The old social scripts

A friend pointed me to this column by David Brooks in the NYT. My friend is vaguely amused at the middle-aged and unhip like myself who are hearing about Sex Diaries for the first time via his column.

Brooks is writing about (presumably) single New Yorkers who publish accounts of their romantic lives, and he’s focusing on the way people juggle multiple possible hook-up partners in an evening via carefully composed and timed text messages. They don’t want to commit to one until they are sure a better one isn’t going to be available later in the evening. Brooks doesn’t like this. He writes:

Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment

Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn’t fit the post-feminist era.

My first problem is this: he’s laying responsibility for the shallowness of the hook-up on dead feminism?

Beyond that, I have deeper problems with his claim that the social institutions you are brought up in (the “neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families” he lists) are necessarily going to have a good partner for you. That works great if you want to marry (or hook up with) someone who is like you, who shares the culture, religion, values and experiences of your family of origin.

It made me think of my dad. When I was a young teenager he took our family to visit his family of origin in Alabama. One of his aunts mentioned a young woman he’d been engaged to in a way that spoke fondly of the young woman and gently disparagingly of my father for having broken off the engagement. I was shocked. I don’t think that my mother was present, but I was shocked that 20 years after the fact my father’s aunt was still dredging up this old issue, that she wanted him to marry a Jewish girl in Alabama and not my mom, from California and Japanese-American.

I am sure that if my dad had not married that particular Jewish girl from Alabama he might have married another one approved by his – as David Brooks lists – neighborhood, school, workplace or family. They might have had a perfectly nice family and a perfectly nice life. But he would not have moved to California, and my father loves California. He rids his bike through the Delta or up in the Sierras and he understands the watershed and the wildlife and the system of freeways. His wide understanding feeds his deep love for the landscape. He would have not had that if his choice of a wife had been constrained by the guardrails David Brooks remembers fondly.

It’s odd that Brooks attributes it to a “Happy Days” era. Young people have been making marriage choices more independently since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This is the whole plot of Fiddler on the Roof. It’s why San Francisco and Washington DC were filled with gay people in the 70s and 80s. They weren’t going to find the people they wanted to make long-term commitments with in their old neighborhoods. If they did find someone, their families and communities would not support their gay relationships. The “old social scripts” would never have served them.

The old social scripts, however, do serve me now. We’re getting ready to go to Thanksgiving with my extended family in Sacramento. For me growing up, they were precisely the guardrails Brooks is praising. I had to move away from them to find my gay identity and my wife. I also moved back to them once I acquired my wife and my first child because I wanted my children to be closer to their extended family. Now, I think, if you are gay there’s a good chance that you can stay inside the guardrails Brooks writes about and still be gay.

That would not have been possible if the gay people of previous generations had not broken away and made their own culture and community. The old culture and community, the one that could never have served gay people of a previous generation, the one that would not have served my father as well, seems great to the people who were served by it. I assume that David Brooks is one of those people who could be their full and happy selves inside the guardrails. For everyone who could not, I don’t know what Brooks had in mind.

At the conclusion, he writes:

This does not mean that young people today are worse or shallower than young people in the past. It does mean they get less help. People once lived within a pattern of being, which educated the emotions, guided the temporary toward the permanent and linked everyday urges to higher things. The accumulated wisdom of the community steered couples as they tried to earn each other’s commitment.

Today there are fewer norms that guide in that way. Today’s technology seems to threaten the sort of recurring and stable reciprocity that is the building block of trust.

He writes about “the accumulated wisdom of the community” as if it was a static thing. I wonder what he thinks is supposed to happen to you if you don’t fit into the existing “pattern of being.” And that whole last sentence – does he really think that if we couldn’t text people would not hook up, they would just go steady and wait until they get married to have sex?

Dream Wedding

In the Haftarah for Yom Kippur morning, from Isaiah chapter 50, God asks, in the apt description of one commentator, a snarky rhetorical question:

Is this the fast I ask for? A day when you starve your bodies?

It is, of course, not the fast God is asking for when all you do is not eat all day. God wants more – and spells it out:

This is the fast I desire: … It is to share your bread with the hungry and to take the poor into your home; when you see the naked to clothe them and not to ignore your own kin.

Isaiah is being very straightforward, here. God doesn’t want you to just go through the empty gesture of fasting. God wants fasting to be a symbol of deeper substance.

So when I started crying on Saturday, as Shana and Jessica walked out of their house and into their wedding, I naturally imagined God asking, “Is this the wedding I ask for?”

Chris, radiant and ready to officiate, opened his folder and said, “Dearly beloved …”

and the guests joined in, “… we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.”

If I hadn’t been crying before, I would have started crying then, but I cried the whole entire ceremony because when God asked, “Is this the wedding I asked for?” the answer would be: abso-fucking-loutely.

Shana and Jessica are so happy together and Chris looped us all into their joy. He got us to sing for Shana and Jessica because we all know the same songs, we all love those pop songs and we love Shana and Jessica, and we love how much they love pop songs, too. I cried and cried some more because it is the wedding God asked for. Jessica and Shana and Chris were offering not the empty gesture, but the symbol of deeper substance.

Being married is one of the things we do that is innately human. It transcends culture and technology and time. Jessica and Shana’s desire to be married in dresses, with flowers and music and rented chairs, is the substance of the tradition of marriage.

The substance of marriage is something I think about all the time. I believe that being married is made up of a lot of pieces of substance: legal and economic, religious, procreative, residential, sexual, romantic. All of those pieces are important but distinct – and most of them were lacking from Jessica and Shana’s wedding. The two parts of marriage we, as Americans, have been talking about the most for the last couple of years were entirely absent: there was no legal element because they got their domestic partnership months ago and there was no religious element because that’s not who they are. And they aren’t changing their names, their living situation, their finances.

Still, Shana and Jessica had discussed all of those things and worked out, together, how they are going to address them, because they know that’s what marriage is. It’s two people coming to an agreement about all that stuff, the money and the house and the sex, for the simple reason that it’s easier and more joyful to do it with somebody you love than to go it alone in the world. The only thing we’re doing differently now is making our own agreements instead of being forced to sign on to the same agreement. We’re not throwing out the old institutions; we are claiming them as our own.

Shana and Jessica’s wedding was pure in a way very few weddings are. It was only about them and how much they love each other and how much everyone present loved them together. All of those other nuts-and-bolts aspect of marriage were taken care of elsewhere. It was just them, glitter and music and love.

Their wedding was the same rite people have participated in for thousands of years. It is the way life works, to break away from our families of origin and join together in new families, the new recombinant DNA in the same double helix. Jessica and Shana used a ceremony to seal their new lives. I cried the whole time.

The firmament on the dance floor

I took a few days off from my Torah portion. I wanted to think more about the story, the Hebrew words. I have such a magical and familiar portion: the first eight verses of the whole Torah. I was trying to picture it like a movie or, no, something more, like an exhibit at an aquarium or planetarium. The beginning, when the universe consisted of darkness and water and God. There wasn’t even time, yet. God had to speak into being the light before there could be time – evening and morning, one day.

There are a few interesting words in the portion including “rakia,” a thing that God speaks into being to separate the waters into sea and sky. It gets translated as “firmament” in the King James version. I also see “vault” or “dome” as a translation for rakia.

The yin and yang of contemporary Torah translators, Everett Fox and Robert Alter, disagree on word choice here, as is their custom. The Alter, which I usually prefer, goes for “vault,” with the explanation that rakia “suggests a hammered-out slab, not necessarily arched, but the English architectural term with its celestial associations created by poetic tradition is otherwise appropriate.” I had been using the Alter as my main reference for translation as I learned the Hebrew, but last night I picked up the Fox. He uses “dome” with the note that the literal translation of rakia is a beaten sheet of metal.

I could picture this, now, God placing a dome made of a beaten sheet of metal to divide the waters above from the waters below, a shimmering vault between sea and watery sky. The vowels in “rakia,” the clear ee and ah can shimmer like beaten metal in the Torah cantilation. I can hear them cut through the ambiguity and darkness in the first part of the portion, where it describes the universe as “tohu va-vohu,” without form and void in the KJ. “Rakia,” I imagined, could make its own bell-like sound if God had had a mallet to strike the thin, beaten metal of the dome of the heavens.

Then, this morning, my favorite reporter forwarded me something she’d written for some other editor about a Madonna song. She wrote about “Beautiful Stranger,” a dance club track from the late 1990s, produced by William Orbit. My favorite reporter has a mind-bogglingly huge vocabulary. She’s always slinging words I’ve never heard of. She wrote, “The song is about a fascinating enigma who forces you to swallow your pride and give it up on the dance floor.” And she described Madonna’s voice as “burnished, ductile, knowing.”

I didn’t bother to look it up; I just picked up the phone. “Ductile?” I practically screeched at her.

“It means metal you can beat thin,” she explained.

“Rakia,” I replied.

God’s thin, burnished metal dome of the heavens, ductile and magic like Madonna’s voice cutting through the smoke in a dance club, a fascinating enigma on the second day of Creation.

The Mother Sell

I have been very successful in getting a lot of cooking done on my vacation – but I’ve failed at most of the reading and writing. I’m a little more than halfway through The Feminine Mystique. This is my first time reading this book.

It’s especially interesting to read as we are watching the new season of Mad Men, because it’s clear that Betty Draper is the unhappy homemaker Betty Friedan is describing. I’ve just finished the chapter about corporations marketing the image of the housewife. Their tactic was to sell many different kinds of soap – for clothes and floors and dishes and windows – and make the housewife feel just important enough my making her feel like she was managing all those kinds of soap. They wanted housewives to feel satisfied with their lives if they used the right kind of soap or canned soup.

Friedan is devastating in this chapter. She goes through marketing strategies and surveys to make her point that corporate America had a financial interest in maintaining the idea that women could only be totally fulfilled if their sole purpose in life was to take care of their housewifely duties – by buying products. It’s an image, one Friedan elsewhere refers to as “occupation: housewife.” It’s Betty Draper. No, it’s Betty Crocker, a perfect housewife made up just to sell a convenience food.

It reminded me of a PR email I got a while ago. It struck me to much that I kept it.

I wanted to let you know about an interview opportunity with Cat Schwartz, the Hi-Tech Mommy.

School’s out, summer’s here and although Moms can’t go back to the days when summer simply meant no responsibilities or cares in the world, it doesn’t mean they can’t loosen up, relax and enjoy themselves this season. It’s time to take advantage of the warm weather, without dropping responsibilities at work and around the house. Moms everywhere will want to take a look at the latest technology on the market to ensure they’re “living easy” and staying connected.

In this segment, Cat Schwartz, the “Tech Chick” and “Hi-Tech Mommy” can discuss:
* How to stay connected during the summer
* The latest gadgets to help make those daily household tasks a lot easier
* Insight into the latest and greatest technology coming out on the market this season and how you can get your hands on them

This email is over the top, but I think it signifies something that is very truthful: what we think of as “the mother” has changed. It used to be Betty Friedan’s “occupation: housewife” or Betty Draper. Now, as evidenced by this email, “the mother” means “the over-busy multitasker.” From the high-powered-attorney to the working-poor bus driver who also cleans houses for more cash, the primary image of a mother is now this: a woman with children who is pressed for time.

“Stay connected,” “make those daily household tasks much easier.” All that stuff is about the over-busy woman who has too many jobs and too many demands on her time. This Cat Schwartz isn’t trying to free mothers from some of the multi-tasking. She wants to help them multi-task even more. The over-busy multitasking is being sold as a positive image here, just as the cake mix makers tried to sell the empty-headed housewife as a positive image. I see this in commercials all the time, for cars and paper towels and rice in a boil-in bag; the sell is to the glamorized over-busy multitasker.

The image of the mother has slid from being a brainless happy homemaker to being a person whose defining characteristic is that she is overly busy, the thing that makes her feel like she’d falling behind all the time.

The Rules, part 2

I remember ten years ago or more being in a committee meeting for the gay synagogue I belonged to at the time. We were talking about something – I don’t remember what, actually, but it was very contentious – and we voted and people kept talking about the issue, bringing it up again at the next meeting. One of the women got fed up and said, “We already decided this issue. We shouldn’t go back and debate it again. I’ve done that, been in communities where every decision is subject to renegotiation endlessly. There’s a reason we don’t do that anymore.” She was totally right and everyone in the room listened to her.

She was probably 20 years older than me. She had been, as Ellen and I said, “in the movement.” By that we meant that she had been active when “lesbian” and “feminist” were coming into their own together in the 70s. This woman had told me, with a laugh, that back then she went by the name Thunder. When she said that thing about endless renegotiation in the meeting, I knew that she was talking about that time. I’d bet that she got fed up with that way of functioning in a community around the time she went back to calling herself the name her parents gave her.

Today for the first time, I understood why, back when she was called Thunder, the women in her community felt the need to renegotiate everything endlessly. I got into this exchange with Shana about the arrangements we made with our wives about sleeping with other people. Ellen and I had a very specific one when we first met. Shana and her wife have one, too, even if they didn’t quite go through the negotiating process that Ellen and I did – but our mutual friend Elizabeth did. At the end of our conversation, I told Shana that I never called into use my agreement with Ellen. We agreed that we can’t really imagine wanting to sleep with other people, anyway.

Sexual fidelity is the kind of thing that used to be understood in marriage. There was only one way to handle it. There was no negotiation. Shana and I took for granted that it was ours to negotiate within the bounds of our individual marriages. When Thunder and her cohort were endlessly renegotiating everything to the point where community decisionmaking was constantly being undermined, they were reacting to the earlier state, when there was no negotiating, only one way to handle it. The one-way-only system didn’t work for them, so they thought the way to counteract it was to reject everything about it. Eventually Thunder and a bunch of other women figured out that constant renegotiation didn’t work so well, either and I could sit across from her at a committee meeting 20 years later and benefit from the wisdom she had gained the hard way.

I love my life. I love being in my life right now, where I can take for granted that the old rules don’t automatically apply to me – but I know most of them have some value. I know that marriage has to have some mutually-agreed-upon component of sexual fidelity. Shana and I are married to women and we call them “wives” – that’s how much we want to say “fuck you” to the old rules and how much credence we still give them.

“I want my America back,” someone said on the radio this afternoon, quoting a protester at one of the health care town hall meetings. You can take that a lot of ways, but I think the person means (even if they would not articulate it this way exactly) that they want to go back to a time when they knew what the rules were. They aren’t thinking that those rules didn’t work for everyone (leading to the adoption of names like Thunder), just that they find themselves confused by a world where everyone doesn’t have to follow the historical rules. They would feel more comfortable if it went back to a time when you could not renegotiate the rules.

That’s what the health care debate is about – a fundamental change in the way the rules have been understood for a long time. It’s as scary as women running corporations once seemed, as scary as gay people teaching elementary school, as scary as a black family living next door to a white family once seemed.

At every stage in my life I have been happy and excited to be me, right at this moment. When I came out in the early 90s, gay women were hip and exciting and Cindy Crawford was shaving k d lang on the cover of Vanity Fair. The census started letting you say that you were mixed race in 2000, the year I filled out a census form for myself for the first time. I’ve never had to fight the difficult fight. I’ve never been the first at anything but I’ve been early, in the first wave of people who are making a new identity. It’s always been the source of a lot of satisfaction in my life to be not the first courageous rule-breaker – but to surf in just after them, full of appreciation.

I feel happy because I know how to renegotiate the rules. I’ve been doing it my whole adult life. I also know that I can take control of my own re-negotiation and make it come out better for me.

Here’s what I don’t know how to do and I wish I could: I wish I could communicate to the people who say “I want my America back” that they can’t have it back – but they can have something that, after the renegotiation, is better than it was before. It’s not going to turn into the crazy anarchy-world Thunder eventually rejected where nothing is ever knowable. Thunder has already been there and we can benefit from her experience. I want to tell them that they can get in on the renegotiation, that renegotiation could make for stronger marriages, a more equitable economy, safer communities.

I have no idea how to say that, though, at least not in a way that doesn’t begin, “Back when the lesbian feminists were trying to overturn the patriarchy …” I know that’s not the way to reach them. I just don’t know what is.

The Daddy One

Ruth is way more into the concept of “daddy” than Jacob was. Or at least I thought she was because she said, “daddy” all the time and he never mentioned it. However, she never says “daddy” in relationship to herself. Occasionally she’s identifying a specific individual, as in, “Robin’s daddy,” but more frequently she’s using it to denote the size of objects, as in she sees a medium sized glass next to a large one and she calls the medium one “the mommy one” and the large one “the daddy one.”

I’ve asked her a couple of times if she wants a daddy and she always says no. Lately I’ve realized that she’s not talking about “daddy” all the time because she wants a father or even because she is thinking about fathers specifically. She’s a girl, so she wants to group objects by relationship. Calling the glasses “the daddy one” and “the mommy one” just indicates that she wants to put a label on their relationship to each other. Jacob would have been content with calling them “large” and “medium.”

Daddy intimacy

A few times a week I look a Popsugar. It’s for work, I tell myself, because I need to know what is going on in the culture. Today I got down to the bottom of the page and I clicked on a link to Popsugar’s 35 favorite celebrity dads. I was barely paying attention to a phone meeting and I started clicking through the pictures.

They were mostly paparazzi photos, and that was what made them so interesting. Matthew McConaughey offering his son a bite of pear, Keith Urban with a diaper bag over his shoulder, Ben Affleck lugging the carseat, Usher with the toddler on his hip, Tobey Maguire crouching in the little space at the top of the slide, Matt Damon with the baby in one arm and the preschooler holding the other hand – so many of these men were doing the utterly mundane work of parenting in a totally natural way. They were doing something with their bodies that signaled that these children were theirs to nurture.

There are no pictures of my father looking anything like these men. My dad was more involved in my life than, say, my mother’s father was in hers. When I was born, in December of 1969, my dad was present. It was unusual, and it signaled that he wanted to be engaged with me in a way that men of his father’s generation were not. He went as far as men went in the 70s. He read to me. He taught me how to fry over-easy eggs. Still, I am willing to bet that he never, ever carried me on his hip the way Usher does his son. And there’s no way he ever walked down a sidewalk with my baby brother in one arm and my hand in his like Matt Damon. This weekend my father told me that I think about parenting in a way that he never did. Not like he was apologizing, but that he was acknowledging that there was something he had not done. “It was a different generation, Dad,” I told him. It was. I don’t fault him for it – but I do see it.

There’s a qualitative difference between the way fathers handled their children 40 years ago and they way they do now. In the paparazzi pictures on Popsugar, the fathers were physically intimate with their small children in a way that they likely would not have been a generation ago. That hip-carry Usher uses was exclusively the posture of a woman-caregiver for thousands of years.

You can tell that all these men had changed diapers because they wanted to. That’s the way to learn a small child, by changing diapers. Not just once or twice as a favor to the real person who should be changing the diapers, but seeing the changing of diapers as part of your own responsibility. That NYT article pointed out that Jack Nicklaus would read his kids bedtime stories – but Tiger changes diapers. Michael Lewis points out that the difference between him and his father is that his father didn’t change diapers. The diapers aren’t a metaphor, here. I think that you can see the result in those paparazzi pictures of all those men, mostly in their 30s and 40s, who are physically intimate with their young children.

Diapers are not a metaphor

There were two items in the NYT on Sunday that played into the things I’ve been thinking about fathers. There was an article about Tiger Woods’s enthusiasm for being a father. It talked about how Jack Nicklaus would read his kids bedtime stories – but Tiger changes diapers. Woods took a nine-month break from golf because of an injury, which gave him extended time at home with his daughter. “The best thing in the world was actually to watch her grow and, you know, each and every day have fun with that and teach her different things,” Woods said. “I really enjoy that type of life.”

Woods, like Michael Lewis, discovered that the way to really get to know a small child is to get into the details of taking care of the child every day. “The person a baby loves best is the person who changed its diapers the last ten times,” is what Ellen said, soon after taking over that duty from me. And then, as they get to be toddlers like Woods’s daughter, teaching them some small thing day after day until they learn it. You have to know a child in order to love a child, and in order to know a very small child you have to be able to see their smallest details. You can only see the small details when you watch them over time. (When we moved out of our DC apartment shortly before B’s third birthday, our upstairs neighbors, childless, told us that it had been a privilege to get to see B change a little tiny bit every week. Big, gruff JP actually got tears in his eyes.) Older kids are different, in large part because they can talk.

When my uncle was here a few weeks ago, he told me something my grandmother said soon before she died. She said, “I wish I had done more. I thought that my job as a mother was to feed you good food and keep your clothes clean.” I don’t think that my grandmother’s fault is personal, even if she might have. She grew up in the Depression and had two small children in an internment camp. Food and clean clothes were tall orders for her, and she was a fantastic cook and accomplished seamstress.

I think that she came to her regret very late, after she saw my mother and aunt parent in a very different way. They were deliberate about teaching us, coaching us through school and through childhood. My grandmother might have, in the 80s, looked back on her own parenting in the 40s, 50s and 60s and found it lacking in comparison. I think that the idea of parenting thoughtfully, the way my mother did, could not have existed for my grandmother. The basics – the food and clothes – took all of her time and focus. My mother, with her dishwasher and clothes dryer and abundantly stocked supermarket, could spare the time and attention for directing my childhood. My mother, and the parents, mostly women, of her generation, developed that style of parenting that Tiger Woods is describing, the teaching a little every day parenting. My mother and the parents, mostly women, of her generation found the deep significance and great joy of that kind of parenting as well.

It is based, first and foremost, on time. You only get it by spending time, much of it spent on what might seem to be chores: changing diapers in the beginning, then helping with homework. One mother I know likes driving carpool because it gives her time with her daughter. Jacob cuddled up with me on the couch tonight. “He never cuddles with me any more,” Ellen said. Jacob still cuddles with me because we spent years cuddling in synagogue when he was little. Now, because I put in the time being patient when he was a toddler and needed lots of attention during shul, he can’t imagine any other way of sitting next to me in synagogue. I put in the time and the work and now I get the precious reward.

Which brings me to the second item in the NYT yesterday. In the book review Leah Hager Cohen quotes Virginia Woolf. “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.” Hager Cohen continues, “If you think this belief is dated, think again. Just two months ago, Joyce Carol Oates told The New York Times Magazine why violence is so often the subject of her fiction. ‘If you’re going to spend the next year of your life writing,’ she explained, ‘you would probably rather write Moby-Dick than a little household mystery.’”

I have a great deal of respect for Leah Hager Cohen. However, Tiger Woods and Michael Lewis might represent men who would finally turn that Virginia Woolf quote on its head. These men – and the other men of their generation they represent – are seeing the deep significance and great joy my mother and the women of her generation found in leisure-enabled parenting. The men are looking into the realm of women with respect and desire. They see parenting as – to paraphrase Woolf – an important book that deals with the feelings of women. It’s a book they have discovered they want to read.

The sport of fatherhood

“The guy who wrote the book you left on the stairs was on the radio,” Ellen said.

Michael Lewis truly is the best sportswriter I have ever read. It’s not the beauty of his prose but the depth of his insight that I find most striking. I was hoping that he would bring that same sharp insight to his book about fatherhood. I would love to find a father who is writing about the changing nature of fatherhood the way that Michael Lewis writes about sports.

I read the whole book today, in the time it took me to ride BART into the city in the morning and back home in the evening. In the introduction, he steps right up to the plate the way I was hoping he would:

This book is a snapshot of what I assume will be looked back upon as a kind of Dark Age of Fatherhood. Obviously, we’re in the midst of some long unhappy transition between the model of fatherhood as practiced by my father and some ideal model, approved by all, to be practiced with ease by the perfect fathers of the future.

But there, in the middle of that second sentence, he backs away without taking a swing. He makes a self-deprecating joke about perfection on page 11 and then he stands in that exact spot for the rest of the book.

Don’t get me wrong; he’s a good writer and the book is well written if what you want are sweet stories about a very thoughtful guy who is trying to play a father role he didn’t know he wasn’t prepared for. He spends the whole book with that slightly-amused tone he uses when he writes “…to be practiced with ease by the perfect fathers of the future.” It’s lovely. It’s not what I want.

I believe that we are in that intermediate stage Lewis is talking about. I also believe that the way to make the transition is for fathers to take more of the initiative. When his wife insinuates that he should not have given their daughter cereal before dinner, I wanted him to defend himself. What’s wrong with cereal before dinner? It isn’t the exact thing she would have done, but that does not make it wrong. What if it represents a better way to interact with a child that we’ve never known about because it’s been driven by mothers, mothers, mothers who think they are right and they don’t take what the men do seriously?

Lewis doesn’t defend himself. At the time, he shrugged and backed away. In the book, he gently makes fun of his wife a little and resigns himself to the idea that he just isn’t as thoughtful a parent as his wife is.

Michael Lewis is a plenty thoughtful guy. I want him to think more about fatherhood. I want him to have something to say. Over and over in this book, he tries to do some parenting task. He puts his heart into taking care of his kids … and then his wife undercuts him and makes him feel that what he’s done is inadequate. She’s doing what I see a lot of mothers doing to a lot of fathers when she undercuts him. And then he agrees with her. I don’t want him to agree with her. I want him to do it his way.

Near to the end of the book I feel that he gets closer to what I was hoping for. His youngest child, a baby, is in the hospital. Lewis ends up taking care of the baby in the hospital alone, without his wife. The staff keeps coming in and waking the baby. The baby needs to sleep to get better. Lewis puts a note on the door and he blocks the doorway with his chair to protect his son from the constant interruptions. He writes:

I repel several more assaults until, finally, word must have spread that there’s a total asshole guarding the little boy in Room 5426, because we find ourselves well and truly alone. I change his diapers and feed him and suction the mucus from his nose. I notice for the first time that he has my hands and feet. I study the heart-shaped birthmark on the back of his head. I discover that if I hold him to my chest and hum against the back of his neck, he falls right asleep. Tabitha comes and offers to take over, but the truth is I don’t want to leave. He feels like my jurisdiction. After every new child, I learn the same lesson, grudgingly: If you want to feel the way you’re meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. It’s only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it.

Lewis writes: He feels like my jurisdiction.

That’s the very beginning of what I think Michael Lewis, and so many other fathers, can say about parenting. When they feel like it’s truly their jurisdiction I believe that men can remake parenting. I want them to believe that they are in the middle of a cultural transition. They can get caught in the transition – or they can direct the transition. The great majority of this book describes Michael Lewis being caught in the transition. I want him, and the fathers like him, to direct it. I want that brilliant sportswriter Michael Lewis to write about it.

The food of the future

(Traveling for work in Los Angeles)

I was hungry but I hesitated. Everything was touristy in this neighborhood. Eating in a restaurant is a treat I only get when I am traveling for work, so I wanted to make every restaurant meal count. One place offered “Asian street food” which seemed ok. When I said, “Dinner for one,” the hostess put me at the sushi bar.

I watched the open kitchen. Three guys moved between the yakitori grill, the woks, and the sushi station. They weren’t hustling even though the restaurant seemed to be full. I liked the way they worked together, relaxed. There didn’t seem to be a clear hierarchy between them or even assigned tasks.

The waitress came back with my vodka tonic. I squeezed in the lime, but the drink didn’t taste exactly right. It was too sweet, too silky.

The guys in the kitchen were smiling and talking in a combination of English and Spanish. I liked them. The tallest looked just like my brother. Hapa, I thought. The shortest was Mexican, and in his face I could detect a little bit of the mysterious pre-Columbian Olmec carvings that my father saw on his trip to Mexico. He flipped the yakitori skewers. The third one had a bit of a tattoo peeking out from under his chef’s jacket. He had dark skin and darker freckles like Jacob. He pulled tempura shrimp out of the deep-fry wok and put them in the middle of a sushi roll. He curled his fingers under as he used his knife, the way all trained chefs do.

All three of them had noticed me, too, and they came over to chat one by one. “Do you know what you want?” the not-my-brother one asked me, smiling. A couple of minutes later the one with the tattoo said earnestly, “Did you get to order?” The Olmec put a slab of wood with pickled ginger and wasabi on the counter near me, but he didn’t seem to be doing anything else with it. I hadn’t ordered any sushi.

“I’m all taken care of,” I told them. “All taken care of.” I hadn’t brought anything to read, so I watched them as I waited for my food. The Olmec pulled salmon on skewers out of the case and put them on the grill. Those were mine, I could tell. He squirted them with teriyaki sauce from a squeeze bottle. The waitress went to pick up my plate and she gave it to me.

The tallest one looked more and more like my brother. I wondered if he was Japanese and Jewish like we are. His whole name, first and last, was embroidered on his jacket. I tried to read it but he kept moving around. The writing was too small. It was something hyphenated. I looked at his face, trying to figure out if he really was hapa.

In the future everyone will look like us, like me with pale skin that is pale-yellow, not pale-pink, or like the dark skinned tattooed chef who looks like Jacob, or the yakitori-making Olmec.

In the future everyone will look like us. When my brother and I were growing up we were the only two half-Asian kids in our whole synagogue. Now there is a whole cohort of little Asian Jews. Ruth plays with other little girls at the synagogue who have light hair and eyes like girls in Japanese cartoons.

When Jacob was a toddler, people were always telling me that we looked alike. I’d nod politely. I thought they were wrong. Jacob and I have different eyes, different noses, different skin tones, different hair, different face shapes. He and I only resemble each other in the way that all mixed race white and Asian people resemble each other. People thought that my best friend in high school – also half white and half Japanese – looked like my sister. She didn’t, she just had that hapa look. It’s the look that’s not one thing you expect or the other, but a combination that isn’t just a hybrid. It’s something else, its own thing. It’s something that Jacob and Ruth and I are. I was pretty sure the sushi chef making Asian street food was that thing, too.

I’ve always loved being that person of the future, the new thing that lots of people see but don’t yet understand. They will soon. It’s like “Asian street food,” what ever that is. I’m pretty sure that the street food in Kyoto is totally different from the street food in Rangoon but there’s food and they eat it on the street on the continent of Asia. Here in America, Asian street food is cooked in a slightly overpriced restaurant half a block from Venice Beach by three guys who all look like they are from the future.

My salmon was soft and tasty, but the sauce was a little too sweet. I wanted a piece of the pickled ginger to suck on to counteract it. Thinking about the ginger, I took the last sip of my vodka tonic. That’s what my drink needed, too: pickled ginger instead of lime. I could taste it now, how it should be, the sharp of the ginger against the density of the alcohol in the same way that ginger would sharpen the too-sweet of the teriyaki.

In the future, when I order a vodka tonic it will always come with the Japanese pickled ginger my mother put in her sushi. It is the drink of the future: an alcohol born in the cold of Russia, cut with a mixer designed by British colonialists to fight a tropical disease in India, finished with a plant that migrated from China across the Sea of Japan and now is essential to cuisines from the Caribbean to Africa to Southeast Asia. It’s the whole world in a highball glass.

Food is the first thing that blends cultures. Europeans set out for places they’d never seen because they wanted spices. At home, most Europeans ate cinnamon and pepper in their meat sauces long before they ever met anyone from India or Ceylon. The Dutch processed their cocoa without ever consulting a Mayan. You don’t need words to understand someone else’s food, you just smell and taste, and then you appropriate their flavors and techniques. Mixing cultures by first mixing food makes sense. It’s nothing but pleasure. The wars that follow over trade routes and territory are about governments and economies. The sun has set on the British Empire, but its children still drink tea.

Before you have interracial couples and their interracial children, you have fusion food. It’s easy to order tea-cured salmon at an American restaurant, easy to serve mango salsa with rack of lamb. But blending people is complicated. For every set of siblings like me and my brother, there are two individuals who fell in love with someone totally outside of their childhood experience. Initially, their families disapprove. They get married anyway. The food parts of their separate cultures are the first to come together. When my parents met, my mother was astonished that my father knew how to use chopsticks. He’d learned at a Chinese restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama. My mother taught herself how to make potato latkes. Beyond that, blending two traditions in one home requires more negotiation. My mother struggled to learn to say blessings in Hebrew. She conceded some ground, and gave up having a Christmas tree. Every person of the future grew up in a family of the present, where cultures clash until they blend. The first place they blended is with the food.

Mixing up food is simple. Mixing up families is harder, but when you do it with intention and love, the way my parents did, you get children of the future. I’m not straddling the two different worlds of my two different heritages. I’m living in one world, eating at an American sushi bar and imagining a cocktail that touches more continents than I’ve visited.

I realized that the slab of wood just to my left all set up with ginger and wasabi was meant for me, I just hadn’t ordered any sushi. I flipped my hashi around and grabbed the ginger with the back ends and put it in the last of the teriyaki sauce on my plate. The ginger tasted great with the teriyaki. I sucked on it and imagined my vodka tonic. In my imagination the ginger tasted great with the vodka tonic, too.

In the future everyone will look like us. All the inheritors of a mysterious pre-Colombian civilization will make yakitori skewers in a restaurant that sells Asian street food. My daughter will step off a plane in a country she’s never seen before and be greeted by many faces like hers, faces with pale skin and anime eyes.

The tallest chef, the one who looked like my brother, went outside and came back in with something in his hand. The waitress brought my check and I handed her my credit card. The not-my-brother chef walked over to the bar and got a maraschino cherry. What is he doing? I wondered. What is on the menu that he’d need a maraschino cherry to make it? He handed it to the tattooed chef. The Olmec chef took something off the grill and put it on the work surface. The maraschino cherry went on top. Then the tattooed one put the whole thing in front of me.

I was totally surprised. The three of them had conspired to make this thing for me. I had been watching them the whole time and I had barely noticed them doing it. “What is this?” I asked.

“It’s an orange,” the Olmec one said with a shrug. It was an orange, cut up in some fancy way and then grilled, with the cherry on top. All three of them were smiling in this sheepish way, as if they didn’t quite know what had compelled them to make it for me. I wanted to say, “We’re all from the future,” as if that would explain to them why we all felt like we knew each other. It would just confuse them more.

So I just laughed and signed my name on the credit card slip. “What’s your name?” I asked the not-my-brother one.

“Adam,” he said.

“Adam what?” I asked.

“Adam Creedy-Sanchez,” he said.

I laughed. “You look just like my younger brother,” I told him.

The others laughed, happy and shy all at once.

“Goodnight, guys,” I said.

All three of them waved and smiled. In the future, everyone will look like us. And it will be delicious.