The Art of Touch

November 10th, 2009 by seth

After a dinner break on a family road trip, I fished out the sidewalk chalk and invited the kids to draw pictures on the sidewalk bordering the parking lot. An older couple passed us and saw what the kids were doing. The man paused to speak to me. “Fifteen years ago,” he said, “I lay the concrete for this sidewalk.” His tone was amusingly critical, as if he felt that what we were doing to “his sidewalk” was wrong but not that wrong, but I didn’t think he was joking.

I replied, “I can’t believe it’s taken 15 years for someone to deeply appreciate your work.”

The bronze ears on the hare in Copley Square are shiny from the many grips of children’s hands as they climb upon the bunny’s back for a pretend ride. The bills of the bronze ducklings in Boston’s Public Garden are similarly bright from touch, polished over many years by thousands of bare palms. The artist of both sculptures, Nancy Schön, writes “I wanted my sculpture to be interactive and touched.”

Then there’s architect I. M. Pei, who said in an interview that he felt validated and even proud of the oil stains at the edge of one his buildings. The East Building of the National Gallery comes to a very sharp vertical edge, an edge so enthralling to visitors that they can’t help but touch and even squeeze the line where the building’s sides comes together, discoloring it over time. Pei sees this discoloration as proof that his idea is meritorious.

Unlike art that makes you think, art that you can touch — even if you’re not really supposed to — can be so affecting that, like children, we ourselves must touch it. This man’s sidewalk came that much closer to transcendence with the simple addition of my children’s chalk. This intentionality of touch, of reaching out and feeling the paint, the edges, the colors, is for me an important part of art. It’s so important, in fact, that if I can’t touch an object, I will mime the creation of it with my fingers, as if I were brushing my hands through a Zen sandbox. Children understand. They touch, mar, smear, push, brush, pet, poke, and scratch everything. Their worlds are — and literally must be — at their fingertips.

I remember how my children, like all very young children, used to put everything in their mouths, and suddenly I’m a little bit jealous.

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Play clothes

September 6th, 2009 by seth

I’m washing dishes when I hear, “Show Daddy.”

I know this has something to do with Oren’s clothes. My wife enters the kitchen first, as if to announce an honored guest. Oren follows. He is wearing a buttoned shirt with vertical red and blue stripes, dark blue corduroy pants, and blue socks. I selected these clothes myself, rummaging through nearly empty dresser drawers, but even I am a bit surprised at how much older he looks in those clothes. My wife says, “Doesn’t he look like a little man?” Oren stretches his arms in the air in a grand ta-dah gesture. This untucks his shirt and exposes the front waistband of a diaper, diminishing things a little.

Four-year-old Siena is dressed casually in a white tee and blue jeans, barefoot. She says, “He looks like he’s going to a meeting.” My wife laughs and asks Oren, “Are you going to a meeting?” and “Are you a CEO?”

“I’m not going to a meeting,” Oren says. He doesn’t likes this idea, doesn’t recognize the compliment. “I’m going to play on an adventure,” he says.

I know why Siena said what she did. Going to a meeting is why I get dressed up. In fact, it’s nearly the only reason I ever put on a tie and jacket: client meetings, professional events, teaching. I used to worry that my children would get anxious by my professional wardrobe, as though business dress were some kind of Pavlovian precursor to being without a parent. But now they’re both old enough to grasp the less emotional truth that I dress up for work-meetings (whatever those are). Oren, who bears an uncanny resemblance to a miniaturized dress-casual model from a J. Crew catalog, is going to a meeting. Siena, who looks more like a girl from a promotional candid in a Disney Cruise brochure, is having fun. Oren doesn’t want work. He wants play. He wants adventure.

Almost every book with advice for home-office workers suggests showering and dressing like everyone else, not just donning yesterday’s shorts. In my experience, however, there isn’t a single work-at-home individual who ever dresses up. Even video conference participants know the camera doesn’t see what you’re wearing below the edge of the desk. Dressing up simply makes no sense. The casualization of the public workplace is taken far more seriously, and sometimes to secret extremes, by those who traded in their cubicles for entire houses. Under-dressing is a perk, an aggressive compensation for all of those social exchanges we’re missing.. So when I actually have browse my closet and meet people, it is a little bit of an adventure.

Oren has it wrong, thinking that work and play are contradictory things. I like playing businessman.

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The mundane miracles

August 24th, 2009 by seth

“Needle in a Haystack” was conceived as a joke, but my kids love it. I do too, but only because it keeps them engaged long enough for me to work or talk on the phone. To play “Needle,” you uniquely mark up a thumb-size wood chip, throw it away, and then fetch it. The catch is this: the playground — the entire playground, all 400 square feet of it — is carpeted with an inch-thick covering of nearly identical thumb-size chips.

When my brother was seven years old, he couldn’t contain his joy when he traveled backwards in time for nine minutes. He didn’t experience anything; he just noticed the numbers of his bedside clock repeat themselves, once and for no good reason. For days he spoke of it, as though he had been divinely chosen to stay in bed a little longer.

But once we’re adults, for miracles to be miracles, they have to mean something. We get a choice about what it means, but we absolutely must choose. We can find a penny on the street and think, “This coin was left here meaningfully for me to find, perhaps by God,” or we can contemptuously sneer at it because, after all, it’s a stupid, worthless penny not worth our effort to pick up. Never both. A college friend once dreamed a bowling game in which he got his average score, so we teased him about his wasting a perfectly good dream on an average event. Even today, when I discovered my car with the keys locked in and the windows down, I felt no supernatural breath on my neck. It was dumb luck, that’s all. I have too much on my plate already for me to waste time on a silly miracle.

Children live in a world with no clear boundaries. Everything is possible, especially for grown-ups, who can perform superhuman feats of strength, sensation, dexterity, and intelligence. My children don’t yet understand why cars and paper didn’t always exist, why some things can’t be fixed, or why there aren’t a billion different spoken languages or nearby planets. My children view the world in the black and white of perfection and futility. In that forgettable middle space of grays are the most mundane of miracles, where finding a thrown wood chip is just as ordinary and expected as my having to wreck my pen creating two dozen replacements.

We admire our children for seeing beauty in the world. But to them, I think, beauty is plain ordinary.

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The gossip of preschoolers

August 7th, 2009 by seth

My whole family was in the car when one of my kids announced, “Eva has a lunchbox with a princess on it. Sophie has a fairy on hers, but Eva doesn’t think fairies are real.” Is it just me or does this sound like gossip?

Since I first really noticed a comment like this, I’ve been listening more carefully. Now I’m fascinated at how children talk unabashedly about their friends and their friends’ problems.

“Ryan wanted to go down the slide yesterday, but he wasn’t allowed because his pants were wet. He wets his pants a lot.”

“Daddy? We listened to that song at school once, but Terri said she didn’t like it. She says she only likes movie music.”

“Brian ate steak for lunch. He ate the whole thing.”

“When we had a fireman come to the school to talk about being a fireman, Isabel wanted to sit in the front but couldn’t because her parents brought her to school late and made her miss the beginning part.”

The inflection when these comments are spoken is devoid of any meanness or envy. They are spoken with such an earnest this-is-so-awesome vulnerability that you’d think they were thanking someone for a favorite birthday present. My replies are forcibly noncommittal, along the lines of “I see” and “Oh yeah?,” but that’s good enough. They’re don’t need validation from me. This is their news, the headlines of the social drama that is preschool, the very first building blocks of the he-said-that-she-said-that-she-thought urgency you hear from the mouths of middle-schoolers.

Years ago I believed that a person’s intelligence was reflected in his dialogue. People who spoke about ideas outrank those who spoke about events, who outrank people who gossip. For preschoolers there still isn’t a whole of lot of “ideas” to talk out. My son is learning karate; my daughter is learning the planets. I teach them about cooking with the aid of Ratatouille, and I bring every bug I can catch in a box to their day care. But conversation with my kids is dominated by conversation first about themselves, and then about others. They know the names of every creature that has ever crossed their path, from television characters to neighborhood pets, from friends to distant relatives. They are still beginning to construct the foundation of their life-view, and people and their relationships are the hardest and most important parts to learn right now. So when my daughter says, “Me and Donatello both drew flowers in our drawings, but his stems were smaller than mine,” I see the future shadow of all life’s challenges laid out ahead of her: competition, creativity, sexism, science, apology, self-image, compromise, and emotional health. The gossip of preschoolers is not fluff. It is a casual but critical oversimplification of an unknown world. In response to this, the adult is reduced to nearly nothing.

“Really?” I say. Yes, very really.

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The box of which to think outside

July 8th, 2009 by seth

This morning my daughter crayoned a quick picture for me, an abstraction of a rainbow that looks like a staircase, and then she wrote her name on it. Beneath the rainbow were the letters

SIE

and on the back of the sheet,

NA.

Later, I’m going to have to explain this to my wife, to her mom. See, I’ll say, she wrote her name, which starts here … and ends here. And if they’re anything like me, they’ll necessarily pause for a moment, needing a second or two to process this idea alighting upon the a-hah of understanding. It’s true; when you read the big letters above, didn’t you briefly pause to put the ideas together? Front-and-back integration is actually hard for us. What doesn’t even register on the brain of a four-year-old requires a focused effort from her parents.

Professionally, I want to be more like Siena. Working with words and web pages, I am always shoehorning my ideas into a hierarchical structure, the columnar layout of HTML pages, the little rectangles of a PowerPoint slide. I like being a stay-at-home dad, juxtaposing parenting with professionalism, because this breaks the mold. I learn from both, and then apply to both. Exceptions are cracks in the mold. The reason it takes time to process these exceptions is because we’re re-learning, growing, becoming smarter, finding wisdom. There’s insight aplenty jammed into those cracks.

Handwriting analysis experts will explain how the edges of our penmanship matter a great deal when interpreting personality. Writing up to the very edge of the physical page implies desperation and compensation (you just can’t afford the delay of starting a new line), whereas leaving lots of extra whitespace implies carelessness and distraction (you just can’t wait to start a new line). And if you get to the bottom of a page or card and start bending the text and writing upwards along the margin, you probably don’t know to relax and let go. But Siena and other kids her age don’t even see the edges; they don’t think twice about turning it over and using the backside. And Oren, who draws on toys, tables, and every exposed part of his body (especially the fascinating bottoms of his bare feet), doesn’t acknowledge the specialness of the paper itself. In adults, these behaviors tend toward mental instability.

The box is how we function. Ignore it, and excel.

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The Fall of My Discontent

June 13th, 2009 by seth

I don’t know why, but I’m continually growing more afraid of heights. And falling from them. And landing.

I love a good view, especially from tall buildings or mountain ledges. I remind myself that I’m safe, and I work hard to shove my irrationality as deep into my gut as I can, to pretend it doesn’t exist.

When I was perhaps eight years old, I had my first vision of a fall. I imagined that my eyeglasses slid off the bridge of my nose and fell from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Those with poor eyesight will admit how precious eyeglasses are, how they represent our connection with the world around us, and how losing them — at least for the first several hours — is like losing a member of the family. As a young boy, my “vision” of the end-over-end loss of my world was apparently too much for me, because ever since I have grown increasingly nervous at the edges of the world.

Today, it is hard for me to put my forehead against a top-floor window, to step onto a balcony, to stand at a high guardrail, and to climb a long ladder. I hide this from my kids, of course, because I know how awesome it is to see people the size of ants, and entire forests of fall colors, and shining mountain valleys. And yet every one of my possessions is twisted around my arms and wrists, gripped in my hands, and shoved deep into my pockets. Even my neck is tucked down a bit, like the head on a turtle, lest I lose my glasses. It’s like standing over sewer grating with my cars keys out: someday, I am convinced, they will fall into the cracks and never come back out.

Of course, I fear more for my kids than for myself. As a parent, I can’t allow myself to call these fears unfounded; Oren has fallen down stairs twice in three years, though without injury. I have grown to hate staircases, even two-step staircases, especially near the top ledge. And that’s not all. Once he plunged head-first over the couch into the floor. I don’t know which was worse: his falling, or my watching.

I have a whole new perspective of the world now that I have kids. It’s bigger, and a whole lot less flat.

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A Lawn on My Mind

June 3rd, 2009 by seth

Oh, it’s so embarrassing. I can’t believe I’m actually publishing this in my blog.

I bought a lawnmower.

I’m so ashamed! For years I looked askew at those men who woke early on weekend mornings, an hour before the ordinary and righteous people of the world stopped sleeping in, and in ragged cutoffs and loosely laced tennis shoes marched patterns on the grasses, the noise of their infernal machines scaring away the birds. I could never understand their longing for the perfect edge, or the wet confetti that stuck to their legs; that grassy smell mixed with exhaust, or the sweat that accumulated in their armpits; the perfection of accessories and specialized tools no other vehicles ever require, like the blade sharpener, the waste bags, the hard black plastic spoon; or worst of all, the weekly devotion to the seeding, wetting, weeding, and heading of a hundred thousand living objects destined to grow back.

This subculture of worship is so alien to the child, the student, the renter, and the condo owner that never once was I offered membership. Instead and unexpectedly, I got thrown overboard from a sinking economy, dashed upon the rocks of my mortgage, and stranded on an island in a sea of greens, worried about the vegetative tide. My new friends at the hardware store were sympathetic, especially when I couldn’t speak “acres.” They talked to me about mulching blades and car engines. They sold me a gas can. And that weekend I collected sticks and rocks and toys, a fatherly mix of Sherlock Holmes and Santa Claus, before filling the tank and pumping the choke and yanking the string. (Naturally I spilled gas everywhere and couldn’t figure out the safety bar.)

In my early twenties, I joined the Sierra Club and spent 8 days in the Arizona desert. Every day away from civilization I learned just how unnecessary and even trivial certain amenities can be: television, phone answering machines, laundry machines, even toilets. I discovered that we don’t need these things to survive and live well and simply. I missed my friends and family, and nothing else. And so I try to tell myself that mowing the lawn really isn’t necessary, that if I can give up flush toilets I can sure give up cutting the grass. I even try to explain this to my Sunday-morning neighbors, all of us like synchronized swimmers with our machines, but of course they can’t hear me over the noise.

I miss the desert.

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The scam

May 4th, 2009 by seth

My wife was scammed.

Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but the results were clear. She met someone online, like on Craig’s List, and bartered an exchange of gift cards. Several cards with about $200 dollars on them, plus $10 of actual dollars, changed hands. My wife came away with cards for Starbucks, Borders, and Macy’s, in amounts like $54, $26, and $38, the kinds of stores that fit her personality better than the shoes-and-hardware combination that she had collected over a recent birthday. She was excited, despite the rigmarole it took to make the arrangement work: twelve emails, last-minute trade-off meetings and no-shows, haggled negotiations to get the dollar amounts to almost match. And then she calls me, furious.

The clues were abundant and, at least in hindsight, agonizingly obvious. Over-the-top haggling. The eclectic card collection. The don’t-call-me, I’ll-call-you behavior. The lack of real name. The Starbucks card was real, with the $54 that “Tag” said would be there, but that’s it. The other cards were empty. After five busy days of negotiations, being scammed for $50 seemed, well, it seemed neglectfully cruel.

My wife began to beat herself up, angry at the naturally trusting nature that I find so inspirational. But she called me, so I took over. I had her call the shoe store, the hardware store, to claim the cards were stolen. (After all, they were.) It worked, and we got paper certificates in the mail. Meanwhile, I transferred Tag’s Starbucks balance before she could retaliate. We won, and I was proud. My wife emailed the scammer with an angry but surprisingly fair message. She wrote, “You really thought this would work?” and “I CANCELLED your cards” and “Give me an address and I’ll mail you back your cards.” Trapped behind her own anonymity, there was no response from Tag.

I didn’t understand why my wife was prepared to undo the transaction. Tag had been dishonest, and either careless or malicious. We wrought karmic justice upon her, and at a profit. But when Tag never accepted the do-over, never identified herself, never acknowledged her defeat at the hands of the superior couple that my wife and I comprise, well, that extra money started to burn a hole in my pocket. Had we sunk to the level of someone like Tag? Should I worry that I beat Tag at her own game, earning us more money in one hour than she didn’t after her five days? Does it matter that the scam hadn’t been my idea?

Every time I go to Starbucks now — a coffee, a sandwich, a snack for the kids — I wonder if I’ve used up all $54 dollars. And if I’m free.

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Parent vs. world

April 13th, 2009 by admin

I have two completely different stories to tell.

A few months ago, Siena decided to throw a tantrum, a knock-down dragged-out doosie of a screamer, at the shopping mall food court. My wife returned from the bathroom with her, at which point she screamed, sat, and refused to return to our table. So with no remaining options, we left her there, many yards away but within eyesight, and with more frustration than embarrassment we waited for her to scream it out, alone in the middle of the floor.

For many minutes, passersby would either stand high like prairie dogs, looking for parents, or crouch down and attempt comforting conversation. I waved to the prairie dogs; the crouchers made things worse. Later, after I gave up and dragged her kicking and screaming to a more secluded corner, a woman approached with a need to verify Siena wasn’t being abused. I felt insulted by the question but held my tongue. Besides, there was no way I could convince anyone that Siena actually wanted to scream like that.

Now I’ll tell you a second story, filled with big belly laughs and childhood fun. This story is about Oren, who loves the game I call Watch Out. I put him on my shoulders and lean way over, pretending to tip him into bushes and trees. Oren’s favorite part is when he falls completely upside-down onto my back. With his knees still over my shoulders and my hands on his legs, he flips over and bounces the back of his head against my belt. I spin around, wondering where he went, and finally I bounce him high enough for his little stomach muscles to complete a sit-up back up to my shoulders. His laughter during all of this is truly wonderful.

Here’s the thing. I know full well that I can’t tell this story with people thinking, “Whoa, you better make sure you don’t drop him!” and “Are you sure that’s good for his back?” and “What if he goes back but you’re not holding his legs?” People who see this get really nervous too, because it looks, well, dangerous.

Both of these stories are about safety disguised as danger. Climbing trees, performing in recitals, learning to use scissors or a bicycle: If I can’t bring risk into my children’s lives, then I’m not doing my job as a parent. It’s a very strange thing, having to defend this.

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Collision of Perspective

March 15th, 2009 by admin

Enough time has passed that now I can share this story.

One of my work-at-home responsibilities is delivering the kids safely to day care in the morning, but this day had started off as troublesome as it gets. I needed thirty minutes to shovel a wide-enough space through the snow for my wife to extricate her car from the garage. After she left, Oren threw a tantrum because he didn’t want to get dressed. Siena couldn’t find a particular stuffed animal. Thirty minutes behind schedule—I had a phone meeting in under an hour—I had two screaming kids in the minivan. I began to shovel and scrape the windshield, refusing to abandon the kids to get my gloves. Then Oren soiled his diaper, and since I wasn’t willing to bring both kids (or just Oren) inside for a change, I began the ten-minute drive in olfactory overload.

The storm was rotten. The minivan failed to take a nearby hill, and so we half-slid toward an alternate route. Parking was impossible. Both kids insisted on being carried: sixty-five pounds of child, twenty-five pounds of clothes and baggage, three flights of stairs. On wet carpet we undressed, the kids clinging and unhelpful and smelly, when my phone rang. It was my wife, calling to tell me — you ready for this? — that she was in a car accident. Over the kids’ screams I got the most important details: no one hurt, car still functional, my wife psychologically stable enough to drive. Knowing she was safe, I reassured her I’d call back in two minutes. Quickly now, I did everything I could to rush through all remaining responsibilities, ridding myself of these loud, stinky, burdensome creatures, my mind racing with possibilities as I wait impatiently to call back my wife. When I finally do call, I get voicemail and leave a concerned message.

Phew.

Now here’s my wife’s version of the story. She leaves the house late and twenty minutes later gets struck from behind by a car, which causes her own car to spin around on the slick blacktop of a highway onramp. She calls me, offers me a perfunctory summary of events, and hears me say to her, “I need to finish this. I’ll call you back.” Click.

There really is no substitute for a little bit of perspective.

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