I had the flu – realizing too late, after a few days of feeling shaky and feverish, after driving an hour and a half to see good friends while trying to shake it off. I spent a day in bed, drinking madeira and reading Thomas Mann, not a good thing in my condition and with my particular personal demons, and I was tired, ready for bed.
Upstairs, my parents watched Antiques Roadshow, which was banal enough for me to close the door and close out the noise. But at some point, the show ended and PBS switched to a Jackie Robinson[1] documentary. The first bits of it included some sound bites from Barack Obama, and my parents, who view him as the anti-Christ, more or less, mumbled their criticisms loudly enough for me to take note. I opened the door to my room to listen in to the rest of whatever their commentary might reveal.
Strangely, though, the documentary played out and there were few sidebars from my parents. The documentary unfolded and I kept in mind the fact that this was really describing to them the story of their lives – they were born just a few years before Robinson came into the majors, just before the colour barrier was broken – and while every now and again they talked about their memories, as children, of hearing about the events described, they mostly just listened. I was downstairs, but I imagined my father watching, in mild pain as his spine twitched in bone-shattered spasms in his easy chair, and my mom watching, probably knitting or doing a crossword puzzle and looking up, her hearing not so good but trying her best to focus on the interviews, the annoying voiceovers, the vintage footage.
I was thinking about other things. I was thinking about the interview tomorrow in southern New Hampshire, how to play it, how to dress in the right way, how to prove to the small company that was looking at me as a wingnut global banker trying to pitch to be their finance guy, how to be the right person. I was thinking about the girlfriend, how to be good for her after she had seen me as being so wrong, even as she loved me, even as she was facing the blandishments of the life I had left behind, even as she had failed to face up to what I needed as a father to my son, even as she had to suffer my inability – my failure – to be the person she desperately needed while she navigated her own journey towards salvation.
And my parents stayed quiet. Every now and again there would be a discussion of a few baseball players that my father or mother remembered as kids, but they kept listening.
I sometimes think of my parents as “the landed gentry” – hopelessly conservative and stuck in a view of the world where, as my father sometimes says, “now everyone is gay or transgender”, where my mom views Democrats as harbingers of the apocalypse. But then I remember that they have lived through almost eighty years of unrelenting change. They laugh when they hear about someone saying “the fried chicken in the negro restaurants was great” – not demeaningly, but because they also went to what were called Negro restaurants just because they wanted to, just because they cared, just because they wanted to show that they knew that black people were people, not black people, and they also loved the fried chicken. Today that will be viewed as being condescending, but when they were young, they were revolutionaries. Just because they liked the fried chicken. (I should point out here that my mom’s mom, apparently, made the best oven-fried chicken on earth – but her recipe was lost forever and I can only report this second hand. But fried chicken love runs deep in the family, for what it’s worth.)
Retweet this. I’ll be shunned. My parents might be reviled. But I like fried chicken because I like fried chicken. My parents, though, tried fried chicken at restaurants that they weren’t “supposed” to go to because they both liked fried chicken, and they wanted to be kind to the African-American people who owned the places that served it, and they went out of their way to visit them. That minor – almost absurdly minor – act meant something, once, even though today saying “fried chicken” and “white people” in the same sentence will ensure a comment troll war.
My mom probably voted for Trump – I’m respectful enough of the secret ballot to not admit to knowing one way or another. My father probably did too, but again – secret ballot, democracy, don’t know, shouldn’t ask. But regardless of any present day reactionary tendencies, they were revolutionaries in their way in their day. And tonight, they’re listening to a documentary which, as I listen to it, can only be described as progressive. A documentary which white supremacists and “alt-right” people would be vomiting over from the first sentence. But they are reliving their memories and seeing how far the world came in their lifetimes. And they – along with a wonderful community of teachers, but starting with them – gave me the capability to see what a world could be.
Sometimes they annoy me – and living with them, if only temporarily, opens up all sorts of minor annoyances and refocuses me on the things that I didn’t like about growing up in a relatively conservative, Republican, Catholic household (living with your parents in middle age is sometimes good but always challenging…). But more often than not, I’m reminded of their history, and their perspective, and how much the world changed while they lived in it. And it’s also made me more sympathetic, realizing how much they participated in that change. From my stupidly “knowledgeable” position, with friends with transgender children and a racial hodge-podge of friends and my Taiwanese-American ex-wife and therefore “mixed-race” son, I sometimes forget what came before me. And I sometimes condemn my parents’ Trump sympathies, even as they sit a floor above me, enraptured by listening to the story of Jackie Robinson. And I am wrong to judge, and I am graced to be their son.
I think about that as I think about the girlfriend, sleeping in Essex, an entirely different world with entirely different social trajectories – neither her nor her parents, with whom she lives, probably have ever heard of Jackie Robinson, but her parents lived through a different but no less radical transformation of England, which resulted in both the girlfriend being herself and also in Brexit. I think about that as I prepare for an interview in middle of nowhere southern New Hampshire, for a company that makes t-shirts both for organic multiculti hippies and gun-toting post-9/11 ruralistas, and wonder whether I should wear a button down LL Bean collared shirt or a non-buttoned down tailored shirt with double buttoned cuffs. I think about that as I wonder into the far future, five years down the road, where my ex-wife and I, and hopefully the girlfriend and hopefully my parents and hopefully my ex-wife’s future beau and hopefully every other part of my son’s community will consider where he should go to middle school and why, and hopefully will do so in partnership. Hopefully, but I know five years is an eternity in the landscape of a human lifetime – especially mine, even more especially that of my son.
I think about that and I marvel. This social construct – this world which is wholly human, which really doesn’t reference anything other than that which we as human beings choose to set value to, both for good – because we love one another – and for ill – because we fear one another – is so unbelievably amazing. It’s horrible to look at from one angle – but I use angle in a weird way, because it gives the idea that we can look at something as a physical thing. But I’m a mathematical guy. “Angle” to me just means a perspective, and this social construct is far more multi-dimensional than any possible representation of 11 or 26 dimensions of quantum reality. Human beings have constructed the most beautiful creation of all – we have constructed reality. And the angles from which we can view this reality are infinite, but most of them are spectacular, beautiful, stunning – even if some of those perspectives are also horrible, cruel, wretched.
But the beauty is what overwhelms. How do I describe that beauty? It is far more wonderful than the most beautiful visions I could describe – say, the Portrait of Madame X by Sargent, which when I first saw it at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston I stopped and sat and dropped slack-jawed for what seemed like an hour, or the vista of the lakes just north of Jackman, Maine, when you drive north on US Route 201 towards Quebec City, when the afternoon sun makes the water seem like mirrors, or looking out from the top floors of an Edmonton tower block as the sun erupts over the prairie and the Fort Saskatchewan refineries in an early February sunrise and you realize what the Earth really is. It is all of those things because reality – human reality – can embrace all of those visions at once and transcend them and create something even more magnificent – can create a vision of those visions happening in front of a group of people who love one another and can see that beauty and make it erupt inside themselves, together, shared, at once.
I want to take the girlfriend and the son and the dog (well, the dog might be allowed) to see Sargent in Boston. I wish they could all be here with me listening to my parents reliving their childhood in the story of Jackie Robinson. The amazing thing about this world is – it’s all possible. It can all happen. And even if those things don’t happen, even greater things will.
And that, really, is the beauty that I am a part of. Not the individual beauty of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, or living through my parents’ experience of that, or seeing Madame X, or being a part of the life of someone who will, I’m sure, paint something even more spectacular. I’m part of a world where all of that exists. And as long as I open myself to it, as long as I’m not scared of what’s next, as long as I remind myself and others to speak up and put pen and brush and thought to paper, we’ll create unimaginable beauty. Today.
But tomorrow, I have an interview. I’m pretty sure I’m going to wear the LL Bean shirt. Light blue. But with jeans. They make t-shirts, after all.
[1] I know some of my readers aren’t history or baseball buffs, so an explantation with apologies to those to whom this is obvious: Jackie Robinson was the first African-American baseball player to play in Major League Baseball. Race is complex in America – biggest understatement of the last five centuries – and his breaking the “color barrier” in baseball unleashed the process in American life which has led to equality not just under law, but in specie, for the US. He is a hero – in the Greek sense, which means he is tragic, and his fate is unjust, and incomplete. And because most people I know today don’t know who he is, his heroism is truly perfect. Being a historian is a curse, but no one told me that when they said it was essential to being human – but had they told me, I never would have tried to become human, so I’m glad they kept me in ignorance.