Easily Distracted

Earlier this summer, I noticed that our huge, old red oak had once again begun a serious decline from oak wilt after we had it strongly trimmed four years ago. Then this week, one of those guys who goes through neighborhoods looking for possible tree trimming jobs made me look at it again: a massive fungal bloom had broken out on two very large limbs, one of which would damage our house and one of which would damage the neighbors if they broke off. Our regular tree service looked at it and recommended that we bring it down.

It was kind of like euthanizing a pet you loved, though we were only the last stewards in the life of an organism that had been around for a very long time. (I will add, though, that the cost was nothing to sneeze at.)

The tree service needed to work from where my vegetable garden is, south of the oak. Everything was done for the year except the basil, which I’d planned to pull this weekend. My plans accelerated and off it came, with an orgy of pesto-making following.

Maybe it’s because we’re pack rats with everything, but I wanted to find a way to make use of some of the tree. I didn’t want to keep most of the limbs: it’s too much wood and too big for me to try and chainsaw myself into firewood. But I kept part of the upper trunk because I thought it would make a perfect bench for outside. All I need to do is plane off the very top, sand it and then protect it a bit. Or so my theory goes at the moment. Of course, once I’m done with that, I’ll have to get a bearcat to actually move the damn thing.

I also decided to keep the bottom eight feet or so of the trunk. I’d been planning this spring to make a treehouse in a maple on the other side of the house. But it seems much cooler to make it on top of a platform laid out on top of what’s left of the oak. So that’s the new plan for the spring. The bottom part of the trunk is still very healthy and should last for a long while even after it sheds its bark. I might try to figure out if there’s something I can do to protect it from insects and so on, though.

Vis-a-vis the “pigs as organic garbage disposal in Cairo” story, I’m starting to see a whole new side to our deranged basset hound. My wife pointed out we could practically keep a blog on the things the dog has eaten that it’s not supposed to eat. (Oh, if only I’d had a bad dog before John Grogan did.)

She has an awesome vile-thing-that-should-not-be-consumed or “delicious human swag that I grabbed from the counter” method, as well, because she’s learned that I or other humans are likely to freak. She sucks it up when no one is looking (she definitely watches to see if we are) and then sticks it in her cheek like a minor league pitcher with a tobacco chaw. If someone notices, down the hatch it goes, otherwise, she takes her time and savors the experience.

My personal tally, directly observed:

Dead mouse.
Dead cicada.
Dead chunk of unknown mammal, carried around proudly for a bit in the front of the mouth until noticed. (Unusual break with technique).
Entire pumpkin bread loaf along with plastic wrapping and part of cardboard container.
Seven ripe tomatoes from the garden kept on kitchen counter.
Her own poop.
Poop of the other dog.
Poop of unknown dogs that visited our yard.
Deer poop.
Rabbit poop.
Raccoon poop.
Sticks of many sizes and tree species.
Rocks. Small ones. So far.
A non-pumpkin loaf of bread.
Cookies.
Flying insects of multiple species.
Grass.
Weeds.
Stuffed animals not given to her as toys.
Other toys of miscellaneous kinds.
Every kind of footwear presently known to the human species.

And the crowning achievement so far? A fairly good-sized chunk of a linoleum floor.

Before the blog went haywire last week, I meant to comment on Michael Chabon’s essay “The Wilderness of Childhood” in the New York Review of Books.

The basic thrust of Chabon’s commentary is spot-on. It’s certainly one of the most complicated, mysterious transformations of the way childhood and family life feel that I’m aware of in my own life. My childhood was like his childhood in the sense of his essay. In fourth grade, living in southern California, friends and I would ride our bicycles around a fairly extensive area on our own. We had a racket where we collected golf balls in a ravine near a course and sell them back to golfers: the ravine was rocky and on a few occasions, we saw rattlesnakes coiled under rocks there. We moved when I was in fifth and sixth grade, near a creek that ran through a quiet suburban neighborhood that was surrounded by less-quiet areas. I routinely used to tell my mother that I was going to go hike up the creek, and then off I went for hours at a time. Once I went almost all the way to the beach, probably a four or five-mile round trip, and similarly far up the creek. There was a municipal park nearby, and I’d go there and meet friends on my own.

I knew the backyards and byways of my neighborhoods in a way that I think my daughter and her friends will never know. A bit of that is a difference between the roads around my current house and some of the places I grew up: there’s a couple of busy, badly designed roads that bisect some of the likely walks she might take. Mostly, it’s a comprehensive shift in how children, parents and space relate.

Chabon settles on the common default explanation for this change, namely, the extent to which fears about children being molested by predatory strangers has led American parents to hold their children closer to them. I think he’s right that this is a big part of the change, and he’s not the first to point out that the fear is wildly out of step with the reality. It’s also not a new danger. As an adult thinking back, I can think of at least two times when there was a probable pedophile somewhere near to my own childhood travels: an older brother of a neighborhood kid at one point, and the sketchy young adult “friend” of a kid I knew when I was in sixth grade. If you follow Chabon’s metaphor (and a memorable Matt Groening cartoon that he cites as well), every wilderness has, by necessity, its ogres and perils. In sixth grade, I knew where the house with the dangerous dogs was, I knew about the kid who was supposed to be a dealer, I knew (along with all my friends) about the old sycamore tree in the park where some unknown person had stashed some mildewed porn. I knew where the neighborhood with the tough kids was and how to skirt around it. I knew where there was a pool with tadpoles in the creek, that you could eat the watercress growing on the banks, and I knew where going any further down meant you’d have a hell of a climb back up a concrete and rock tumble.

Like Chabon, I think it’s too bad that we’ve swung away from that kind of childhood experience. On the other hand, I think he’s missing something new about contemporary middle-class childhood. Sometimes, yes, it’s about ferrying the kids between contained, safe experiences. But also, I think that a lot of middle-class family life is now about the simultaneous adventures of children and adults, that children and adults are sharing far more of their experiences.

I recently watched the Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life”, based on the Jerome Bixby short story. For those who haven’t seen it, the basic premise is that there’s a rural Ohio town that has been removed from the world by the god-like mental powers of a six-year old boy who then terrorizes the population of the town. One of the subtler aspects of the story, alongside the overtly horrific consequences of the boy’s powers, is the way that the adults are forced to anxiously guess at what a child prefers while suppressing their own adult cultural habits in his presence. The two worlds were alien to one another, and now they’re drawn together under the worst of cirucmstances.

The wilderness of childhood that Chabon describes in the 1960s and 1970s was maintained in large part by the strong separation of adult leisure and children’s leisure. Saturday Morning TV was partly defined by that sense of isolation, kids off watching cartoons by themselves, cartoons which the adults knew little about, like the rest of the things their kids did or said. Adults had their own places and activities within which children were only occasional, peripheral presences. All the stories we saw reflected this distance: adults were Charlie Brown voices, they didn’t come into Narnia, they were left behind in Kansas.

It seems to me now that in many families, children and adults have far more shared cultural moments and touchstones. A lot of children’s media is cross-over entertainment that adults also watch and enjoy, or in the case of video games, play alongside their children. I feel like I’m far more likely to see parents and kids hiking together or exploring around the landscape. Last weekend, I took my daughter to see an odd ruin in the woods near here, and there was a mother and her two sons coming out of the woods as we went down the overgrown path to it.

We haven’t really figured out yet how to tell stories that reflect this shared world, which is why a lot of children’s media still banish adults at the outset of the action, so that the kids in the story have to make their own decisions. But I could easily see that we could have a new wave of stories where adults and children deal with adventure together without the grown-ups making all the choices.

I think rather than lamenting the lost past, Chabon might be better off looking for where adventure and exploration take on new and distinctive forms in the present.

Don’t you kind of wonder how this woman thought she’d come out looking from this New York Times article?

On one hand, she seems perfectly aware that most of the other parents at the schools her kids have been at don’t like her much, nor do the school administrators. On the other hand, she seems so serenely unperturbed by the existence of other people with other views than her own, or by a little thing we academics like to call “culture”, who knows? She might feel that a wider window into her actions would result in a round of applause from the wider society for her righteous crusade.

———

I’m in New York for a conference this week. On the train up, I happened to be next to a very talkative older woman. To whom I was perfectly polite, before you go on accusing me of anything. I was struck, though, at the way she described history, both personal and shared. Some of what she had to say was a garden-variety account of how the world is going to hell in a handbasket, a story we’re all prone to tell with increasingly frequency as we age. But her version had a particular flavor to it, in which all of her choices as a young person were exactly what they should have been, and all of the choices of everyone younger than thirty now were exactly the opposite. Some declension stories are about the world, and our helplessness before it, but hers was, “I did everything right, and now everyone’s doing everything wrong.” She worked hard, now the young folk are all lazy. She liked the right kinds of books and right kinds of movies and now the kids are all perverts. She fell in love with the right man, now young women fall in love with sex fiends and wastrels. Maybe she did live the right life, though in my mind, living the right life includes not caring altogether that much about how other people live theirs.

The interesting (if consistent) amendment to her view of the world was that there is one and only one group of people under 30 who have in fact done the right thing: her own adult children. They’ve chosen the right careers, live in the right places, married the right people, raised their own young children the right way. Which in her view I think is just a vindication of the rightness of her own choices.

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The reason I recount this somewhat painful trip alongside the mother crusading against birthday cupcakes in the schools is this: if there is a single thing I’m prepared to get righteously aggravated by at this point in my life, it’s people whose vision of their own lives rises perpetually towards their own righteous vindication.

I’m all about the doubts these days, I wallow in uncertainty. Sure, I’m still right about all sorts of shit, and don’t you forget it.

I guess.

But if you want to be an aggravating irritant to the lives of every other adult trying to raise or teach a kid in your community, you’d better be damn sure the cause justifies it. If you’re Atticus Finch, green light, go for it. If you’re the scourge of the snacks, and brook no dissent? You might want to worry more about the epidemic spread of “lack of proportionality and self-awareness” before you worry about the epidemic of obesity. If you’re my seat-mate, would it hurt for you to imagine a story of your life where experience leads to humility, even a little teeny bit?

I’ve spent a good portion of the last week catching up on household tasks of various kinds. Whether it’s something I’m increasingly comfortable with, like gardening, or something where I’m still finding my way like working with power tools on various projects, this kind of work has become really satisfying for me.

I’ll probably pick up Shop Class as Soulcraft as a result, given that it’s getting good reviews. Though Francis Fukuyama’s review of the book this Sunday didn’t do the book any favors, given the aggressiveness of Fukuyama’s ideological packaging of its argument.

I’m completely persuaded that it’s a good thing in general for middle-class folks to learn as much as possible about the machines, objects and processes that surround them, and to learn through direct hands-on work with all of them. If that’s what the book argues, I’m with it. But Fukuyama argues that the shutting down of shop classes in high schools is a result of a campaign by experts to denigrate this kind of work in favor of “knowledge work” or “symbolic analysis” due to changes in the global economy. Fukuyama (and maybe Crawford, author of the book? I’ll wait and see on that one) is smarter than this: I think he knows very well that most of that argument about the future of skills and labor isn’t aimed at plumbers, carpenters, electricians and so on. It’s about the disappearance of unskilled factory labor from much of the United States.

I also think Fukuyama knows full well that European and American middle-classes, especially intellectuals, have long fretted about becoming too distant from manual labor, from practical knowledge, from direct experience. Complaints about the alienated, enfeebled culture of white-collar work go back a wee bit farther than “Dilbert”. I’m perfectly ok with the wheel turning once again: I’ve argued myself that a great liberal arts course would interweave studying the history of cars and traffic, the public policy of transportation, and a hands-on disassembly and reconstruction of an actual automobile. But let’s get a bit savvy here and ask why a sentiment that seemingly rejects middle-class “knowledge work” and white-collar labor is so recurrently popular with middle-class white-collar workers. And why most of the people who enthuse about the message don’t quit their jobs as symbolic analysts but just build stuff in their garage or tinker with farming and so on. Fukuyama is generous enough to acknowledge this point but I’m not sure he grasps it fully. Learning how to do it yourself is just another dimension of bourgeois culture, right alongside being a foodie or going to the theater. Which is fine by me: nothing shameful about middle-class life, as far as I’m concerned. Still, that takes down the rhetorical heat by about ten notches.

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So miscellaneous things I’ve found or wondered about this week.

1) Precision is, as in all things, my bugbear. One reason I’ve always preferred cooking to baking is that you can usually fix a dish that’s gone wrong, but if you’re off by much with baking, you’re screwed. This turns out to be even more true when you’re making something like a bookshelf or hanging a screen door yourself. I missed by maybe an eighth of an inch on one of the spade-bit drill holes I had to make for the door lock installation on the screen door and was barely able to adapt the whole thing with some careful filing. If I had missed by much more, I think I would have had to just take the whole door down and call it a loss. That’s one key problem with DIY stuff in general: learning by doing can get expensive.

2) Everyone likes to complain about bad instructions. What I was struck with in the case of the screen door was that the instructions were difficult for me to understand, but they weren’t bad. First, I had the classic problem of a left-handed person: all the illustrations were of right-handed tool use. Sometimes I find I try to reverse what I’m seeing in my mind and then I end up ‘tricking’ myself back into a double reversal. A more complicated installation like this is also difficult to write instructions for both because the instructions have to be flexible (this door could hinged on either side, and had variable widths to accommodate for different doorframes) and because various parts have names that are non-intuitive. The instructions have to build a vocabulary for you, a temporary jargon, because they can’t just say “That thing” and “that other thing”.

3) I finally got a fairly cheap chipper/shredder (and it’s not a very good model: you get what you pay for, I guess) and found to my surprise that a huge pile of debris I’ve been building up for three years reduced to about three or four wheelbarrows of finely shredded mulch. That’s leaving aside the logs and sticks bigger than 2 inches, which I need to chainsaw down and then break into firewood. Makes me think again about the amount of material that must be needed to make really huge amounts of mulch. Not that there’s any shortage of woody waste in the mid-Atlantic area but still.

4) Has anyone come up with a cheap disposable mask that doesn’t fog up safety goggles? So far I’ve tried a couple of different brands, some of which promise that their foam seals prevent fogging, but I still end up close to blind after ten minutes of work when I’m wearing a mask and goggles.

5) My table saw scares the crap out of me, but it does seem to be the answer for making dado grooves on the bookshelves I’m making. I’m still not as precise as I want to be, but I’m getting there.

6) For the third time in my life, I’ve planted mint in a garden without thinking very carefully about how to control its spread. I think mint should come with a biohazard sticker on it.

7) I’ve really despaired about getting my lawn into shape through my own seeding, with no chemical use. But this spring I looked around and realized that it had really grown in after three years of seeding. I guess grass is just a long-term project if you’re not going to go with heavy treatments.

8 ) Before I started trying to do some household maintenance and repair myself, I always thought that the major cost of hiring people to do that work was labor. Same for making pine or ash bookshelves. But for furniture, it’s increasingly clear to me that materials are most of the cost of retail furniture unless it’s very high-end crafted work. Same I think for a goodly amount of household work: the cost is in the equipment you need to do it and the materials it requires.

1) At the Saturday 2nd grader soccer games, there were of course all manner of kids wandering around, exploring the woods and creek near the field while siblings played or waited for their game to start. At one point, my wife told me that some of the other parents on the sideline were becoming concerned about a young boy who seemed to be a six-year old or so who was picking up large rocks and throwing them at other children with impressive force, as well as periodically swinging a substantial branch at them. I watched a bit and sure enough, it was kind of alarming, and it felt as if it wouldn’t be long before somebody got hurt. Some of the other parents had already tried to get the boy to lay down his rocks and sticks, and a few had moved on to sternly telling him to put them down, but he was doing his best Jimmy Cagney imitation and having none of it. Nobody knew where his parents were, though we guessed they were probably on the far field, a long way away.

This is one of those tricky situations. If it was your own kid, you wouldn’t hesitate to grab the kid forcefully and to have a serious talk about this stuff. But you really don’t want to do that to a complete stranger’s kid: all sorts of things can go very wrong from that moment onward. I think a lot of us were edging up to that decision, though: better that than another kid getting a sharp rock to the forehead.

And then another six-year old stepped up to the rock-thrower and shouted, “I KNOW WHO YOU ARE! YOU ARE IN MY CLASS!” The rock-thrower paused. “WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS!” The rock-thrower kept his big stick but seemed to change his mood a bit: he walked away onto the forest trail. I half expected the mediator kid to start an even more sophisticated line of psychological intervention. Then the game ended and as a lot of us were walking away, we noticed that the father had finally caught up with his wayward son and was bringing him to heel. There was just something kind of awesome about this kid stepping in like a hostage negotiator to defuse the situation.

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2) We went down to a local Philadelphia museum that was having a superhero-themed event this weekend as a way to get kids to come in and look at the exhibits (and, I suspect, to entice parents to buy memberships as a way to get around the long line). It was fun to see the kids, some adults and some staff members in costume while going around the museum. There were some good theme-related events for the kids as well as a couple of nice lectures by Penn faculty.

Still, I was struck by two things. One is just a basic issue that I see at a lot of events that are intended to attract or entertain small children. Event planners often don’t anticipate fully where the heaviest traffic flows are going to be (and how upset children can get when they don’t get to do something that looks like fun because of competition for places or spots), and they don’t break up events or activities into sufficiently bite-sized components. Planning a successful event for children is a really difficult art, far harder than for adults. You have to have a lot of fast-paced activities, a surplus of materials and adults to help children, and you have to think ahead about what most kids are most likely to want to do. One thing in particular: if you have an activity or entertainment where the kid gets to take away something (balloon animals, to use one example from this weekend), you can expect that to be intensely popular, and you need enough people assisting with that if you don’t want some upset kids (and parents) by the end of it all.

One other thing: event planners need to think carefully about lowest-common-denominator standards for what’s appropriate while also keeping a bit of fun and maybe even parent-tweaking trangression in the mix. In the case of this weekend, I have to say my jaw dropped a bit when it turned out that the prize for kids who completed a scavenger hunt involving clues from the exhibits was…Watchmen posters of Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl. As my daughter said, “I don’t think I’m allowed to see anything else about those characters, am I Daddy?”