I love my watches, but deciding which one to wear, like my wife deciding on an outfit, drives me crazy. I'm taking my daughters out to lunch for fish tacos. Do I really need to torment myself between the Seiko Sumo, the Orient M-Force, and the Seiko Black Monster?
I was sixteen when my father told me we needed to see our
neighbor, a surgeon by the name of Preston Stark. We weren’t that close to the
doctor, but we exchanged niceties over the years. That was enough of a bond
that my father felt obliged to pay Dr. Stark a visit. Somehow my father had
gotten wind of a great, crippling depression that had overcome the doctor. The
depression pertained to his wife Catherine leaving him for another doctor
nearly two years earlier. She had let her soon-to-be ex husband keep the house,
but she wanted the furniture for herself because she had picked it out and
wanted to bring it into her new life with her new husband.
Because Catherine had left so long ago, I had assumed that
when my father and I entered his house with a pot of spaghetti one afternoon
that the interior would have been redone with new décor and furniture. But I
was wrong on many counts.
First, the doctor who was usually tan, tall, and gangly,
due in part to his love of tennis, answered the door slouched in a tattered
gray robe. He looked pasty, deprived of sunlight, and had a dark circles under
his eyes, a double chin and a paunch. His hair was unkempt and he had a week of
scraggly beard growth. The house was bare and over-heated to the point that it
was difficult to breathe. The windows were closed and it was like a sauna
inside. The walls were blank canvasses. The hard-wood floors were covered only
with a few dust balls. That was about it. Only the kitchen had a card table and
three fold-out chairs.
Moving like a ghost tethered to a ball and chain, Stark
led us into the kitchen where we sat on the fold-out chairs. My father made
small talk about fishing for crab at the Berkeley pier and my stupid idea of
bypassing college and going right into the labor force as a garbage man and all
the while Stark was plugging numbers into his calculator and mumbling the cost
of what it would require to replace the furniture while shaking his head as if
overwhelmed by the money he would need to spend.
My father said, “You’re loaded. You don’t need to worry
about money, do you?”
Stark ignored my father and continued making calculations.
He looked up and pointed at the dining room. “The dining table she took was
worth over five thousand dollars. And that was ten years ago. Today it would
cost twice that much.”
“Then replace it,” my father snapped. “Just fill up your
house to your heart’s content and be done with it. It’s time to move on.”
Ignoring my father’s words, Stark said, “The sofa turned
into a pull-out bed and was the most comfortable bed in the house. I’ll never
find one like it.”
I noticed my father’s demeanor was changing. He was a
lieutenant in the army well acclimated to barking orders and expecting quick
results. A rigid scowl of impatience was spread across his face.
“If you continue going down this rabbit hole,” my father
said, “you’re going to go down so deep no one—and I mean no one—is going to be
able to pull you back up. Do you hear me?”
Stark didn’t appear to be listening. He was plugging in
more numbers in his calculator while grumbling about a rare vase from Paris
that his wife had taken with her. “Technically it was hers, but I had picked it
out for our tenth wedding anniversary.”
In the mythical version of the story, the way I want to remember it, my father grabbed Stark by the lapels, shook him like a doll, and screamed "Wake up!" over and over.
But instead my father looked at me and said, “Let’s go, son. I’ve had
enough.” My father grabbed me around my upper arm to the degree that it hurt
and he steered me to the front door.
Following us, Stark seemed to emerge from his daze. He
said, “Wait, we haven’t had lunch. Your spaghetti is still on the counter.”
With a look of disgust I’ll never forget, in one motion my
father bared his teeth at Stark, opened the front door with his left hand and
with his right hand he violently swatted in the direction of the forlorn doctor
as if trying to kill a fly. His dramatic gesture was accompanied by a loud
unintelligible yell of dismissal. I’ve never seen my father do this to anyone.
It was like an official shunning of another human being.
I replay this scene over and over thirty-five years later,
but it’s always in slow motion with spittle parachuting out of my father’s
mouth and beads of sweat flying off his drenched hair.
When we returned to our house, my father said to me, “I
know as your father I am supposed to love you unconditionally and for the most
part I do, but if you ever succumb to helplessness and self-pity to the degree
that you and I just witnessed, I will disown you, do you hear me? I’ll disown
you because the disease that he has allowed to take over his life is the
unforgivable sin. Do you understand?”
I didn’t totally understand at the time this “disease” my
father was talking about. But I do now, the self-pitying python that strangles
us and makes us squander the life that has been given us. I’ve struggled with
this “disease” off and on over the years and I loathe myself when I see it
baring its fangs. But I’ve also learned that the self-loathing from seeing my
own self-pity and my own fixation on the past just feeds the disease, so I find
that this “disease” can be rather tricky to deal with.
One thing for sure, I always make sure to fill my house
with tasteful, high-quality furnishings.
But I have none. Recently my twin toddlers were fighting over a balloon. As they ignored my repeated pleas for sharing, I got up from watching Pawn Stars, marched to the kitchen drawer, pulled out a steak knife, grabbed the balloon and stabbed it. With a big pop. I pronounced that "the fighting was over."
I solved the problem, just like my father used to . . . with absolutely no patience.
My wife wasn't happy about my recounting of the incident. She said, "You killed it. That's so violent. In front of the children. A knife. Oh my God."
There is the issue of the steak knife. What if it slipped from my hand or something? I realize now that the steak knife was too harsh, both in terms of symbol and substance. think next time, I'll stomp on the balloon with my foot. Or do a swan dive belly flop over it. Non-knife versions seem safer albeit no less violent.
Bullying, braggadocio, mean-spirited schadenfreude, reckless aggression, mindless greed, and silver-back posturing are clearly rooted in primitive, toxic, misguided, and emotionally-arrested definitions of masculinity.
What, then, should we trash masculinity altogether and become epicene, androgynous, feminized creatures?
That, too, strikes me as an affected, pretentious pose.
There is a real masculinity. An experience in which I couldn’t rely on the plumber but had to become self-reliant (actually did the work with the help of a friend) got me to thinking about authentic masculinity. It comprises of the following eight characteristics:
Possessing a type of self-reliance and having the moxie to take initiative and learn how to do things yourself, as opposed to the lazy habit of always depending on others and in the process losing control.
Possessing a type of humility and self-criticism that doesn’t venture into learned helplessness and self-pity but provides motivation for change.
Possessing the impulse to provide mentorship for the misguided and less experienced because you live connected to the world, not in an isolated state of solipsism.
Possessing an empathy that makes you want to help deliver people from their personal Jahiliyyah, teaching them through your actions rather than lecturing down at them.
Possessing a type of self-confidence that defies the dependence of others’ approval.
Possessing a type of courage so that you can achieve your high aspirations while ignoring the skepticism and discouragement of others so that they don’t drag you down to their level of mediocrity.
Possessing a vision for a better life and a higher skill level so that you’re always hungry for self-improvement.
Posessing a noble life purpose achieved through blood, sweat, and tears, not platitudes. Tolstoy said that death forces us to either utterly reject life or change our lives in such a way that death cannot take away the meaning of it. We don't find our purpose, according to Viktor Frankl. We ask life what it needs from us and in the process meaning finds us.
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