Pick a Side

On walks around the neighborhood I have recently taken to saving the lives of still-squirming worms stranded on the sidewalk. The proximity of worms to sidewalks and driveways is a great reminder that we live life “in the foothills of death,” a brilliant turn of phrase from philosopher Mark Johnston. Worms have been dealt a rotten hand; to put things in perspective just imagine if mice spent their entire lives adjacent to a gigantic glue trap that expanded towards them in the rain. So far I have rescued at least three worms.

But I still swat mosquitoes with the lethal accuracy and superhuman speed of Stephen King’s gunslinger Roland Deschain, and I don’t think twice about drowning the scores of ants who, forming a division of the army invading my kitchen, have pushed the western front forward into my dishwasher. My approach to the pesty members of the lower animal kingdom who encroach upon my person or my real estate, perhaps best embodied by my practice of using the aforementioned glue traps to catch mice whom I immediately euthanize, is one of certain speedy death with a minimum of suffering. So, it seems, for the worms I wear the mask of Vishnu the maintainer, and for the ants et.al. I portray Shiva the destroyer, all of which reveals my basic philosophy to be “I bidthe old joke goes, Catholic Lite (as in Miller Lite), then I am also Diet Thich Nhat Hahn, i.e. Peace is (not quite) every step.

If a philosophy is to be considered truly basic, however, it should be universal. When gaps open up it means you still don’t know why you do what you do, which is ultimately to be in the same position as the worms, ants, mosquitoes, and mice. Which is why I found it so unsettling to encounter a bug squirming in a spider web on my porch the other day. “I bid you peace on two conditions…” was, in this case, about as useful as “When lost, never ask directions from strangers; get your wife to do it, or failing that, panic” which, while also basic to my approach to life, wouldn’t have filled in the gap left by the bug squirming in silk. If I bid peace to the bug, by freeing it, I starve the spider. And if I bid peace to the spider, I kill the bug. (And, to state the obvious, neither the bug nor the spider gave a rat’s ass about me or my house, meaning that “I bid you peace…” wasn’t nullified by its qualifiers, just merely meaningless.)

I once had an acquaintance whose basic life philosophy was “When in doubt, do nothing.” It was on the back of this philosophy that he gave his heart to a woman with whom he technically did nothing. “When in doubt, do nothing,” is both convenient (my married acquaintance had a “best friend,” not an emotional affair) and, as a means to choosing while pretending not to, bad faith par excellence. Just so, after I left the bug to die I rationalized that since I hadn’t known what to do I had simply chosen to let nature take its course. In pretending not to have chosen the spider over the bug I was simultaneously lying and suspending disbelief, which is known in the vernacular as believing your own bullshit. Believing your own bullshit will likely get you through the day, but it will just as reliably maintain your soul vibration at a low enough frequency such that you keep managing to piss off your wife.

Determined to stay married ‘til death do us part because a) my wife Jen is a badass sexy mensch who is the best thing that ever happened to me and whom I love with an OCD reckless abandon that involves a lot of checking (imagine the staccato rhythm of the Verizon guy’s “Can you hear me now?”, but substitute “Do you love me now?”) , and b) because I would never grant my enemies the schaudenfreude of my divorce, I have just recently, for the first time in my life, decided to begin aiming my bullshit detector at myself in a concerted effort to address what my shaman, who seems to have momentarily forgotten that flattery will get her everywhere, likes to call “my arrogance.” In fact, I used my bullshit detector in this novel fashion for perhaps the very first time when I caught myself pretending to let nature take its course with the spider and bug, leading, inevitably, to thoughts that I might just be a natural at this self-BS-detection thing (i.e. to more BS). But, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

The unvarnished truth is that I chose the spider. If its captive had been, say, a ladybug or a lightning bug, I would have chosen differently. But this was an average bug, in no way special or glamorous, completely lacking e.g. the erotic danger of the praying mantis, the mystical overtones of the butterfly, or even the grotesquerie of the cockroach. It was only too easy to imagine the generic bug in the web as the equivalent of a pale orange tomato pressed between cellophane and light green Styrofoam.

It is likely that my “I bid you peace on two conditions…” is as self-delusional as “When in doubt, do nothing.” Where the latter denies the inevitability of choosing, the former, as in the case of the bug and the spider, denies the inevitability of choosing sides. Note that Jesus said “Love your enemies,” not “Don’t have enemies.”

And re: my choice of the spider over the bug because the bug basically looked like someone who might be sitting next to you on the bus, there’s clearly still plenty of grist for my shaman’s mill in our next session.

Plus, my math was all wrong. Since when is missing lunch the equivalent of becoming lunch? That’s some bullshit.

2+1=Big: Excerpt #2

When I first met Jen it was on the heels of a relationship in which my laissez faire approach to housekeeping had been identified as one of my less becoming attributes. So on the fateful night we first went out for drinks, when I essentially signed a lifetime contract, it was deeply reassuring when I first laid eyes on the interior of Jen’s blue Corolla. In addition to the brazier draped across the front passenger seat among other miscellaneous items, I noted that the back seat was inhabited by a table, and that spread throughout the remaining available space were stacks and stacks of Jen’s twelfth grade English students’ written work. I knew that a woman with a car in this state couldn’t possibly notice how carelessly I draped four pairs of pants on one wire hanger. It appeared that Jen might not even be familiar with the concept of a hanger, a prognostication later validated by witnessing Jen’s preferred approach to organizing her clothes, which involves multiple small piles on her bedroom floor. My own composting approach to laundry, in which a week at the bottom of the hamper assures that any intense odors have been absorbed and diluted by other garments in the pile, similar also to how the oceans filter out toxins from the atmosphere, serves to spare me (and the environment!) untold numbers of unnecessary washer/dryer cycles, and is right at home chez Jen.

If sources of marital strife were a Family Feud category, housekeeping would likely rank just behind sex and money as the most popular answers. Jen and I have come up with winning strategies for maintaining marital harmony in each of these three crucial categories. We have sex whenever our children let us. We have an official policy of spending less money than we make, which means we purchase nothing not needed for survival or Jen’s hobby-of-the-month (she buys everything used from the internet for two bucks and change, so we’re not talking a home shopping network addiction here). And neither of us does any cleaning, which means that neither of us can resent the other for doing less. One of Jen’s hobbies-of-the-month was to read up on all the ways to keep one’s house neat and tidy while raising children and working. I believe it was in one of these books that Jen stumbled across the technique that has revolutionized our living space: hiring a cleaning lady.

At work recently I heard a colleague make passing reference to changing the sheets on her beds weekly. I almost choked on my English breakfast tea. At our house sheets are only changed when significant amounts of body fluids, or any amount of vomit (not counting Yael’s spit-up), have rendered the sheets officially soiled. The rigorous clinical trials at the Gaither household have proven that the whole notion of “clean sheets” is socially constructed, and that in the objective world there are only sheets upon which one can sleep and sheets upon which the barf or pee-pee would prevent a restful slumber. When you get right down to it, it is amazing how little housework there really is, if you don’t pay attention to little niggling details like changing the sheets or wiping down surfaces. As long as you do the dishes and laundry and take out the trash you can go months without doing anything else. This leaves you plenty of time to come up with ways to get a half hour without the children so you can have sex. This, unfortunately, might make you have to change the sheets. Might.

Just Wait Until Your Mother Gets Home

In my memoir 2+1=Big I briefly touch upon the difference between my father’s role as disciplinarian and how my own children perceive me:
“My mother was a guru of parental stock phrases. Push her too far and you got either the aforementioned ‘end of my rope,’ or if you had pushed just a little farther, ‘I’ll put you over my knee.’ I can’t recall ever actually being put over her knee, so the mere threat of a spanking must have carried significant weight. Mom was also known to warn me that she would have to ‘tell your father when he gets home.’ The difference between 2011 and 1978 is that a) Jen would never even think to say this to our kids, and b) if she did my children would probably laugh at her.”

What I’ve come to realize since writing this passage is that not only does Jen abstain from ever warning our kids that she will “tell your father when he gets home,” but that I am constantly saying, in so many words, “just wait until your mother gets home.” I may do a lot of ineffective yelling (I’m working on that), but Jen is the heavy. I can (in my very worst moments) make the girls cry, whereas Jen can make them do what she says. And since making my daughters cry makes me feel like a parenting failure, we get various versions of “just wait until your mother gets home.”

There are two main strands in the explanation of how Jen came to be the heavy at chez Gaither. The first, alluded to in the passage quoted above, is the reinvention of marriage, and the roles played by husband and wife, in the last thirty-five years. When I was a child our dining room table had four chairs, only one of which had arms. The seat with arms was placed at the head of the table, and it was always occupied by my father at dinner. At my dining room table now, all of the chairs are exactly alike, and I am as likely to sit on the side, with my wife or one of my daughters at the putative head, as vice versa. I may happen to drive the family van more often when we are all squeezed in together, but Jen gets to sleep on the king –sized bed (with the baby) while I am relegated to the mattress on the floor. There is a dearth of signals that Daddy is the Head of Household.

In the absence of these signals, the second strand, the matriarchal nature of Jewish life, asserts itself. One of the children’s books in our house, Once Upon A Shabbos by Jacqueline Jules, is the story of a bear from a storybook losing its way and finding itself in Brooklyn. The bear terrorizes the grandchildren who go to the corner store to fetch some honey for their Bubbe. Bubbe then sends her husband, the children’s Zayde, to the store, only to see him return minus the honey that was taken from him by the bear. So Bubbe goes to the store herself, and when the bear attempts to terrorize her and take her honey too, “she put her hands on her hips, looked that bear straight in the eye, and said ‘Bears don’t live in Brooklyn.’” Needless to say, soon it is the bear who is the one crying about being lost and being comforted by the tough but caring Bubbe.

If I had been that Zayde, and the bear had cornered me for my honey, I would have said “just wait until Bubbe gets home.”