Rock, Meet Window

by Jason Good

  That’s not to say it was a smooth transition. Everyone knows that relapse is an integral part of the recovery process. During my March visit, the Internet service in Mom and Dad’s apartment had become atrocious. Fed up with the spinning Netflix wheel, I suggest to Dad that we go on a father-son pilgrimage to Radio Shack, his favorite place on Earth. Oddly, he takes some convincing. He seems tense in the car, and clenches his jaw when we walk in.

  “They don’t have it,” he says.

  “Have what?”

  “The modem.”

  “We haven’t even looked yet,” I say.

  I look over to the pockmarked employee, whose nametag reads “Jamie.”

  “Hi, do you have any Motorola DSL modems that work with AT&T?” I ask.

  “All of our modems are in that aisle over there,” he says, pointing.

  “Okay, thanks.”

  I ask Dad if he’s coming, and he joins me, albeit reluctantly.

  “See? Look. They don’t have the goddamn modem,” he says, aggressively enough to frighten Jamie, who, sensing trouble, puts down his Mountain Dew and walks over. Dad turns his back, feigning interest in the remote-control helicopters on the other side of the aisle. It occurs to me why Dad is so tense. It’s the same reason alcoholics avoid going to bars: they’re afraid they won’t be able to control themselves. Radio Shack has a Communist feel to it that Dad likes. Unadorned, and uncomplicated by too many choices, it’s a blue-collar Best Buy. Dad knows the failure of this utopia is one of his anger triggers.

  “Having trouble finding what you need?” Jamie asks.

  “Yup! You don’t have it,” Dad says, turning to walk out. Before opening the door, he turns back, “You know who does? Office Depot, and we’ll be taking our business there!” I shrug at a very confused Jamie, and then jog off to catch up with Dad.

  “You know that kid doesn’t give a shit if we go to Office Depot, right?” I ask.

  “Well, he should!” Dad snaps back, holding on to the quaint ideal that employees should take pride in their companies, like cashiers at Woolworth’s in the 1960s.

  This is one of the few times I’ve seen him lose his temper over the previous couple of months. Overall, he may have unintentionally harnessed The Power of Now, but the secret no one tells you is that sometimes “Now” involves your favorite electronics store not having the right equipment. As long as Dad avoids the marketplace, he’s damn near Zen.

  I have experienced no such transformation. The train to Shambala did not stop in New Jersey. Upon returning home after each visit with Mom and Dad, I was a little less present, my fuse a little shorter. I lay down more and spent too much time staring at my phone. Having subscribed to the power of five minutes from now, I had begun waiting for the current moment to pass in hopes that the next one might be more pleasant. Buddhists make presence seem so easy. “Be like water,” they say, ignoring that most of us have emotional dams blocking its flow.

  Trust your deepest consciousness.

  Focus on he who is breathing.

  Why can’t anyone explain Zen to me without being mystical?

  “Zen is the state of not trying to understand.” I feel like Phaedrus talking to Socrates.

  At no time, however, is it more necessary to employ these practices than when dealing with small children. The personal transformation required by parenthood is gnarled in a paradox, though. We’re expected to become more patient and flexible amid the most emotionally cacophonous years of our lives. Only a true Zen master could be like water while a child plays a plastic flute in his ear.

  When in a good mood, I can sometimes pull it off: “Hey guys, instead of squirting all the lotion into the toilet, how about we do an experiment to see what happens to cheese when it melts!” But in between my trips to California, good moods were increasingly elusive. More commonly, my reaction was stern and followed by a sigh and a mile-long stare.

  The Goods are a tense and fragile bunch. No matter how much we try to relax, via meditation, exercise, pharmaceuticals, booze (or in the case of my grandfather, fishing trips and booze), the yeasty dough of unease continues to churn in our stomachs.

  I seem to have passed this gem of a mutation onto my son Silas. As a baby, he was a fleshy ball of fuss. He didn’t sleep. He wouldn’t nurse. There seemed to be something he wanted that Lindsay and I couldn’t provide. When he’d scream for so long that his face turned the color of rhubarb, we’d look at each other in a panic. What’s wrong with him? In the years since, we’ve learned that what we assumed was colic, a physical condition, was more likely something psychological. Silas is a first-grader now. He’s impatient but empathetic; a first-born people-pleaser with zero patience for people who are hard to please. Of course, I’m the person he wants to please most, and my praise has become even less satiating over the past few months.

  Sometime in April, while playing Lego Batman on the Nintendo Wii, Silas berated me for not jumping at the right times, missing valuable coins, and failing to change into a bomb suit so I could blow up a van full of grizzled shipyard mobsters. So, I let him be Batman and relegated myself to the skirt-wearing Robin. What more could he want? But he was still agitated. After falling from a tightrope connecting one bad-guy building to another, he yelled, “You did that on purpose!” and threw down his controller.

  “Why would I do that?” I said. “I’m not perfect at video games.”

  “You did it to make me mad.”

  “Why would I want you to be mad?” I asked, monotone and defeated. I knew where this was going and didn’t have the energy to stop it.

  “Because you don’t want to play Wii with me!” he yelled, storming to the hallway.

  When he returned—sniffling, wiping his tears, and catching his breath—he collapsed in my arms. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

  “I’m sorry too, Bud.” Instead of moving forward, and crossing the goddamn tightrope, I made a classic parenting mistake: I revisited the issue. “Can you tell me why you got so mad?” I asked, thinking I was being therapeutic.

  “Because . . . Ahhhhhhhhh!” And off he went again.

  I turned to Lindsay, who had observed the whole thing. “Do you have any idea what this is about?” I asked.

  “He senses you aren’t present,” she answered, a little too eager.

  “But I am! I’m playing this game with him. I just fell off some stupid tightrope. It’s sort of hard.”

  “It’s not about that.”

  “Actually, I think it is about that.”

  “No. He wants to spend quality time with you,” she said.

  “How is that different from what we’re doing now, exactly?”

  “It’s when both of you are equally enthusiastic about something.”

  “Well, I’m not really an enthusiastic person.”

  “Umm, yeah. I know,” she said.

  I could never seem to get my own dad’s attention growing up. His head was always somewhere else. “Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad,” I’d machine gun until he answered.

  Finally, he’d bark, “What? Jesus Christ.”

  “Nothing. Forget it.”

  “No, what did you want?” he’d ask, with a hint of repentance.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then don’t say my name twenty times unless you want something.”

  “Fine!” Then I’d stomp into the kitchen to watch Mom cook. She always listened to me.

  When it comes to their own emotions, kids are all confusion; either they’re unable to express how they really feel, or they don’t understand how they feel. Kids are like a perpetual sympathy quiz. As parents, we are supposed to supply the right answers. The more I failed these tests, the more Lindsay and I argued.

  Later that night, after Silas and I sorted out the tragic tightrope situation, Lindsay seemed fed up with me. “Why can’t you be more joyful?” she asked.

  Joy. It’s such an aggressive term, isn’t it?

  Joy

  jOy

  JoY

  JOY!!!!

>   I was already suffering from a mild, twenty-first-century depression before Dad’s illness, so this seemed like a particularly bad moment for Lindsay to scatter plot my bliss scores. The truth is, save half a dozen dates with cocaine, I’ve never felt joyful. Who besides the intoxicated and maniacally naïve experience this?

  “Well, maybe I’m less joyful than you’d like because my father is dying,” I said. I knew she’d ignore this excuse. I’d used it a dozen or more times already, and it had lost its bite.

  “Do you enjoy life?” she asked, whittling my patience down to a nub. I admit it was a good question. I wanted to be able to answer with a resounding yes, but I wasn’t brought up in the kind of home that discusses joy. Any whiff of pop psychology triggers my gag reflex.

  “I don’t really think about it,” I replied. “I just kind of live. It’s not as if I have a choice. It’s like asking someone if they enjoy breathing.”

  She stared at me with a mix of concern and confusion: a cat to a candle. I think she wanted to know why I wasn’t acting like I enjoy life.

  As time went on, this became an ongoing source of conflict between us. Some days later, Lindsay said, sadly, “I can’t imagine if we were driving in a car that you would ever look out the window and say, ‘Wow, look at that tree, isn’t it beautiful?’ That upsets me.” Perhaps she didn’t know that I’m not really a tree person, much less one who might force others to endure my appreciation of them. What starts with trees quickly expands to other fauna, and the next thing I know, I’m puttering around my house with a watering can asking my ferns if they’re thirsty. At least, that’s what I imagine would happen if I pretended that nature infused me with unrelenting wonder and happiness.

  In response to these legitimate gripes, I shut down more, hoping to scare her into thinking she’d caused me to fall deeper into my hole. Physically, I acted like a dog after being punished. Emotionally, I was trying to elicit sympathy and guilt rather than admit fault. And, well, maybe that’s what dogs do, too. Let’s call it vicious manipulation via involuntary pouting. It’s what I did as a kid when Dad let out his controlled leaks. They say men seek women who remind them of their mothers, but I married a woman who reminds me of Dad.

  I understood that Lindsay was just trying to avoid popping. On an emotional level, she is there for me when I really need her, but day-today I was joy poison. She couldn’t help but leak a comment whenever I shuffled around in my slippers, slumped down in my chair, or stared off into the distance. Her father had died five years before, so it’s not as if she was unsympathetic, though she certainly dealt with it differently: stoic, strong, and unflinching in her commitment to not letting sorrow throw her off course or become the foundation of her moods. She was sad, but sought ways and reasons to be content and happy in any given moment.

  If it were just the two of us, Lindsay could have restrained herself, but she feared that Silas was modeling my depression. “He walks away with his head down like that because he sees you do it. You know that, right?” Why is it that children never mimic behaviors like sleeping past 7 AM on Sunday? Not to invalidate my wife’s concern here, but it’s only fair to point out that she, like all mothers, has irrational fears when it comes to her children: random gas leaks, concussions after routine falls, and “sensory overload” from playing Monopoly Junior while listening to The Jackson 5.

  Of course, I could see how my depression affected my family, but I was addicted to it. I had finally been given a valid excuse to mope, and I made the most of it. I was already losing my Dad, so fuck it, why shouldn’t I lose everything else, too? I fantasized about stocking up on e-cigs, renting a Chevy Volt, and driving west until I ran out of batteries (somewhere in Pennsylvania).

  Eventually, after five months of drama, Lindsay needed a break—from me, from everything. She’d been on mom duty for too long and wanted to spend a couple of nights in a hotel with her sister. Of course, this was a completely reasonable request. No one deserved some R&R more than she did, so I agreed with a smile. It’s what adults do. We mask our childish emotions with a simulacrum of maturity. Sometimes we fail.

  The truth is, I was bitter. I didn’t want to acknowledge that she had needs, and I was angry that she would have the gall to attend to them. When she texted to ask if she could stay one extra night, Arlo was screaming at me because I couldn’t re-create an exact replica of the cardboard fort we’d built the night before. We’d run out of duct tape, so I was assembling a dozen boxes with an adhesive normally used for wrapping Christmas presents. I usually love my “dude time” with the boys. This should have been an opportunity for me to get out of my head.

  I didn’t respond to Lindsay’s text—the honesty and sweet tone of her request pissed me off. “I feel like this is really benefiting me,” she wrote. “I’m just now starting to feel a little refreshed!” The desire to hoard attention for myself overcame my ability to be an adult.

  She called me, but I let it go to voicemail. Ten minutes later, she called again, and unfortunately, I chose to answer. “You know, you should do this, too,” she said. “Get away for a few nights and escape. You can do it anytime you want.”

  An emotional switch toggled inside me. Though I knew the words coming out of my mouth were unfair, if not cruel, I had lost control. “You’re right, I do need a break from my life. But you know what the problem is? I can’t escape it. My fucking life comes with me everywhere I go. Even in a hotel room, my father is still dying.”

  “You don’t sound good. I’ll just come home. I don’t need to stay another night.”

  “Oh no, you can stay another night. You need to relax. I’ll just get back to building this fort with Scotch tape for Arlo. He’s out of his mind.”

  “Is he hungry?”

  “No. I feed our children. I’m their father, so I know that I’m supposed to feed them.”

  “Please calm down.”

  “Oh, and I’m tired of you assuming that I get all of this downtime when I go to California. Do you know what I do there? I drive my dad to doctor’s appointments. And I don’t have a sister, either. I’m an only child. Do you even know what that’s like?”

  “I’m coming home.”

  “No. Come home when you’re fully refreshed.”

  She came home.

  In the beginning of my father’s illness, I thought I was dealing with the situation so well. I made promises. And I felt energized by them. My dad and I will talk on the phone every day. I’ll learn everything there is to know about leukemia. I will not take anything for granted. I didn’t write a letter to myself or pin these mantras on a vision board, and maybe that’s where I erred, because six months after Dad’s diagnosis, I was worse off than when I started. I was talking to my wife as if I were her teenage son, smoking e-cigs like a junkie robot, and eating sausage every morning like a disco owner in Munich.

  Steadily, my energy flagged. The daily phone calls with Dad became weekly; discussions of test results ended in accepted confusion rather than diligent research. I forgot my password for MarrowForums.org. Things hadn’t changed nearly as much as I thought. A psychologist told me it was “natural” and “okay” to feel that way. She said her job was to help me feel okay about who I was and to accept how I was behaving. But I wanted her to help me change everything. Later, eventually, I realized those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. I was resisting a return to normal, which was something I wasn’t yet aware that I wanted.

  I Knew I Was Because I Am

  If you’ve never had a fresh, hot, soft pretzel made by a dude in his garage, I’d suggest you start living your life with a little more purpose. In the early eighties, there was a place, a garage, just a few blocks from Grandma and Grandpa Good’s house in Dayton, Ohio. I don’t know if he made them for fun, to get away from his wife, or this wizard of twisted dough simply had a passion and a gift. The details of his inspiration didn’t matter to us. We always left Delaware at 1:30 on Christmas Eve because that got us to those pretzels at 3 PM, when they were s
cooting off the conveyor belt, hot and ready to eat. One brown grocery bag full cost three bucks, and there was never a line.

  My grandparents’ house had a trick door but if you knew the timing (twist the knob, put your shoulder into it, and then kick the bottom), you were family and not expected to knock. When we would bust in with that brown bag, folded twice at the top to keep the heat in, the house rumbled. “Hot damn! Somebody up and got some pretzels,” Uncle Clement would yell, as Grandma hustled to the phone to call Grandpa at the Red Carpet bar. “It’s Detta. Tell Eddie the kids are here.” Aunt Libby was usually pretty quiet because cursing around Detta made her nervous. Uncle Paul would hang back a little, smiling. I don’t think he cared much for the infamous garage pretzels. Once the hoopla subsided, he’d give Mom and Dad a hug and shake my hand. He treated kids like grown-ups, and we loved him for it.

  Paul has always marched to the beat of a tuba: slow, deliberate, and without concern for other instruments. His voice is calming, and he speaks in a cadence that belies self-doubt. He does what he wants, when he wants, and how he wants, but he never causes harm to others in the process. Paul, for better or worse, is the closest thing I know to Zen.

  He and Gayle live across the street from Dad’s other brother, Clement, in the small town of Goose River, Ohio. It’s a place lost in time (almost as lost as the idea of living across the street from one’s brother). My uncles have addresses, but you wouldn’t need them. The houses in Goose River don’t have mailboxes. Residents pick up their parcels at the post office, like some kind of modern-day Deadwood. Main Street, the only street in Goose River that isn’t any alley, contains more dogs and barefoot teenagers than cars. It’s a great town to visit if you want to feel like you’re from a dystopic future, or if you want to see what the simple life looks like. The “grid” looms nearby, but one can’t see it or feel it in Goose River. And that’s exactly why my uncles have never left.