Familyhood (16 page)

One day the phone rang and my son—knowing how eager I was to get the “yes” call—came into the room and stood by me, listening to my end of the conversation, trying to read my expressions for a clue. Finally, ever hopeful, fingers to his mouth in excited anticipation, he whispered, “So? Did they accept you?”

Broke my heart. That he saw it so clearly and honestly. Yes, nobody else's opinions should ever impact so decisively anyone else's sense of self-worth. But that's how it always seems to play out; we feel “accepted” or “not accepted.” It's really that simple.

When my young son wondered if he'd be accepted to these schools, it was more than getting admitted to them he was fretting about; it was the universal acceptance of
him
. The very being of who he was. What would he do if they rejected
him
? he wondered.

I assured him that first of all, I was more than confident he would do great on the test. Which was true; he's a smart kid. But even if he didn't do as well as he hoped, the test was only a
part
of what they looked at. They also considered his grades at school (all pretty good), his various activities (he was pretty darn active), his interests (he was very interested), and most importantly—
himself
. The sparkling, shining, wonderful
him
. When they sat with him for the obligatory interview, how could they not be impressed with what a gem of a guy he is? Why would they want to have a school without him in it?

“They might,” he offered. “They might not accept me.”

I had nothing else I could say. “That's true,” I said. “They might not.”

Unfortunately, part of being a parent involves explaining things to your kids that you yourself don't understand. Best I could do, I decided, was to try to put things in perspective for him: enjoy when the judgments are in your favor, I suggested, and accept when they are not, but never put your faith in them entirely, because they are subjective, mysterious, and often meaningless things. No judgment can tell you who you are or what you can be, and no judgment is final as long as we are alive and able to put ourselves out there again and again.

This either made sense to him, or he was so over the whole thing that he pretended it did. Either way, we were done talking about it.

STEP THREE:
The interview.

We go visit the first of the schools to which we've applied (our top choice, actually) for our Family Interview. (Isn't that nice—how they make it Fun for the Whole Family!) But I convinced myself that barring anything extreme—like my punching the director of admissions in the nose, or accidentally (or deliberately) besmirching their carpets—our kid was going to sink or swim on
his
merits alone.

We show up on time and properly dressed—our son having consented to long pants, a clean shirt, and a perfunctory combing of his hair, but nothing so out of the ordinary that he would feel in any way not “himself.”

They come to call him for his one-on-one with the director. Mom and Dad wait outside—our interview will follow his.

As he heads away and down the hall, he exudes not only his usual confidence and sparkle, but a freshly minted surge of independence. He avoids even making eye contact with us, assuming full responsibility on his own shoulders. He has accepted that he will make it or
not
make it entirely by virtue of what he and he alone can do. His mother and I do a reasonable job of containing our tears of pride and sniffles of wonderment (which, as you may recall, was also the name of the band in the late sixties most famous for their Top 40 hit, “Dream Tissue”).

Thirty minutes later, our son and the director emerge from their closed-door meeting. The poker-faced ten-year-old reveals nothing as he is guided to a work-desk for further “evaluation.” The school director invites us into the same room where he just sat with our son. He closes the door.

We make some small talk, and in very short order he smiles and can barely contain himself when he confides that our son is
exactly
the type of child they want in their school. Possibly the very
epitome
of what they're looking for. The clearly brilliant educator proceeds to list all the qualities that our son was able to manifest in their very first—and brief—encounter. “Well, obviously, your son is exceptionally bright. He's inquisitive, he's intuitive, he's courageous and spirited, he looks at things from a very fresh perspective . . .”

We could not have asked for a better outcome. We were thrilled—not to mention enormously relieved—that the worst of our fears would not come to pass; while he might not be accepted to
all
the schools he applied to, our son would at least not end up “school-less.” He seemed all but guaranteed open-armed admission to this school. And, equally important: he would be spared the pain of being resoundingly rejected.

This was a perfect day.

As we walked through the school on our way out, we saw even more confirmation and validation. The kids that went to this school—as much as we could tell from peeks through classroom doors and their effervescent strides down the halls—seemed to all be happy, confident, well-adjusted young boys and girls. In fact, the boys who were about our son's age even all looked and dressed kind of like him. This seemed, indeed, to be a perfect match.

As we strutted victoriously toward our car, our only-moments-old sense of relief and confidence slowly began to give way to other, less healthy impulses. We each—my wife and I—independently started to wonder if perhaps this wasn't
too
close a match. Maybe this school wouldn't stretch our son as much as one of the other schools might.

“Maybe this school is too easy to get into,” my wife whispered to me.

“I know,” I whispered back. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

It was shortly thereafter I made a very big decision: our children are not going to college—I can't go through this again.

Emotional Baggage vs. Luggage

I
'm not a
particularly nervous flyer. I am, however, a nervous
packer
. I worry about not having enough stuff, too much stuff, the wrong stuff. (“Am I really going to need a sports jacket? What if I'm the only one there who doesn't have one? Or the only one who
does
have one, and others mock me just for packing it?”)

Then of course there's the anxiety that the stuff you ultimately pack may not even make it to wherever you're going. Will my stuff get lost or mangled? The idea that I myself could get lost or mangled is not a concern, but the possibility of my pants and pajamas going through that kind of trauma rattles me to the core.

Packing for the whole family, this anxiety is multiplied a hundredfold. Forget
me
—now it's “Do my
children
have the right clothes? Will they be warm enough? Will they be
too
warm? Will they look like slobs? Will they look
too
well dressed? Do they have enough things to amuse them? Do they have
too many
things to amuse them?” It's downright exhausting—and we haven't left the house yet.

NOT LONG AGO,
we went on vacation, the whole family. We got to the airport, checked our bags, and went to wait for our flight. Within minutes, there was an announcement, paging my son. “Hmm . . . that's odd,” I thought. My son looked at me, a bit tickled and a bit nervous. He had never heard his name blared out loud in a public place like that. Could it be a mistake? I wondered. Is there possibly someone else with his name at this airport at this moment and they are actually paging
him
? Unlikely. Maybe it is a prank. As it happened, his birthday was the next day, so I decided that the airlines must have noticed his date of birth when we checked in and were going to make a little bit of a big deal, give him a special cookie or something.

So we headed over to the counter, where the nice airline lady was on the phone, indeed discussing my son, and his luggage. Quickly calculating the possibilities, I decided the problem must be his video games. They'd triggered some security sensor; too many electromagnetic digital gigabytes could potentially knock out the plane's navigation system. Or perhaps the actual content of the game was so violent that even packed away inside his suitcase, the very idea of it was deemed a threat to public safety. So as to not make him any more nervous, my wife and I told our little guy to go relax—we'd deal with it.

It was soon explained to us that, in fact, his bag had somehow gotten caught in the rollers of the conveyer belt while it was being loaded onto the plane and ripped wide open. Nothing was lost, the agent assured us; just the bag was damaged. They had since taped it securely shut and, of course, would reimburse us for a replacement. This call to the desk was, apparently, merely a courtesy “heads-up” so we wouldn't be alarmed upon arriving at our destination. All in all, a very nice handling of a minor, albeit unpleasant mishap.

But my heart sank for the little guy. First of all, he had just gotten the suitcase—the first of his very own. It was a rite of passage for him; he was very proud of it. But also, this was a specific nightmare I have always feared—the ripped-open luggage at the airport. We've all seen the poor guy whose bag implodes in transit, and who stands there at the baggage carousel pathetically watching his clothes pour down. You do not want to be
that
guy. It's almost too painful a humiliation to consider: all your personal effects violated and on pathetic parade for public viewing. I always look away; it seems the charitable thing to do. Give the guy a little space to gather his underwear with a modicum of dignity.

And now, my sweet little boy
was
that guy. My wife and I went to tell him the bad news. As is often the case in these matters, we had different ideas about how to handle it. I suggested we wait; why should he spend the next several hours upset about his dead suitcase? I argued. We could tell him when we landed; let him live in innocence a few more hours. My wife—an ardent proponent of Full Disclosure All the Time—disagreed. She thought our son should know everything that we knew. Not feeling particularly strongly about it, I acquiesced.

We told him about the bag, and to my great surprise, he was totally fine with it. Eerily flippant, actually. I believe his exact words were “Okay, whatever.” I couldn't have been prouder. Truly. For a kid who
loves
his things, he handled the news remarkably well. (Maybe because the only thing he cared about—his video games—were, as it turns out, safely in his carry-on.) But, no matter. I was impressed and inspired; he had shown me a thing or two about retaining equilibrium in the face of life's little bumps.

HOURS LATER,
we landed and went to collect our bags, prepared for the worst. His bag comes around and, surprise of surprises, it doesn't look bad at all. Can't even see the tape. Or the rip. Maybe they got it wrong and it was some other poor sap whose bag got shredded.

It was.
My
bag came down next. Apparently, we had somehow put
his
name on
my
bag, and vice versa. When I saw my bag spit out of the luggage chute, my stomach clenched. It looked like a toy left too long in the gorilla cage, on the day the gorilla had a playdate with a shark. And a monsoon. And a civic uprising. Ripped to pieces it was, my not inexpensive, supposedly damage-proof feat of technological engineering. Hours earlier, when I thought it was my son's bag that had been destroyed, I think I even said to my wife, “I hate that this happened to him! I wish it could have been
my
suitcase instead.” I can't believe that out of all the wishes I've thrown out there over the years,
this
is the one I'm granted. (And I didn't even really mean it.)

Thankfully, the airline pros had done a very thorough job of taping the suitcase up, shrink-wrapping the thing entirely in industrial-strength cellophane, so at least the individual items weren't streaming down one at a time—which would have, frankly, put me in the hospital. All the bag's contents were securely cellophaned up.

But it was
see-through
cellophane, so everything was still clearly visible, frozen in awkward, ugly suspension. Like pathetic fossils captured at the moment of their death, sealed for eternity, faces screaming against the outer surface, straining desperately to break through. Oh, the stories they longed to tell! (“The ground shook, and the gods' anger rained down upon us!”) Except, instead of ancient Greek shepherds, this was my underwear. And socks. And pajamas.

My wife, bless her heart, knows me well enough to know that nothing in the world could make me less happy than what was in fact happening. She calmly took charge, suggesting I go wait on the side while she gathered the butchered luggage. I waited at a safe distance, shielding my eyes. It was like childbirth; the woman knows what to do, and the father (in this case, the father of
luggage
) has only to get out of the way and wait for the messy part to be over with.

I'M NOT SURE
when this particular aversion of mine developed—the fear of a publicly violated suitcase. I'm not suggesting anybody
enjoys
it, but I remember having this specific phobia even as a kid. And becoming an adult has done nothing to alleviate the anxiety. Nor has having been on TV. Fittingly, I have exactly the kind of recognition that's small enough to not do me any good, but big enough to draw attention when I wouldn't want it. I would never count on getting a good table at a crowded restaurant, but I'm pretty confident that if my underpants were to be scattered about Delta Airlines Carousel 5, the video would find its way onto YouTube. (“Former TV Funny Boy wears briefs! And ratty ones, too!”)

I suppose I should take solace in the fact that the contents were, in fact, perfectly mundane and universal.
Everyone
has socks, underwear, and a toothbrush. It would have been a lot more embarrassing if I'd been packing, say, sex toys. Or cheese. Or a severed human head. I had
normal
stuff; exactly what ten out of ten people have in
their
bags. So why, then, should it be so crippling to have it be seen? It's like the proverbial tree; if you trip and fall in the forest and no one sees, is it still embarrassing? Well, yeah, but . . . who cares? It's a
private
failure; in that case, failure to walk without falling down. But having your bag ripped apart in an airport is a
public
failure. Failure to . . . well, to avoid being the poor son of a bitch that that stuff happens to.

I don't understand why it is we're so embarrassed by those very things that, in fact, happen to everyone. You would think such misfortunes would serve to bring us closer; celebrations of our common, flawed humanity.

But it doesn't work that way. Think of any public scandal: the elected official caught with his pants down; the celebrity fighting unattractively with a loved one; the rock star spotted picking his nose at a stoplight . . . Nothing each of us hasn't done, or couldn't, without much imagination, picture ourselves doing. You'd think that as a group, we'd embrace these poor fallen brothers and sisters all the more at these moments. Feel their pain. But we don't. We go the other way; we beat them into submission with their unfortunate falls from grace. And why? Because we're so happy it's
them
and not
us
. We get giddy and rambunctious with nervous relief. All the shouting, pointing, ridiculing, and memorializing is just our attempt to push further away the possibility of it ever happening to
us
.

Embarrassment, I've decided, is a factor of age. My kids get embarrassed at the drop of a hat—usually by me. (Which is ironic, because I vividly remember every single thing my parents did that embarrassed me, and swore even as a child that I would not repeat those indignities with my own children. But I do, with shocking regularity.)

Kids still think they're the first ones to ever experience embarrassment. And why wouldn't they? They're new here. They haven't yet learned that everything happens to everyone.

Old guys, on the other hand, don't care anymore. And I'm not talking about an unflattering cartoon caricature of old guys—addle-brained incontinents who spend their days talking to cats. I'm talking about dignified men—friends of mine in their eighties who have attained every measure of success in their fields. These guys don't “do” embarrassment; they're beyond it. So what happens between nine and eighty-nine that makes that happen? (Relax. I'll try to answer; you just sit there.)

I think that all our lives, we feel the pull of two conflicting forces: the desire to blend in and the desire to stand out. (And by “stand out,” I mean standing out by virtue of an
accomplishment;
something of our own choosing. As opposed to standing out because a trail of toilet paper is stuck to your shoe and everyone sees but you. That's different. And not at all the goal here.)

Furthermore, we never want
too much
of either. We want just the right amount of blending in and standing out.

You have to start with the blending in; then you can aspire to stand out. But sometimes, in the effort to stand out, you can fail. And then you wish you could just blend in. Until you tire of blending in, and then start dreaming again of standing out.

As a kid, I was not a particularly great athlete. Playing baseball, for example, going 0 for 4 was considered a good day. (A bad day was going 0 for 4 and getting hurt.) I knew I wasn't likely to make the spectacular catch or hit the walk-off grand slam. I just wanted to get on base once in a while, and not let a ball go through my legs. That's all. I prayed just to not conspicuously
fail
. (The praying rarely worked, by the way.)

Now. Had I in fact gotten on base with regularity, and fielded everything that came my way, I would have been able to cross that wish off the list, and most likely I would've gotten greedy and upped the ante; I would have wanted that walk-off home run. I would have tried to stand out. But that can only come with the confidence of having already blended in.

Over the years, I've managed to blend in, by and large. I've even had the good fortune to occasionally stand out for doing some things that have met with success. And as childhood drifts further into the distance, I begin to see what my older friends have learned, and what I try to teach my children: everything truly does happen to everyone. We
all
want to blend in, and we
all
want to stand out—for the right reasons. In fact, it's the universal fear of standing out from the crowd for the
wrong
reason that makes us a “crowd” in the first place, I believe. That's what unites us. We're
already
all blended in from the get-go. So run free and enjoy your life, I tell them. There's no reason for any of us to ever be embarrassed about anything.

Except having your underwear fall out at the airport. That's . . . that's just embarrassing.