On the road with Jay

On a recent Wednesday afternoon at LaGuardia, Jay and I sat by our gate and received bad news: Due to a maintenance issue our plane was delayed. I suggested to Jay that we walk and get a sandwich. He wanted to stay by the gate in case the delay was brief. I assured him that maintenance issue meant we had a lot of time.

The flight we were waiting for was to take us home, at the end of four days traveling together in New York. The reason for the trip was work – I had a mathematician I needed to interview – but that week was also Jay and Wally’s spring break, so I invited Jay along. When I told Wally he was OK with it at first and even expressed how nice it would be for Jay to get to take a trip, but when the morning came for us to leave, he cried deeply, like someone important had been lost to him forever.

This was the first time I’d taken a child on a work trip. I noticed the difference even before I left. On the previous Saturday night as I packed, and afterward as Caroline and I lay in bed talking about the days ahead, I noticed I felt little of the anxiety that usually characterizes nights before a departure.

Our trip proceeded in many stages: a taxi, a flight, a connection, a train, a taxi, a short walk up a hill to our hotel. Along the way I explained such things as I knew, like the difference between the local and the express, and why the boarding door closes ten minutes prior to departure. Over a barbecue buffet in Charlotte between flights, I encouraged Jay to eat up, telling him that when you travel, you have only your body to depend on, so you need to keep it fueled. He seemed to swallow the advice whole.

A month before his eighth birthday, it’s only easy to travel with Jay. When we decamp as a family it’s all about how the kids do in the car and did we remember to pack their goggles; traveling with Jay was like walking with a friend. In four days together I talked to him like his stern dad just once, when I asked him to check the silliness before I left him for a few hours in the company of his young uncle, who I didn’t want to tire of the arrangement too quickly.

And traveling with him, too, changed the feeling of the many ordinary things we did. On the second day, in the late afternoon, we took the train from Princeton to Penn Station. It’s the kind of transit that usually feels dreary, especially at a long hour in the day, but as I sat next to Jay and he looked out the window, it felt like a simmering adventure – like the way I remember feeling on a train car across India with my camping backpack beside me, whole and at-large in the world.

So at the end, when our flight home was delayed, we sat at a bar and shared a pressed sandwich, which Jay pronounced OK, while he kept one eye on the distant gate, and the other on a television playing the last innings of the Yankees game.

While he ate and watched I thought about how these kinds of delays, coming on the last leg of a trip, always put me on edge when I’m traveling alone, yet this time I didn’t feel anxious at all. The reason, I think, is the same reason it’s so easy to nap alongside a sleeping infant: With Jay beside me I could say nearly that my whole life was there, so what was the rush to get anywhere else.

Echoes of a pickup game

Yesterday walking home from school Jay looked back and said, “Why does it have to be today.” We were hurrying to the car, to chess class across town, but his eyes were on the football game forming on the playground. “Can I stay,” he asked. “Hal is playing today.”

Hal is a boy in fifth grade who’s hard to tag when he has the ball. When Jay said his name I found myself back inside a middle school gym on a Saturday morning during the winter in Maine, where the floor by the door was wet with small puddles of dirty melted snow. As I shot around, I kept one eye on the door, hoping each time it opened that Heath would walk through. Heath, who was in eighth grade, two years older than me, and who I’d noticed during a recent basketball game had hair growing beneath his arms. If he came to the pickup game that morning I knew he’d pick me for his team and maybe pass me the ball once or twice because he knew I could hit an open three.

And then my mind was back on the playground outside Jay’s elementary school. I remembered how a week earlier I’d seen him huddle with Hal before a play, devising a route, and how then the ball had been hiked and Hal had hit Jay in stride for a touchdown. Now, I told Jay he couldn’t stay to play because we really had to be going. He took one last glance back over his shoulder and in that moment I felt something I don’t always feel – that I really understood my son.

After the election

The day after the election I awoke early to confirm the result. I knew Jay would want to know. At 6:40am I opened the door to the boys’ room and tiptoed past sleeping Wally, to the edge of Jay’s bed where I nudged him awake. He resisted for a moment, then staggered sleepily down the hall to a pile of waiting clothes. He dressed squinting in the overhead light, giving no hint that he remembered the news broadcast, the open laptop, the way we’d hustled him off to sleep the night before.

It wasn’t until he was a few bites into his cereal that he asked. From across the counter I told him. His face registered nothing, but then he began to cry. When I went over to put an arm around him, he shook me off violently, sending his spoon flying in a spray of milk. For more than a year Caroline and I had assured him that this would not happen. It felt feeble to tell him that most everyone else had been wrong, too.

After Jay was born Caroline and I imagined ourselves as a frontier family. It was mostly a joke, a way of making light of our cramped apartment and the fact that we didn’t have much money. But we meant something real by it, too. I liked the idea of frontier life as coherent and I wanted our emerging family life to be that way: work, marriage, kids, all working together, all pulling in the same direction.

This election season it’s occurred to me that my life is too narrow, too finely tuned to a set of circumstances that won’t last forever. While driving a couple weeks ago on an unseasonably warm day, I thought about what would happen if the climate really did change dramatically and caused big social upheaval. Of all the consequences I pictured, the one I found most unsettling was that in that context, the life I’m leading now wouldn’t make much sense. I have dreams for my kids, but those dreams would arrest in a world where no one cares anymore about the SAT. I have a vision for what makes a good day, but perhaps that vision depends too much on just the right kind of coffee beans.

So lately I’ve abandoned the frontier for a new metaphor – a metaphor of displacement, of a family on the shore after the water recedes. What kinds of choices, what values, would make sense in that world as well as our current world? When I say to myself that I want to live less narrowly, I mean I want to live in a way that holds up under a broader range of circumstances.

Kindness comes first to mind as something that make sense wherever you are, and patience, too. On leveled ground the thought of being in a rush seems silly. But the idea I’ve had in mind most lately is the idea of creation, of bringing to life the world you want to see. It’s a disposition that seems airy when the sun is shining and stocks are up, but necessary when you find yourself in a world radically altered. Which is to say, maybe it’s a disposition for any time.

So, after the election, when I think about raising Jay, Wally, and Leo, I think about raising them wide. And one part of that width, I think, is that while I don’t want them to take anything for granted, I also don’t want them to accept too much as a given.

Remembering family routines

From the beginning, one of my favorite parts of writing this blog has been the way it’s led to conversations with parents, older than me, who’ve already been through the stage of life I describe here. Often they’ll read something on Growing Sideways that reminds them of an experience they had raising their own children, or they’ll see a theme in a post and they’ll tell me how they observed it in their own families. It’s in that spirit that I share the following poem by a Jody Bolz, a family friend and executive editor of the magazine Poet Lore. Jody sent this to me last week after reading my previous post, “Family at rest.” It’s her recollection of nights at home cooking dinner as her two children grew up.

EVENING

Most days I cooked without gratitude
standing at the kitchen counter
rinsing and chopping and glancing
at the clock at five-fifty six-fifteen
the violets on our windowsill

backlit by sunset or outlined
in winter dark as I placed pots
to simmer over wide blue flames
stirring tasting seasoning our food
there was never any question

of whether or when or what
we might eat we had everything
we needed and the fact seemed
commonplace our comfort
commonplace each evening

a steep course to master task by task
scouring the cutting board sponging
the stove-top talking to the children
as they leaned over their worksheets
looking up from time to time to spar

with one another or leaping to the door
to let the cats back in while I watched
the hour pass beyond a wall of windows
seasons in free-fall like the pages
of a flip-book green and gold and gone

and sometimes it snowed and the kids
would drop their pencils racing outside
to see but I didn’t join them
I was barreling downhill
in the midst of all that beauty

veering through each gate
to be done and done and done
another weekday evening
vanishing beneath me
and now the level ground flung wide

originally published in North American Review

Family at rest

A few nights ago, after all the bedtime chores had been accomplished, the five of us sat around in Jay and Wally’s room. Caroline was on one of their beds, I was on the other. The boys were moving around, but not that much, sometimes tossing a ball to Leo, who’d hurl it back, sometimes not doing much at all.

The moment was notable for a couple reasons. The first is that it’s extremely rare that we spend time together as a family doing nothing. We are in each other’s company many hours each day, but almost all of that time is tagged with a purpose – we’re executing the morning routine or the afternoon routine or the bedroom routine or we’re reading with the boys, playing chess with them, ferrying them to music lessons or sports practices. In all those things we’re together, but the point isn’t that we’re together. That fact is incidental to the accomplishment of something else.

And so the other night, when we suddenly and for no particular reason found ourselves together doing nothing, it felt as unfamiliar as a trip to a foreign country.

The second notable thing about the experience was how hard it was to maintain. On the one hand you had me, sitting on the bed, eyeing the little digital clock on Jay’s bedside table. I was aware both that the boys’ need their sleep and that I was ready to commence eating ice cream. On the other, you had the boys themselves, who can’t maintain equilibrium for long. Maybe Leo got tired of sitting with Caroline and started pulling treasures from his brothers’ special drawers. Or maybe Wally started humming, which caused Jay to complain, which caused me and Caroline to lock eyes: That was nice while it lasted.

Later that night, after everyone was indeed asleep, Caroline and I talked about how we hope that it’s only going to get easier to waste time together as a family. Leo’s going to mature, of that I’m confident. And I think there’s a pretty good chance, too, that as Jay and Wally season, they’ll get a little better at staying out of each other’s way.

We also talked about why it felt so good to have even 10 minutes together when we were doing nothing. When we’re busy all the time I feel like our family life lacks density. I could imagine Jay, Wally, and Leo looking back on their childhoods as a series of activities, like points on a grid, all lined up in the right order, but with too much space between them.

And what is it that falls through in such an arrangement? I think it might be a sense of who you are. Caroline said she’d like the boys to feel that during their childhoods, the place they were most understood in the world was in a room with their parents and each other and nothing else much going on. It’s the kind of feeling, like gravity, that maybe would keep them wanting to come back, even when they don’t have to anymore.