Category: Living

About a month ago, I got into a more heated discussion than I would have liked with someone.  We were in a group, having spent some time in a meeting earlier and out for that sort of dinner you have to bond with people at work, and this person – a woman in her mid thirties, upwardly mobile, successful, entrepreneurial – brought up her notion that banking would be eliminated by the rise of “blockchain.”  Her argument was pretty much what I’ve come to expect for intelligent people who use the word “blockchain” in a generic kind of way: a basic understanding – or more precisely, an intuition – that there is something fundamentally new about cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or Ethereum or the like, and a similarly instinctual understanding that when something so fundamentally new comes along in our new world of reductio ad absurdum et acceleratum, chances are, our world will be disrupted.  Being roughly millennial, and having no real direct experience with banking beyond (as she admitted) her credit card, her checking account, and making payments with her phone, she took these two quite accurate intuitions and extrapolated out into the destruction of an industry which strikes her as antiquated, consumer-unfriendly, and monopolistic.

She was wrong about her observations, though, especially given that she is American and therefore faces American banks.  American banks are only antiquated, consumer-unfriendly, and monopolistic if you’re extraordinarily lazy or if you require certain specialized international banking services that trap you with banks with global scale who act much like their oligopolistic cousins in the rest of the world.  Otherwise, you have your pick of incredibly low-cost, incredibly competitive, and groundbreaking banks which ruthlessly compete for your business and are in living terror of the other 4000 banks and hundreds of quasi-banks trying to steal it away from them.  She was also wrong about what she called “blockchain,” which is simply a distributed, secure, and private ledger system which cryptocurrencies use to ensure the reliability and value of their currency.  The thing is, banking itself is also a distributed, secure, and private ledger system; each bank is a secure and private ledger keeping track of your (electronic) money, and enabling the periodic conversion of that private money into public banknotes or tax payments.  Arguing that banking would be replaced by blockchain, and thus will be destroyed, is like arguing that US “generally-accepted accounting principles” will be replaced by International Financial Reporting Standards.  Yes, Virginia, banks may employ blockchain to manage their internal ledgers and to communicate amongst themselves about their various ledger systems; but banks will still exist.

In any event, things got heated because of two things.  First, I have a strong sense that I was viewed as “mansplaining” – which I probably was.  In this #MeToo era, the rules of rhetoric have changed, particularly when you’re viewed as belonging to a privileged class: I’m white, male, middle-aged, and in banking, while she was white (no points there), female (subject to historical power factors which are still to be adequately addressed), young (in the eyes of youth, always a disadvantage – I speak from memory here), and in the non-profit sector (even if you’re making money in the non-profit sector, you still get to revel in the fact that your excrement is noticeably less pungent).  In that discussion, therefore, even if I had valid objections, I had to navigate a much different debating minefield, and I doubt that I did so particularly well.  I’m learning, but I’m not nearly fluent enough in the new art of persuasion to pretend that I can compete.

The other problem, though, only occurred to me after about ten minutes of verbal serve and volley.  It’s not that I thought she was necessarily pointing in the wrong direction with her logic: indeed, I agree with her fundamental intuition that the massive expansion of information technology will, eventually, transform how we think of the concept of “value” which has historically become bound to our monetary units of exchange and the system that enables it to be exchanged.  I don’t think blockchain will be the answer – for one, the computing power required to continually verify individual transactions seems to expand exponentially given the current instantiation of a distributed ledger system, which means it’s not sustainable as a technology – but I do think we’re on the verge in the next generation or so of a fundamental decoupling of “value” from a monolithic concept of “money.”  And that will change banking, or eliminate the need for it entirely, and in so doing it will bankrupt many individuals who have relied on banking as a source of power, as a place for storage of value, and as a means of usurping others who don’t understand it as a system.  I’m both excited and a little nervous about that day coming, but I was in total agreement with my younger, female, non-profit friend about it being not too far over the horizon.

What got me annoyed, and ended up with me moving away from simple point-counterpoint discussion and into verbal smackdown, was my perception that my discussion partner simply didn’t care about moving to that next level.  She was content – in my perception, smugly so – to sit back on her two primary insights, that blockchain is new and disruptive, and that new and disruptive things tend to destroy the industries that they disrupt.  Blockchain is disruptive, it’s about money, banks are all about money, ergo banks will die, and now let’s talk about how great it is to be in a non-profit.  Not that I don’t want to talk about how great it is to be in a non-profit – I’m on two boards and have spent a lot of my banking career working for institutions which are not profit oriented – but hold on sister: just because I shouldn’t mansplain doesn’t mean you get to assert patently incorrect statements and move on.  Granted, you’re young and vivacious and are a master of the new rhetorical norms, but even Alcibiades had to answer to the old guy at the post-symposium dinner party.

I’ve been this way for a long time.  I can remember a study group at Georgetown when I was a way-too-young, way-too-angry sixteen year old freshman from Maine, where I verbally eviscerated some rich kid from New Jersey about the plot of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, her searing memoir of growing up in the West Indies, doubly a slave, first born of the descendants of slaves and now enslaved to a tourist economy that only offered jobs as waiters and maids and cooks to the rich visitors from their former colonial master countries.  The kid talked about how the standard of living in Aruba and Bermuda and Jamaica was only made better by integration into the global economy – not a false point, obviously – and, my Maine roots, my memories of New Jersey fathers looking at me at the mall wearing my fast food garb during the summers like I was a lesser being as they casually ordered for their brood and then yelled at me for taking too long, asking my friends to talk slower because they couldn’t understand their Maine downeast accents, all of it came roaring into play as I told the kid that he lacked both perspective and intelligence, and then gave a three-minute lecture on what it was like to come from the periphery, to have to watch the money come in every summer and leave every fall, to read the New York Times on your break and realize no one who read that paper cared about where you were from except to wonder how the lobster would taste there next July.

That came back to me, talking to the blockchain woman.

It comes back to me despite the fact that I still feel like I’m wrong about most things, despite the fact that listening to the blockchain woman made me think of new things and learn new things.  Even New Jersey boy at Georgetown made good points: without tourism, Maine would basically be northern Manitoba, and if you ask the people who drag themselves into Winnipeg – stabbiest city in North America – to get away from the black flies, mosquitoes, flooding, winter, and lack of everything but especially opportunity to be a valued human being, you don’t want to be northern Manitoba.  Tourism – and some government-subsidized shipbuilding and a few legacy businesses and the odd entrepreneur – is what allows Mainers to raise their children and hope they can be more.  It’s what allowed me to realize a dream and work away from Maine, in the world, in understanding and developing a view and perspective on the world, for the last twenty-five years.

New Jersey rich kid, in other words, had a good point to make, and I took it in, much though it annoys me to this day to admit its provenance.  And the blockchain woman was making a fundamentally good point: we live in a disruptive age.  I need to take that intuition, well stated by her, and apply it to all the things I think about, that Viktoria and Mark and I write about.  And, dammit, I’m doing that, and it’s been fruitful, and I’m playing with new ideas because of it.  Lots of those ideas are, candidly, terrifying, but it would be intellectually dishonest not to play with them and explore them.

But I’m still left with this frustration that many people – not all, but the overweening majority – take their two or three TEDtalk intuitions and then start making their assertions.  They don’t then spend the time to listen, to explore, or to challenge those intuitions from as many angles as they can.  They start laying down conclusions instead of exploring potentials.  They are clever, they often position two or three ideas that I’d never think of, let alone juxtaposition against one another, and they make magical new potentials emerge.  But annoyingly, they then start to conclude.

I’ve talked a lot about recursion in these pages, and I think what bothers me most in these discussions is that these people, boldly concluding and asserting their way through powerpoints and after-work dinners, are wasting their own precious capacity for recursive thinking.  Consciousness, sentience, consists of layers upon layers of potential.  There is creativity – the ability to imagine and posit things which have never existed in reality but can exist within our capacity for abstraction.  There is analysis – the ability to take both concrete and abstract things and see how they interact, see how they cause or affect one another.  But then there is the third degree: recursion, the ability to take both creativity and analysis and apply it to the fruits of each, to continually dive and swim and force interactions time and time again.  It’s the counterpoint to concluding, to asserting: it’s the questioning and inversion of the conclusions, forcing them to stand on their heads and repeat what they said backward to see if it still makes sense, to see if it still works.

Looking back on my reading of late, which has been a bit immersed in works on consciousness and the structure of mind and its implications for the design of artificial intelligence systems, I’m actually shocked that the word “recursion” has very rarely (or at least, not that I’ve seen) come up.  I learned recursion when I was a pup computer programmer, working COBOL on mainframes in one of the few truly non-tourist supported companies in Portland (naturally it was bought by a competitor from Chattanooga not long after I left home).  It was a basic action for exploring data, and it’s become a kind of basic action for exploring everything for me.  If you come up with a concept, explore its implications, including the implications of the concept on the concept itself.  As a human being, if you think something about someone else, apply the same thought to yourself – what do you find?  What do you see?  If you judge someone, judge yourself through the same lens; if someone judges you, apply that lens to the other.  And repeat.  Look in the mirror, then return the gaze.  And repeat.

What annoyed me (to the point of becoming petulant) about the blockchain argument was the fact that the other person had a good idea but didn’t bother to apply her insight to the concept itself.  Yes, blockchain is disruptive – but so was fractional banking, and in fact, fractional banking was the original distributed privately secured ledger system.  Blockchain is banking in a semi-automated way – which, really, is banking, which itself is only semi-automated.  Blockchain is a new technology in the same way that computational data stacks replaced double entry hand written ledgers as a core tracking technology.  But looked at through that recursive lens, blockchain isn’t a new form of banking, it’s just a new technology for use in banking.  Banking, the exchange of value in fixed units defined socially and made abstract through the use of ledger systems to track possession by individuals or their proxies, hasn’t changed and won’t simply because it’s got a supposedly better software package: moving from Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel didn’t change the world, even though macros in Visual Basic made it move faster than backslash keystroke commands.

The discussion I wanted to have with the blockchain woman was about what happens when we no longer require fixed units.  What if we had enough data – and enough instantaneous computational capability – to not require the exchange of unit quantities of dollars for goods and services, but instead could exchange goods and services – or potential future goods and potential future services – for themselves directly, without intermediation through units of currency?  We’ve constructed layers upon layers of systemic intermediation to allow us to exchange across time (bonds, stocks, deposits, interest paid or capital gains made on such instruments) and across location (currencies, differentiated value for similar goods in different places, markets, Amazon.com) and across societal perception (a man’s wage is greater than a woman’s for the same talent or skill or output, some goods are priced openly while others are priced in the dark).  Each of those layers allows for greater abstraction in the higher level of exchange, but it also allows for some information loss, and also allows for what really bothered the blockchain woman: the extraction of economic rent for the privelege of operating each exchange layer.  What if we could exchange with one another all the things that we want to represent materially in realtime with no intermediation – and thus no enrichment of bankers, only the utility cost of maintaining the master system?

Blockchain wouldn’t work for that; instead there would need to be a kind of universal and yet individually tunable and constantly updated price list, a kind of total menu of things and concepts and abstractions that could be exchanged at once.  Blockchain is just a lame, incredibly energy-exhaustive title insurance scheme; what I’m talking about is a way to exchange a Picasso for so many hours of my future writing output, or my new house in South Portland for a collection of old automobiles and model trains and a top-up of yardwork.  A single, universally valid exchange for all goods and services.  And if we had that, wouldn’t we be able to focus that much more time on the things that aren’t value-able, that cannot be conceived of in terms of value – like the value I put on the love I feel for my son, that I felt when I woke up in a motel in Blue River, British Columbia, and realized that at some point in the night my dog had curled up on the bed around me, the value I seek in writing this, in meeting Viktoria and Mark and realizing there is another soul interested in what I have to say and who will require notice of their own words?

That would be interesting.  And thinking of the implications – recursively, referencing the implications of the system over and over again – is terrifying.  There would be some of us who would simply try to get more “stuff” than anyone else – although arbitrage would close out most of that quickly, but not before some people had been taken advantage of and effectively enslaved themselves by selling more of their future potential output than they could ever recoup in terms of material well-being.  Some other of us would underutilize our potential and sit constantly realizing more value than they could spend – that wouldn’t be arbitraged away, it would just be a permanent waste.  The process of constantly updating and recognizing value – the menu-build algorithm – would need to be  made aware of all transactions at once – hence, I think, why some people look at blockchain as the building block of such a system, although again I see the energy demands as precluding that – and would also need to understand concepts of logistical transfer of goods, services, and people in a similarly constantly updated way, such that you can begin to see how all-consuming such a marketplace would look like.  Much, though, in the way that the market consumes most of what we experience in life today.

I’m sure anyone reading this can imagine further implications.  And you’ll start to see that the market which eliminates money is so all-consuming that it would by definition need to eliminate privacy, demand openness, in a way that most of us would be uncomfortable with – hence my own discomfort with it, even as I can imagine such a system emerging over time from our predilection for automation.  Indeed, what I see in such a world is the very opposite of trust, of acceptance, of love – it’s the elimination of trust in favor of complete openness so as to allow that master menu, that master algorithm of instantaneously transferable value, to be updated appropriately in realtime.

That, in fact, is how the argument about blockchain ended.  The woman talked for a bit about how banks were untrustworthy – throwing in an all-too-obvious Wells Fargo reference for good measure – and how blockchain would allow us all to trust one another by knowing that every transaction was verified instantaneously.  I told her that I thought quite the opposite: blockchain represented a material step towards the elimination of trust.  Trust requires the idea that you might be lied to.  You can’t lie when everything about you is already subject to the awareness of the blockchain.  She paused and said that was interesting.

Then I said it was also too energy inefficient, with blockchain mining already consuming some significant fraction of worldwide energy consumption and thus contributing to global warming.  Being a millennial, she agreed that global warming meant blockchain wasn’t the answer.  I sighed and asked for another beer.

It is August and we are driving to Heathrow.  In less than an hour, you will depart through the security gate – with three other young people – heading for Manzini in Swaziland, via Addis Ababa and Johannesburg. You will be gone for year, although we will come and visit you in eight months.  In the last eighteen years we have never been apart for more than two weeks.  I am going to miss you greatly, but I do not want to tell you this.

For, this is your day: the culmination of a year of dreaming, planning, fund-raising, waiting and waiting and more waiting, with a growing sense of anticipation.  It is a big adventure, a rite of passage, a declaration of independence, a crossing of the threshold from adolescence into adulthood.   It is your day, not mine.  At the airport I buy £50 worth of Rand, so you have some brass in pocket when you land.  In your bag you have a letter that I have written to you, which you read – I later discover – while the plane taxis out to the runway to take-off.  It tells you how proud I am of you, and that I think about you every day.

The day after you depart is one of mixed emotion for me.  I know that without my support and encouragement it would have been difficult for you to spend a year away in Africa.  I worry about the increased risks you face in an environment very different to Hackney.  You are street-wise, but where you are going the streets are different.  And, don’t forget, because I told you several times, the number and severity of traffic accidents is one of the biggest differences.   Yet, for all that, I know that this is what you want to do, and I admire your courage and your commitment.  You will have a great time and you will do some good in this world.  For that I cannot but be happy.

Those difficult early-teenage years are now behind us.  At sixteen, after under-performing in you GCSE exams, you changed schools and started again.  You made some new friends, worked harder, applied successfully to the University of Manchester, deferring your place for a year to allow you to volunteer at a project in Southern Africa that looks after children who are orphaned, abandoned, or simply in need of care.  You had (mostly) stopped picking pointless fights with me and I had (mostly) stopped imposing pointless rules on you.

Our relationship was not without its frustrations: there were still irritations and misunderstandings on both sides.   You wanted to grab more freedom and I wanted you to show greater responsibility.  But we kept talking to each other, kept cooking and eating together, kept faith in each other.  Most importantly of all, we were able to joke together.  We maintained a common bond in the humour of the absurd, of the bizarre, of the eccentric.  We had progressed from Harpo Marx in A Night at the Opera, via Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, to Leonardo di Caprio in The Wolf on Wall Street.  We laughed at them all, and we laughed together.

I have a vivid memory of when you were very young, maybe only a year old.  I had taken you out of the bath and you were wrapped in a big towel, slowly being dried and rubbed with oil and cream, before being dressed in a sleep-suit and put to bed.  I wished that I could sing in tune, even just a little.  I would have sung you a lullaby: Summertime, and the livin’ is easy / Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high / Your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good-looking / So hush, little baby, don’t you cry.  But I knew well the strict limitations of my vocal skills: I’d better stick to pulling funny faces at you instead.

We play a game.  I make a series of actions, touching my ears, my eyes, my nose, my lips, my chin and the top of my head.  I try to get you to copy me.  I repeat the series in the same order several times.  Then I make a deliberate mistake and touch my chin when I should have touched my nose.  I pull a face, roll my eyes, shrug my shoulders and look forlorn.  Then I try again. I repeat the series correctly three times and then make the same deliberate mistake again.   You giggle.  You smile at me.  You seem to find my clowning funny.  You have been waiting and watching for the error.  I can’t sing but I can make you laugh, and that’s good enough for me.

Then you try to copy me.  You touch your ear, your nose, your lips, the top of your head.  You repeat the series.  Then the third time, you go wrong and touch your chin.  You look puzzled.  For a split second I’m not quite sure what has happened: have you lost the thread of your actions, and forgotten the pattern?  Were you not able to remember the sequence for a third time?   Before I could organize this thought in my mind, you shrugged your shoulders and burst out laughing.  And how you laughed: peals of uninhibited, uncontrolled hilarity.  Pure physical delight.

The human animal: a thinker, a talker, a maker of tools, but most importantly, a laugher.  And I want to laugh with you, but I am in shock because I realize that you have not only copied my action series, you have also copied my deliberate mistake.  Crazy girl!  You are already asserting your equal standing in our relationship: anything you can do I can do too.   I laugh – we laugh together – but I also want to cry with joy that we have shared this moment of mimicry and intimacy, that I made you laugh, and you repaid me by making me laugh too.

Last month you came to visit me on my birthday.  I cooked for you.  This is more challenging than it once was, because of your commitment to veganism.  You know that I am sceptical of your rationale, but respectful of your decision.  And I am glad that it has made you more interested, both in cooking and in the politics of food.  I make us a selection of dishes, all with a Middle-Eastern theme, and they mostly work out.  We eat well, and I drink well too.  Later we drop into a pub in Holborn to watch England play rugby.  You queue to buy me beer and we enjoy the game together.   Then we head to Covent Garden: you have bought two tickets for us to see an evening of contemporary dance as part of my birthday present (along with a small succulent, an essential addition to my new flat in E2).  The performance is good, with striking music, simple but effective set design and exciting modern choreography.  We had a great day together and I will remember it for a long time.

You are now in your early twenties and we are starting to make friends.  It is not always easy.  Converting a relationship between parent and child into a relationship between two adults requires us both to reconsider our roles, our power to hurt, our knowledge of each other’s weaknesses, our propensity to slip into standard or stereotypical roles.  You will always be my daughter, but I do not want you to be only my daughter: I also want you to be my friend.

I remember someone asking me, when you were around ten or eleven, did I mind that my only child was a girl?  I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this question.  I didn’t think that I would have treated a son any differently from the way I treated you.  I have sometimes wished that you were more tidy, more timely, more Tottenham; but I have never wished that you were a boy.  My only regret, less for me than for you, which I have become aware of in writing these texts about you, is that you will never know first-hand what it feels like to be a father to a daughter.  For me it has been the best experience.

 

Pierre passed away on April 2^nd, 2019.  He died like he always lived – by his own will.  When he was first diagnosed with lung cancer, he expressed his intentions to forgo chemo-therapy, surgery and radiation.  He didn’t want to exchange one sickness for another.  But sickness came nonetheless and in the end, in constant respiratory distress, he refused supplementary oxygen.  Amid the warm hug of morphine, he peacefully suffocated.  As he took his last barely audible breath, we could almost hear him say:  

-I had One Life to live and I have no regrets.

My mother and I were present by his side for merely five minutes – even the nurses had been surprised at how fast he had declined.  Between sobs, I reassured him: “We understand and respect your choice.”  Holding his limp hand in mine, with my mother’s head over his chest, we both told him how much we loved him.  

I’ll always remember the moment his One Life left him.  It is the most tragic of magic to witness how something so ethereal as a Life – as a Soul – can be so noticeable when it goes…    

With his diagnostic, he knew that his end was near.  All he asked was to live a few more months in peace with my mother.  For Pierre didn’t fear death.  What he most feared was to be disabled, to lose his dignity, to be a burden on my mother, dependent on her for his basic needs.  Arguably, he had increasingly relied on her for the entirety of their relationship, ever since he lost an important share of his eyesight in January 1996.  Still, autonomy comes in various degrees and he warned us – quite forcefully – that he’d depart this world when his body would finally fail him.  

– What’s the point to live when there is no quality of life?, he’d ask rhetorically.  

For two years, he kept his mobility – now motorized – and peacefully co-existed with his cancer.  He did less and less, went to bed earlier, but still led life to the fullest of his capacity.  He spent both winters in his condo in Florida.  Pragmatic, I enquired about his health insurance.  Pierre pointed that: “One can’t get insurance when their house is already on fire!”  Touché.  Anyway, he could afford a trip to the emergency room or even a private plane to bring him home.  

Throughout his decline, he maintained a brave face and an unwavering strength – what mattered most was to live as with as much resolve as ever!  He settled his affairs.  I wrote this book.  He shared with me: “I never thought that I’d so successful, so fulfilled.”  By questioning him, I discovered how he became the man I met almost twenty-five ago.  In his answers, I could hear how much I tested him over the years.   Quickly, my writing revealed how profoundly my fate had always been interwoven with his.

Only in the last month of his life was his respiratory distress such that he couldn’t function normally.  Still, he lived with complete acceptance of his eventual demise.  He wanted us to be stoic him.  He wanted us to behave as if he wasn’t dying – not in denial of reality but total acceptance of it.  Pierre wanted us to celebrate his life instead of despairing!  For my mother, this request was the hardest to accept – she wanted to cry in her husband’s arms, to be comforted by his touch.  Even if she genuinely supported his decisions to die as pain-free as possible, she hated to see him disintegrate before her eyes.

When I could be alone with Pierre, I sometimes scolded him to be so stiff with my mom.  I reminded him:

– It’s not because we do not like to talk about feelings that we do not have them!  We talk about our emotions not because they can solve anything but simply to feel close.  

We experienced an intimacy we rarely shared before.  Even in his matter-of-factness, in all his rationality and meticulous planning of his estate, I obviously knew that my mother was the love of his life, his joy and jewel.  Everyone could plainly see their devotion to each other!  She had given her life to him and thus, waves of sadness were bound to wash over her.  But all he could muster to say was:  

– I had One Amazing Life!  

In his gaze, we discerned the unspoken: “It was amazing because you shared it with me!”  He really was a man of a few words.

Eventually, the day came when he felt himself becoming a burden.  My mother, now his nurse as well as his wife, called me to tell me how both of them could no longer sleep.  He had fallen and broken his nose, which further hampered his breathing.  He couldn’t walk to the washroom on his own.  He was losing his grip on reality and slurred his speech.  Because he always led the way, made decisions and demanded them to be respected, it was hard for my mother to convince him that he needed to be in a hospital.  He was always a stubborn man but now, his lung capacity was so low that he was asphyxiated.  He could no longer think.  

Since our last major conflict, my relationship with Pierre had evolved to the point where he trusted my judgement like his own.  Thus in his last day, I was to be his mirror, his pillar, the voice of his conscience.  

I arrived by his side on Monday night.  At first sight, I felt horrified – with my fresh eyes I could see him already in the process of dying.  I tried to relieve my mother from her nursing duties for a night but he preferred her.  Still at home the next morning, he finally sleep while I held his hand and read Aristotle’s Ethics.  

The home-care palliative nurse arrived at 11am.  I translated her concerns in clear terms: “Yes, he should go to the hospital”, though one could see in her hesitation that she was concerned with Pierre’s consent.  

He was reluctant.  I deciphered in his grunts and one word answers that he didn’t want any more tests, just to talk to his doctor.  I could hear him wonder: “Is it time already?”  My intuition was clear: he needed his doctor’ reassurance that indeed, it only went downhill from here.  We do not know if his doctor visited him that last night, precipitating his choice to refuse oxygen.  Either way, he died in peace.  

In the aftermath of someone’s demise, it is tempting to be revisionist of their lives.  As friends and family warmly hug my mother or me, they exclaim: “Pierre was such a good man!”  My sole reply is to embrace them tighter.  He certainly was a loving, generous, most of the time patient person.  But he was also rough and demanding.  He was often silent when he should have spoken from the heart.  Yet in his actions and choices, he was transparent.  If I had the strength to be honest, I’d answer: “Pierre was more great than good.”  He was as complex as a man can be.  

Pierre was an epic hero – a nobleman of a bygone era – and yet, the modern antihero of my own life.  Just like Odysseus, he ruled and vanquished.  He navigated the challenges of his time with his wit and sheer strength of will.  Since he spent everyday of his life self-actualizing – simultaneously being and becoming increasingly more himself – his life exemplifies the most complete paradoxes of humanity…

For the better part of seven hours, I tossed and turned in the upper bunk of an Amtrak “roomette”, their quaint term for attempting the impossible of putting two people in a six foot three inch by two foot six inch space and allowing both of them to get a good night’s sleep.  One of us did: my son, who at six years old and three feet eight inches high is perfectly sized for such a space, slept the sleep of the gods.  He also had the bottom bunk; despite efforts at dinner, from both me and from the random couple from Chicago who sat with us, to convince him how much fun the top bunk is, he called the bottom bunk.

Making it worse was the fact that he wanted the night light on.  The night light is a low-wattage bulb in a five inch by three inch blue plastic enclosure.  If it were glowing faintly across a room – or, say, you only saw the indirect shine coming from above the bunk directly above you – it would probably be soft and lulling.  If the bulb is a foot from your eyes, however, even the low wattage is enough to be an impediment.  I kept thinking about all the press recently about limiting the “blue light” from screens in the hours before bed as even with my eyes closed tightly I could sense the glow.

I finished a book while my son read Busy Busy World by Richard Scarry.  I looked down at one point and he looked up and said “Hug?” but getting down would have roused him a bit too much, so instead I asked for one of his stuffed bears, gave it a big hug, and told him to give my son an even bigger hug back.  He caught the bear and snuggled him tightly as he nestled into the covers, yawning below me and eventually falling still.

At dinner he ordered the steak, but not the salad, as he announced loudly to one and all.  He also asked for bacon bits on his baked potato, and said he wasn’t going to eat any green beans.  I told him that he needed to eat at least two.  During the meal the couple from Chicago convinced him to eat some more beans in the same forkful as a bit of bacony, sour creamy potato. That worked too.

He’s made friends with another young boy, a bit older but who’s a bit… special.  The boy carries around a stuffed bear which is slightly larger than my son, and despite being probably two or three years older, his eyes and his speech reveal a sense of wonder, a sense of absolute joy, that even now in my almost-seven year old son I can see being pushed out by a sensation that the world isn’t quite fair, that not everyone is getting the same good things as everyone else, that maybe life is going to be a lot harder than train rides with Dad and a really good teacher and a Mom who loves him makes it seem like on the surface right now.  The other boy, though, having kept a sense of unadulterated joy and love and life in his eyes for even a few more years than six, is marking himself out as someone different.

My son has been so designated, by a child psychologist three and a half years ago roughly seven months after his parents split up and he moved away from his dad and back to a Seattle that he didn’t know.  In the intervening time it’s obvious to almost everyone except my ex-wife that our son is really pretty normal – a bit bookish and not interested in sports, but given his parents and their families, that surprises no one.  He’s a bit ungainly in social situations but having observed him with his friends in first grade, it seems to be about the norm for boys.

I volunteer at his school, which is a nice thing to do I suppose but it’s also an opportunity to see what being a six year old is like.  I was not normal at age six and I could even articulate that fact: I knew I was having conversations in my head, and with adults, that other kids weren’t having, and mostly they didn’t understand them and didn’t care.  A friend of mine, who is also a single parent, has said that her goal is to let her child have fun, to just see world in terms of the beauty of Maine and a dog and snow and laughter, for as long as possible. For me, that all wrapped up around four years old when I started to read books without pictures.  I haven’t looked back, but I’m intruigued now to see how my son and his friends are doing.  I didn’t have enough objectivity when I was his age to see what “childhood” was like; I was busy guarding my incipient adulthood, too busy trying to make sense of self-awareness at an age when most kids were blissfully unaware.

The boys are ungainly: their sentences carrying their own weird cadence of incorrect emphasis, poor word choice, and neck-snapping changes of topic.  Their bodies are all a bit strange too: some lean and wiry with big heads, like my son, some already building a kind of linebacker dominance to them, out of scale with the rest of the room.  There’s a few dreamy eyed kids, a few social butterflies – my son is one of them – and a few burly types who are embarrased by their strength, and one or two pre-bullies, kids who insert themselves in front of others, demanding attention, demanding respect but not doing anything to earn it.  I vaguely remember those dynamics but mostly I remembered finding the quiet corner with the books and reading as much as I possibly could, and sitting in the back of group time and trying not to be noticed.  My son sits in the middle.  He’s occasionally reminded not to talk to his neighbor.  I’m sort of proud of that.

The girls at age six and seven are confident and happy, although you can already see signs of cliquishness and coquettery, the girl with the not-quite-perfect leggings being shunned at choice time, for example, the same four girls always sitting together despite the teacher’s best efforts to break them up.  Some are already wearing clothing that would be viewed as “sexualized” – they’re definitely dressed more thoughtfully than the boys, but there’s also a bit of preening, hair done up nicely and clothing that’s coordinated.  They also want to be noticed, especially by a father volunteer: one girl stood up during story time, locked eyes with me, and started to pirouette.  The teacher asked her nicely to stop, and without breaking the stare, she sat down in front of me.

The only coordinated outfit among the boys is for the only African-American kid, who’s also the strongest and fastest kid in the class.  I have a sense that all of that is a lot of burden for a seven year old kid in first grade.

The boys neither shun nor do much in the way of self-identification.  They sort of form random groupings, coming together into little groups or teams and dissolving again in the course of a few minutes.

I thought about all of this while drifting on the outer edges of being awake, between Klamath Falls in Oregon and Sacramento.  Although the cities didn’t matter, really, except as markers on the timetable, benchmarks for determining whether we’re time or not.

I thought of my ex-wife, after having our quarterly divorce coaching session on Friday with a lot to talk about.  I thought about the ex-girlfriend, and girlfriends before her, and I thought about it in a spiralling way back to when I was little, when I was my son’s age, searching for the thread that tied everything together.  It’s not there, but part of the mystery of not sleeping in an enclosed space it that your mind dangles out the hope of that thread as a means of both getting you to sleep and of keeping your consciousness alive.

I thought about a dozen things I should be writing, a dozen work things I should get done in the next few days.  We pulled out of Chico and my body started warming up for the day, despite it being barely past three thirty in the morning.  I stayed in the bunk, staring and looking away from the blue night light. Finally I got up, fished out some clothes, got dressed – thankfully yoga has given me enough flexibility to get dressed even in a bunk – and kissing my son on forehead, went out to the observation car and started to write.

Good morning.  He’s up now… he just ran down the hallway.  Maybe there is a thread in there somewhere.

It was a warm night in June, or perhaps July.  I was very conscious of the time, because you were late.  We had asked you to come home by a certain time, but your curfew-hour had passed, and you were still out.  I left the house and walked around aimlessly, for fifteen to twenty minutes, up and down the local streets.   I knew that the chances of meeting you were low; negligible; greater than zero, but not by much.  What else could I do?  Sitting at home waiting for you was a torment.  By walking, at least I could slowly impose upon myself a diminution of my anger.   I would almost certainly not find you, but I would be kinder to you when you eventually came home from wherever you had been hiding.

You had a phone; a very nice phone; a BlackBerry to be precise.  In those days, when Nokia and Erikson had fallen behind, and before Apple and Samsung were ubiquitous, BlackBerry was the phone of choice for teenage girls in Hackney.  Forget the efficiency with which they delivered email, which made them beloved of employees of the financial services industry, for you it was only about the free-to-use messaging service:  BlackBerry Messenger allowed you and your friends to communicate endlessly and pointlessly – securely too, although you cared less about that – without incurring any cost.

Tonight, my smart daughter had her smart phone turned-off.  Or you were just ignoring my messages, pretending that, despite being a member of the most “connected” generation in history, somehow you were unavailable to take my call, enquiring why you were not home at the agreed time.  You were on the grid but pretending not to be.

You were late, very late, and I was furious.  This was not the first time: it felt as if it was every time.  You asked if you could go out and we agreed a time by which you must be home.  You invariably came home an hour or more later than we had agreed and then played hurt and aggrieved when we chided you for tardiness.  You were at fault, but your body language quickly made us feel ourselves to be the problem: frowning mouth, eyes rolling upwards, tension in your shoulders and fists.

One of my worst experiences of fatherhood was catching myself while offering you some form of admonition or cautionary advice, realising half way through that I was starting to sound exactly like my parents addressing me when I was your age.  And I remembered – immediately and urgently – how little regard I had for what they said to me when I was in your shoes.  I didn’t want to repeat that mistake but, mid-sentence it was hard to re-phrase my nugget of parental guidance in a way that might be of some beneficial use to you.

The repetition of fool’s wisdom, from one generation to the next – and the next and the next, onwards unto perpetuity – was not my idea of responsible parenting.  Just stop talking, I told myself, before you say something even more stupid.

When I was a teenager, I thought school uniform was an authoritarian imposition, and wholly pointless; I thought it not unreasonable that I should go out with my friends without being obliged to return home at some arbitrarily agreed hour; and I thought that the formal rituals of family life – eating together, taking an interest in the day-to-day worries of kith and kin, showing respect to each other’s values and property – were insubstantial and should be subordinated to the genuine demands of peer friendship.   Mostly, I still think these things.

How I struggled to make the case for the other side of those arguments, when you told me, with exasperation, exactly what I had tried to explain to my parents a generation previously.  I could have said, “yes, of course, you are right”, but I doubted that it would be helpful for you, as you matured into adulthood, and was certain that it would not be helpful for me, as I clung on, reluctantly, to my paternal role as enforcer of household law.

Looking back, I realise that there is a modicum of truth in the wisdom of parents.  There is virtue in shared daily routines, of demonstrating solidarity with the joys and tears of other family members, in learning to be diplomatic, in respecting agreements and trying to meet expectations that have been collective agreed.  An important part of growing up is learning how to modulate the desire for sincerity – for authenticity, as we existentialists like to say – with the social value of compromise and peace.  Some things, albeit true, do not need to be said; some hypocrisies do not need to be called out; some family traditions, rules, mores, do not need to be transgressed, just for the sake of demonstrating the ego’s autonomy.

That said, an equally important part of growing up is knowing when civility is demeaning, when home-truths demand to be told, when double-standards exposed, when tradition should be abandoned and when innovation embraced.  I am even now learning how best to judge the appropriateness of these actions; back then I found myself trying to teach you what I had yet to master.  Parenting is error-strewn; learning by doing badly; being unable to find the right balance; laying paving in the wrong direction but with good intentions.

What did you need from me during those difficult teenage years – from fourteen to seventeen – when you felt the need to rebel against me and my values, to challenge my authority, to overturn the order of the home, just as I had felt that need when I was your age?  But – I wanted to say to you – but don’t you see that the order I have imposed is reasonable?  I have not established my authority upon unjustified and unaccountable power.  I am not an unthinking dictator.  Each request I make, each limit I set, each boundary I draw for you is based on a thoughtful and sincere assessment of your right to independence, blended with our right for the integrity of our family life to be respected.

Of course, you needed to rebel.  When you are a teenager, the specific character of authority is not the point.  It is not the details but the essence of authority that needs to be challenged.  Thereby, you forced me to realise that my own rebellion, a generation earlier, was less to do with the righteousness of my case than my need to have a case – any case – to sustain my emergent sense of independence.  The James Dean film is right: being a rebel is what matters, the precise nature of the cause a minor detail.

If the essence of adolescence is rebellion, then the burden of parenthood is the erosion of fraudulent authority.  I longed for my part in this drama to be over quickly, but that making it too easy – for me as well as you – would have been a great disservice to us both.  You needed to learn that you have to fight to be free; which meant that I, your father, had to resist, to try to keep you imprisoned in your childhood cocoon, despite my not wanting to.

And then – mirabile dictu –some evenings you would come home from school and talk about a lesson you had found interesting, a piece of work that you had enjoyed doing, a problem with a friend to which you had discovered a solution, a challenging incident in the playground or the street that you had responded to with maturity, an item on the news that had awoken your curiosity, an inappropriate remark or insult to one of your classmates that you had challenged.   From time to time, hope springs.

I’m guessing that a frictionless path from childhood to maturity makes for a weak person in later life.  The battles of my teenage years have surely held me in good stead during adulthood.  I hope that I made your adolescence hard enough for you to nurture your strength.  But I am so very happy that time is now in our shared past. Truly: the sign of failed parenting is not that your children break the house rules; it’s when they don’t.