I'd like to think I'm a fairly enlightened parent, as these things go. So I read this excerpt from an upcoming book of edgy essays by hip, literary fathers, or something like that. I'm still laughing.
If I could be said to contour my life in those days around any image, I think it would be one I grew up with... the one featuring a guy with a raincoat slung over his shoulder, a guy on the verge of needing a haircut, with a quizzical, slightly weary, but (don't be fooled) absolutely thrilled look about him... In the first two or three years after my daughter was born, I went on trying to live that life, with the raincoat thrown over my shoulder and the weary, sexy, thrilled expression. I went on writing plays and seeing them produced and writing that first novel and seeing it published, and on weekends joining the other parents in Riverside Park, pushing my daughter on the swings and enduring the jostling, competitive chatter of the other Upper West Side parents.
Yeah, and I wander around with the same half-asleep, thrilled, and undoubtedly sexy expression as I write the random blog entry every odd week, or month, joining the other parents at the Reston(tm) Burger King, enjoying the jostling, competitive chatter of the SWAT team as it makes its appointed rounds.
But there's more.
One afternoon, after hoisting our daughter's stroller up the stairs of our walkup and entering the dim light of our cramped quarters, I just turned to my wife and said, without knowing I was going to say it, "Let's move."
I say that just about every day. So would life in the suburbs bring a new, marginally less solipisitic outlook? Or at least a haircut? Let's read on:
When my daughter turned 5 and started kindergarten, there was a particular lunchbox she insisted she had to have, and I remember now the intensity of the search for that lunchbox, which was, of course, out of stock everywhere. We drove far afield, in the beautiful late-summer dusk, to Ames and Caldor and Kmart, each of them a tall, beckoning, neon-lit tree on the branches of which the Holy Grail of that phantom lunchbox might be found hanging. Though I felt it intensely, it was still not possible for me to admit consciously that this quest had become more important to me than the quest to complete my troublesome second novel.
"Troublesome" is one word for it, I'm sure. Judging by the particularly purplish hue of his prose, I'd bet that "slush pile" is an even better choice of words.
But then again, what can you expect from a person whose worldview can be summed up by this one sentence:
But it really wasn't until I saw "Kramer vs. Kramer" that it all came together for me.
Funny. For me, it was Army of Darkness.