a sunset on a Florida beach. Now that I have my own kids I understand why he did this. He needed to take those pictures to remember being there, to make sure it really happened, because our real memory falls apart so quickly.
What’s Left Behind
I know I’ve driven on US-45 in southern Illinois on sunny spring and summer days, but I always picture it in the winter, with gray skies and two-week-old snow on the ground, the kind that’s been there long enough to start melting into ugly, misshapen ice and turn filthy black along the edges of the road. It’s one of the many routes I can take to get from Chicago to my parents’ house in Poseyville, Indiana. The towns along US-45 are drab and desolate, some slightly larger than others, delineated by whether they have a McDonald’s and a Marathon station or a Citgo with a quickie mart. Louisville, Geff, Hord, Cisne, Flora: they appear universally tired, towns you remember from childhood but left long ago, returning briefly to visit your grandparents once or twice a year, for only old people still live in towns like this. The houses themselves appear to be asleep, hunkered down on their lots, dirty clapboard sidings mirroring the mottled, sagging skin of their inhabitants. Some children must live there or at least visit regularly, according to the broken down Playskool cars and rusty swing sets scattered around the front yards of houses lining the road, but they’re never present when we drive through, as if they hibernate through the bleak winter days.