The Pedal Turns the Crank: Scribble breakthrough!

I’m so excited about this! (I know, everybody says that about their Kickstarter project, but I’ve got the excitement chemicals speeding around my system EVEN AT THIS VERY MOMENT.)

Photo from today’s weekly production meeting for The Pedal Turns the Crank. I love Khai’s rough sketches, but the major conceptual breakthrough? That I’ve been banging my head against for months (for years, if you’re counting since I first had the idea that this could be a picture book)?

The scribbles at lower right. Those are the final breakthrough that had to happen.

This whole book is families having bike adventures together, and each spread (spread = left and right page together as one big rectangle) is one family. There’s the mountain bike family, the road bike family, the beach cruiser family, etc. On the last page, they all come together for a big ride.

But just because a kid has learned the chant (“The pedal turns the…CRANK! The crank turns the…CHAINWHEEL! etc.), that doesn’t mean they know what a chainwheel is, or how to recognize one.

I’ve been going with variations of one basic idea, which is simple technical illustrations as spot art on each spread. Pedal. Crank. Then on the next spread: Crank. Chainwheel.

But I got to thinking about how I taught my own kids. I didn’t do that, I got down low with them and put my finger on each thing. Pedal. Crank. Chainwheel. Chain. Sprocket. So could we do something like that at the very end? Just show everything in that way?

And Khai said, Or the center spread.

And there was the thunderbolt:

The center spread (the one that comes halfway through the book) is in comic book form, a series of panels, each showing one of the different bike families taking a break on their journey and the adult showing the kid one drivetrain part.

So each family’s journey is in three pieces: Their own spread, at the start of their journey; one panel of the center comic spread, taking a break during the journey and learning something; and their little part of the big final image, all the cyclists coming together.

And then, on each main family spread, which says, eg, “The chainwheel turns the…CHAIN!” the chainwheel and the chain are red, or have a little glow, or something like that. It’s a Where’s Waldo, with the center comic spread as its key.

This was the LAST THING that had to fall into place.

I love weekly production meetings, I love collaborators that get you excited every time you meet, and I love this book.

Kickstarter pre-launch page. Please follow us! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/noteon/the-pedal-turns-the-crank

The Pedal Turns the Crank: Kickstarter presskit!

Regular posting about The Pedal Turns the Crank is a goal for me, leading up to the unveiling of the pre-launch Kickstarter page, and I’ve been posting some of Khai’s rough art and writing about the project, but today it occurred to me that I could show how some of the design stuff for the Kickstarter is coming along, too.

After reading an article about how to get on podcasts at Jane Friedman’s website, I started putting together a one-sheet (aka press kit, aka media kit), following the tips in the article. So in the spirit of letting people see how things are going, even if they’re not finished yet, here’s what’s up this week on my end. I haven’t cut Khai’s bio down enough yet, and there’s some gibberish in it which is me typing key thoughts while he talked at Friday’s production meeting, but this will turn into what we send out to try to get the interest of bicycle podcasts, parenting influencers, family podcasts, book influencers, crowdfunding blogs…

I don’t think it’s focused enough yet, as a one-sheet. It’s more like book jacket copy, and I’m not sure how to better focus it, but we’re 1) maintaining momentum 2) consistently 3) in the right direction.

Which if you’re a bike person, you’ll recognize as the only way to get someplace you actually intended to go.

A yes

Instead of sitting home, I roused myself and went to the Hackerspace, and instead of driving there, I rode there. On my way, a white pickup slowed right in the spot, sort of analogous to a blind spot, where I can’t see the human figure in the car, is but their fender is keeping pace right next to and behind me and the driver yells something greetingish and then keeps trying to say stuff as I’m calling “What? Who is that? I can’t see you, who is that? What?” I can’t have a backwards conversation at 15mph. I slow so the window will pull alongside so I can see in, but it slows too.

Cut to the end of the story: The guy who used to fix my car is back in Danbury with a new garage and doesn’t know how not to alarm cyclists.

Then around 7pm at the Hackerspace, I look at the weather and it’s 53° and going down to 48°. I rode there in shorts, sandals, and a t-shirt. I guess I’m leaving sooner than later and suffering a little. No hoodie at the Hackerspace, no jacket, no socks. But 2020’s Randowear stuff is still on shelves in the closet. Maybe… And yes, there’s one long-sleeved men’s large that must have been returned at some point, or has something wrong with its transfer. It’s just thin cotton, but it’s twice as much thin cotton as I’d have otherwise, and it pleases me that I’ll be riding home at twilight in a shirt with that very same bike on it, with its headlight beam part of the design, so…

And then around 7:10, Greenwood Ave. is a parking lot, just one long chain of stopped cars. I can’t see over the little ridge of Blackman Ave., but I figure they’re probably all stopped for a train, .4 miles ahead at Library Place. But I’m cold and I’ve got a tailwind, two reasons to go fast—and I’m on a bicycle: three—so up the rise and yes, past the solid jam of stopped cars and their brake lights, blocks ahead, are the bigger red lights of the crossing and the dark gray of the train. Pump, snake, go, speed past the cars, eyes on drivers’ headrests and door cracks, going harder like I’ve been doing again this week, breathing through my back and pedaling from my butt, and then it’s .3 miles ahead, then everything’s still jammed and it’s .2 and I start thinking, could this go like… yeah, maybe, though it would be total random luck.

Nobody doors me, heart rate’s up, inhale in two stages, bring that oxygen in, now .1 miles and the butt of the gray train starts sliding into the gray shadows where it’ll disappear…and the shadows take it…and the barrier arms are still down and the red lights and the clangs still going, .05, is this going to—? But yes. Without slowing or even pulling my effort a little, the bike hits the intersection at exactly, precisely the perfect moment, the arms up, the clangs stopped, the lights not out yet but the first few cars have let up on the brakes – but it’s too late for them. I’m past the tracks, out of the saddle, and up the shallow little rise before the first car is even shifted past second gear. First through, from .4 miles back.

Though not from .4 miles back. That’s a conceit. From farther back, but no, before that, but no, before that. Yes, from 10 to the -43 seconds after the Big Bang.

If a train leaves Redding Station headed North at X mph and a bicycle leaves Danbury at 7:02 going Southeast at 15mph, does God smile?

God does.

Address to local creche committee

This is what I said on June 27 to the Bethel Religious Display Committee. This committee was convened in response to conflict over the placement of this banner, which, for the first time in the town’s history, was in a public square at the same time as a manger scene:

The committee’s mandate was to make recommendations to the town government about how to deal with that conflict.

 

---

My name is Keith Snyder. I live on Main Street.

I timed myself reading this, and it comes to about six minutes, so thank you in advance for allowing me that chunk of time.

The pro-creche side of this seems to honestly believe that people who think differently than they do are mean and petty.

I haven’t been sure exactly how to respond to this. So last week, I didn’t. But something [local blogger] said last week made me realize what I did have to offer. [She] said that when she first moved here, one of the first things she noticed was that very creche in that very square. She said she was struck by how beautiful it was, that it wasn’t religious, that there was no problem with it, and that opinions to the contrary are because of “hatred.”

I would like to share my early experience moving here. It was August, 2014. I had just separated from my wife two weeks earlier, and my two boys and I landed here. And we really liked it. Still do. We liked our street. We liked our neighbors. We liked the grocery store. It had a sushi bar! We liked the bookshops and the bike shop. We felt like we had landed someplace safe.

Four months later, in December, I came around a corner and saw a big creche on what seemed to be a central public square.

And I stopped and just stood there with my mouth open. I know that sounds like the kind of thing you say when you’re exaggerating. But it’s not. I literally stood there with my mouth literally open.

And suddenly, my new, safe little town was a little less safe.

To understand why, you have to understand something that may not be within your experience.

I grew up with swastikas spray-painted on my house and crosses burned into my lawn. Regularly, for years. And, regularly, for years, the local good Christians turned their eyes away, and pulled their shades down. It wasn’t their business. They didn’t want to get involved.

The only person who ever helped us scrub the swastikas off, as far as I can remember, was the German lady across the street, Heinke.

But those weren’t really good Christians.

Here’s something else I saw, not long after I moved here. There was a swastika at the Bethel train station on the sign that says BETHEL. Not big. It was, I don’t know, about this big. And it hung around there for a long time, and none of my neighbors scrubbed it off. Which I understand — it’s just a little graffiti. Probably kids? I finally scrubbed it off myself, as best I could, with a toothbrush. Because it wasn’t important to my neighbors.

But tonight something is really important to you. A little statue of Jesus. That’s important. And which patch of land it goes on, and keeping other people’s things off that land at the same time. Which is odd. Because Jesus never said he wanted a little statue of himself. What he does care about — and he makes this very clear — is how you treat neighbors and strangers. That’s what he says, flat out, that he cares about.

Had you behaved as though you loved your neighbor, and cared for strangers, none of this would be happening. But you didn’t. You want your statues. In a town space. Between certain dates. By themselves. That’s what’s important to you.

And by letting you do it, the town says that’s what’s important to the town.

Okay. I want an atheist sign. And I’m willing to share. I’m hoping to share. I don’t mind that other things are up at the same time. I hope they are. It’s great. It’s sharing. With my neighbors.

I do care that it’s accorded the same respect as other displays. But — respect doesn’t mean that when you’re not using something, you’ll allow everybody else to split the leftovers. That’s not respect. Everybody knows that’s not respect. You know that’s not respect. That’s winning.

To me, sharing is the win.

***

There are two things I’ve heard pro-creche people say to justify their positions.

One is “I’ve lived here a long time, so my opinion counts for more.” Well, I’ve lived here a long time, too. I’ve lived my entire life in the United States of America. Which is where we are right now.

It’s not the United States of One Group Gets To Choose First And Then Everybody Else Divvies Up What’s Left. You’re entitled to zero special treatment of your display. And I’m entitled to zero special treatment of mine. And this is true whether one of us has enjoyed special treatment in the past or not.

The second thing I’ve heard pro-creche people say is, “There are more of us, so what we want should matter more.”

That’s not what Jesus taught. That’s not what anyone who cares about right and wrong has ever taught.

You’re wrong about this in the moral code of your own religion.

***

So all that is what hit me when I came around that corner, and saw your creche for the first time. All by itself. In what I was pretty sure was a public space. I saw that my new town doesn’t care. You, I expect not to care. But this was the town putting its stamp of approval on it. Boom. We don’t care either.

Okay. I’m a big boy. I’ve been through much worse than that.

But now that this is all happening? Maybe when there’s a meeting, I’ll show up and say what I think.

You can disagree with me. That’s one of the beautiful things about living here. We can disagree. But next time somebody tells you it’s hate, or you hear that coming out of your own mouth, maybe you can take a second and rethink that a little.

Last thing I have to say. We all have biases. I have one too. I’m gonna own mine. I’m sitting here expecting you to do the least neighborly thing. Because in my lifelong experience — that’s just what my good neighbors do.

***

Thank you. I have kids to pick up at Quassy, so I’m out of here. Thank you for the six minutes.

---

 

Three uses of a shirt

A MAN ON THE PORCH was giving me the staredown. The Cornwall County Market makes great breakfast burritos with tater tots in them and I remembered (incorrectly, it turned out) that it had an ATM. The staring man was older than me by maybe five years, and presented as tough guy, beefy biker subtype, with a tuft of white goat beard, a black shirt with some design on it or other, and a baseball cap. I recall something on his head, anyway; I think it was a baseball cap. But I don’t know what the cap or the shirt said, because where I was looking, as I came up the steps onto the porch, was straight back into his eyes, So they’re the main thing in my memory.

Part of avoiding conflict is breaking eye contact — not just so the other person won’t escalate, but so I won’t. In adulthood, I’ve expended some energy unlearning this habit. So I looked back at him and went in the store.

Then just as part of my brain was asking, “What’s with that guy?” another part shot over the answer: “You’re wearing your Women’s March t-shirt.”

I was pretty scruffy myself that afternoon; I’d ridden the Batsto 200K on totally the wrong bike the day before, and I was sunburned and favoring my left knee. My own beard was an island of darker gray stubble a little longer than the lighter gray stubble on the rest of my face. Old jeans and black t-shirt. If not for what the shirt said, I could have passed for one of the staring man’s people.

But it’s those teeny differences that are the real betrayals. When your own people turn on you, that stings more than the Other doing it. I had just pulled in to get cash, but now with the ding of a magic wand, I was in enemy territory.

I realized, even at the moment, that I really wasn’t. I’ve been in enemy territory, and this wasn’t it; this was just some bigoted asshole sitting with a sandwich, marking my passage. But you never know who else is on an asshole’s side; this was rural Connecticut, not Stamford, and in an instant, I’d become aware I was a limping Jew in a Women’s March shirt.

The kid at the counter told me there was no ATM, but there was a bank over there. So I limped back out (not badly, just some stiffening up during the hour’s drive) and drove over there for some money because last year, the Tri State Mini Maker Faire — where I was headed — had a booth with Mexican food made by Mexicans. For an Angeleno in the land of Irish Catholics, this is a kind of a big deal, and I didn’t recall that they took debit cards.

I don’t feel a need to retell, here, at length, the whole story of my family being terrorized by white supremacists when I was a kid — crosses burned into the lawn, swastikas on the house, my mom crouching under the mail slot with a kitchen knife, the house broken into, me staying up at night to take shifts on guard — but chances are good you don’t see that bigoted asshole on the porch the same way I do. You might even want to teach me that I can’t possibly know he’s a bigoted asshole.

That’s Use of a Shirt #1.

My friend Kelly didn’t run the Mini Maker Faire this year, but I still wanted to support it, since it’s awesome. The blacksmith was out front again, guiding more kids in the forging of iron coathooks, and this year there was a crepe stand in the building lobby.

“I like your shirt,” said the woman spreading batter on a couple of crepe griddles with one of those crepe rakes that looks like a kid’s wooden propellor toy. “Is that from the Hartford march?”

“No, DC,” I said. “The big one, in 2016. I mean 2017. That January, after—”

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, and I still had brevet brain, so putting together sentences good was somewhat beyond me, but No longer in enemy territory, my body reported. Thought you’d like to know. Releasing tension now.

Already knew that, my brain retorted, but the body has its own defense readiness system and doesn’t care what the brain knows.

That’s Use of a Shirt #2.

The family from Avocado Cafe was in the parking lot near the Physics Bus again with burritos, guacamole, and hot sauce corresponding to the three standard degrees of the Connecticut hot sauce scale. Reminder to Angeleno: Keep some actual hot sauce in the glove box. It was still good guacamole, though.

This is not a Use of a Shirt; it’s a plug for Avocado Cafe in Millerton. I was not paid for this endorsement.

We were driving back from dropping some kids with their mom after the Faire when we saw a twentysomething guy on the side of the road with his car doors open and a couple of big black manicured poodles lolloping around on the highway. That is to say, I glanced, barely noticed, and would have kept going because nothing seemed wrong to me, but Kelly, being a devout and diligent asker-if-people-are-all-right, slowed, so I rolled down my window and rose to her example.

The guy had black hair and black scruff, red sneakers, and the kind of kippah you wear all the time, not the kind you take out of a box at the front door of the synagogue. “I’m trying to help these dogs,” he said. He’d seen them out on the highway, where they clearly shouldn’t be, and he’d called the number on their tags, but it didn’t work.

She pulled forward and around, and we got out. “When you say it didn’t work—” I said, “Like—”

“Like there’s — like nothing.” He dialed again. “Like it — Oh — ” This time there was a connection. But it was a recorded message saying the call could not be completed.

There was also an address on the tags, but while the dogs were happy about the yogurt container he’d put down for them, there’d been no leap from dogs happy about yogurt to dogs getting into his car so he could take them home.

Kelly opened the back of her car and started talking to the dogs in a calm and friendly way, and I got the sense that where I was standing, just off the rear fender, was making the open hatchback less friendly, so I moved away, and after some more talking to them, patting the car interior, and putting the yogurt in there, she asked one of the dogs if it was OK for her to pick it up and then did so, setting it in the car, and then the other one jumped in.

While Jonathan followed us in his car to the address on the tags, about four miles away by highway, she said she could tell the dogs were used to women. For their part, the dogs just stood with their faces poking forward between us and watched the car ride until we got close to the address, and then they got excited and we got confused, because it was a closed skiing-goods store.

Within a few minutes, though, Jonathan had found a neighbor who knew the dogs and their owner, who was the owner of the store and had recently moved to a new home. I found her on Facebook and messaged her my number, and though she didn’t answer, cops and an animal control guy in a white pickup became involved, and it was clear things were fine.

During a brief lull while we waited for other people, Jonathan told me he’d been on the way to a social justice seder — and then there was the awkward moment where you say a word and don’t know if the other person knows what it means, so you’re like, Um, do you— but I smiled a little and he said “Member of the tribe?” and I said “Yeah,” and we both knew exactly what the awkwardness had been. His decision to stop had been based on a judgment: Social justice is good, but there are these two dogs right here. So he missed his seder to help them. I told him that was mitzvahs for like a month, plus now he could do something bad.

On our way to pick up Indian food from Great Barrington, Kelly told me again that she could tell those dogs were used to women, and had no use for men, something I could never have discerned. I told her I saw Jonathan look at my shirt when I got out of the car, and it might have made him more comfortable about the random strangers that chance had delivered to him on a rural highway.

That’s not Use of a Shirt #3. It’s still Use #2: Identifying Friendlies.

That morning, the shirt had been the next clean one on the stack in my dresser. Use of a Shirt #3 is it’s a shirt.

Pedaling on a night highway

When you’re on a rural highway late at night or in the morning after midnight, often there are no streetlamps, so all you can see is what’s in the unevenly illuminated wedge of your bike headlight, which, if it’s a generator light (mine is), gets brighter when you’re descending and dims on the climbs. The beam mostly illuminates the road immediately in front of you, and shades down to grays and beiges after that, and beyond that is black, with the occasional bright distant dot of a reflective highway sign.

 

In the few inches right in front of your headlight, rain is a scattered jumble of bright slivers. If your headlight isn’t at its brightest, the slivers will have dark dashes on them as each drop passes through a beam blinking on and off too fast to be seen when there are no raindrops. That’s how modern bike headlights “dim”; they don’t actually get dimmer like old incandescents; they just don’t illuminate as often. If you have a battery-powered light, the lengths of the dark dashes on the bright slivers change as you click to different brightness settings.

 

In heavy fog or mist, there are many more bright slivers, smaller, and a short bright cone of haze, and then the beam brushes the top of your front tire, and then the road, with the shadow from that tire, and then there are shadows and refractions from the water on the headlight lens, the dark wiggly snakes of road patches, and the glitter, which is sometimes glass or wire or other puncturing crap and sometimes the chip part of chipseal paving.

 

If you can see your own shadow, and there are no streetlamps, that means the first car in a while has just crested a rise or turned onto the highway some ways behind you. Your shadow will gradually get larger, and gain density and sharpness, and move to your right as the car approaches in the lane to your left. The road surface will become better illuminated, and pebbles and other junk outside your little beam will stand out against the relief of their own shadows; if you’re experienced at this, you’ll take the opportunity to look farther ahead for potholes or puddles.

 

All the shadows—yours, the bike’s, the gravel’s, the beer bottle’s—move together, their size changing and rotation accelerating as the car approaches. By now, you can hear the hiss and swish of the car tires and its displacement of the air. Maybe its engine, too, but that won’t necessarily become primary at any point.

 

A few seconds before the shadows all rotate to three o’clock and vanish, on a forested highway that curves left, you will see your giant shadow on the trees in front of you: You, your helmet, the true shape of your body, your bike. You, pedaling, 10′ tall, then 20′, on gray-green trees. The perspective rotates slightly as the car closes the distance, as though the 40′ cyclist’s labor exists on a turntable, and the dark giant and his 50′ bike and pedaling legs slide sideways to the right, along the trees, and vanish.

 

Red taillights pass you, but what you’re watching is what the car’s headlights can tell you about the road ahead, until the road curves or crests, and then the headlights aren’t telling you anything, but the taillights are still red dots, which vanish soon enough too, and you’re listening to rain patter on leaves, the wet whir of your tires, some rhythmic mechanical noise you’ve been occupying yourself trying to identify, and if you’re lucky, the gorgeous echoes of a wood thrush.

The first chord on a Steinway baby grand at an open mic night in Middletown

The first chord of “Kluane Lake” is a drop cap. It’s the start of the piece, but it’s also an announcement that the piece is starting, so listen, and a promise that where it goes next will be a place worth going.

This chord has no time. It just rings. Time doesn’t start until the rest of the phrase, having listened, now takes its own traveling steps. It’s also a chord I love, but which, until Monday night, I had never played on a good piano.

I’ve been threatening to play at an open mic night since separation, when I got the upright piano with the broken leg. I bought the sheet music for the Gymnopedies and learned my favorite one—which I’d always imagined being able to play—by penciling in the note names, and relearned “On the Rebound,” a Floyd Cramer piece that I learned the first time when I took piano lessons as a kid. I practiced when the boys went to bed. I hope they remember it when they hear the Gymnopedie in a movie or something after I’m gone.

•••

I also started writing songs at the piano. I thought I’d have a set of three post-divorce songs soon enough, and I’d go play them at an open mic night somewhere.

I no longer remember the details of the first one I finished. I think it was good, but I’ll have to refer to a recording to remind myself.

The second one I finished was much better. I think it works. It’s the first song I played and sang Monday night, slightly flummoxed by the microphone boom arm between me and the keyboard, the way I couldn’t tell how loud my voice was in the speakers, and the way the orientation of the piano put most of the audience behind me.

The third one I finished writing wasn’t a new song; it was “Kluane Lake,” a piano piece I’d started when I was much younger and never found a way to finish. One day in my three-boy home in my new life, my hand went to a chord that was down a whole step instead of up, and that unlocked its completion. I still have things I want to improve in the B section, but good enough: That and the second song could be a two-song open mic set.

•••

I’d looked, on and off since landing in Connecticut, for open mic nights 1) with pianos 2) that weren’t at bars 3) and didn’t feature session musicians jamming. I didn’t find any for a long time. Now, with two new pieces burning a hole in my pocket, wanting to be spent, I searched again and found one. 40 miles away, Monday nights. I’d already visited half a dozen open mics a year or two earlier; now I drove out to this one, just to scope it out, not to play.

I didn’t hear the piano that night—no one had signed up to play it—but it was the place. Coffeehouse vibe, even though it was a performance space, and I was told they kept the piano tuned. A few weeks later, I psyched myself up and then chickened out. Monday night, I went back and signed up.

All I really wanted to tell you, though, was what it was like to play this one declarative, declamatory chord. What came out of this Steinway baby grand was a sound my beaten Krakauer upright with the broken leg could only point at. It was truer to the music in my head than even my head could be. The clarity and flat-out power of the chord . . . I don’t have words. It contained more of the divine than I’ve ever heard in it, and I’ve heard it maybe a thousand times.

My old Krakauer with the broken leg makes digital pianos—even the ones with expensive samples and the latest algorithms—sound like toys. This Steinway baby grand did not make my Krakauer sound like a toy; it sounded like what the Krakauer meant but could never fully express. It sounded like how a lake in the Yukon should sound when put to music.

My playing . . . was all right. My nerves in the strangeness of that performance space will improve, and more of the music will be unhindered by them. The B section will improve, too, in small compositional decisions that, when enough accumulate, will nudge it in the right direction on the pedestrian-to-sublime spectrum.

Next time, though, I’ll just do “On the Rebound.” It’s upbeat, there’s no singing, and I can do audience hand claps. I want to see if they’ll let me turn the piano around, though. It’s hard to connect with an audience when you’re facing the back wall.

Interlude with ottoman

PARENT is washing dishes, thinking about various ways the threads of abuse in his family of origin have reached through generations when CHILD 1 enters, crying.

CHILD 1: [crying] I snapped! I … [incomprehensible]—

PARENT: I can’t understand what you’re saying.

CHILD 1: I said I wanted tinvi papartins ackzed [incomprehensible]—

PARENT: I still can’t understand what you’re saying.

CHILD 1: I said I wanted to invite someone to the party, and—

PARENT: What party?

CHILD 1: Our birthday party.

[Their birthday party is still a ways off.]

PARENT : Oh… OK, go on.

CHILD 1: And I wanted to invite someone he doesn’t know, and he said no, and I said but you invited [friend] when I didn’t know him, and he was going [does impression of brother looking away and making yak-yak-yak puppet gesture with his hand] and I said stop doing that and he said F you, and I threw the orange chair at him.

[The “orange chair” is a small stuffed ottoman, just fabric and stuffing, a little heavy, but no hard parts.]

PARENT: [silent for probably half a minute, still washing dishes] I don’t know what to say to that. It’s—I wasn’t expecting to have to deal with this right now, so gimme some time to think about it before I say anything, please.

[Child 1 exits, parent continues to wash dishes, reflecting that this is much too tidy for good fiction, and there should be some time between thinking about his family of origin and being presented with a related situation in his own. Thoughts go in several predictable directions: Sit them down, listen to both sides, and deliver judgment; take screen time away from both of them; tell them to work it out between themselves; give them a lecture about how people treat each other; yell at them to get their attention; tell one to F himself and throw a big pillow at the other to teach empathy.

Dishrack fills up. Parent reflects some more on the threads of abuse in generations of his own family, goes upstairs, gathering Child 1 along the way. Upstairs, the orange ottoman is back where it belongs. CHILD 2 is sitting on his bed.]

CHILD 2: [extra cutely] Hello!

PARENT: Hello. Both of you sit over there.

[Parent sits on Child 1’s bed. Both children sit on Child 2’s bed, facing him.]

PARENT: Do you want to be abusive men when you grow up?

BOTH: [shocked] No!

PARENT: Then stop practicing to be abusive men.

[Parent exits silent room, goes back to dishes, waits ten years to see if this was actually as good as it seemed at the moment.]

The cycle

My grandfather had a temper. He would “pop his top,” I was told. Voices would be lowered in the telling. That was one of his defining characteristics. The family stories involve fists. The fists are his, my dad’s, and my cousins’. The fists aren’t thrown in these stories, so either it was a lot of posturing or I didn’t get the good stories.

My father had a temper, too. He ran ice cold until he blew. Two speeds.

A few months ago, I walked out on my family. I left one child with a red, fearful face, and the other wide-eyed with trepidation. It was the end of a 99-stressor single-parent time-bomb day, and the hundredth had just come. I don’t remember what it was, but it was in the kitchen, and it was some extremely simple thing I’d micromanaged, one tiny step at a time, every single step done ridiculously wrong by the child, after ten or fourteen hours of every other possible thing being frustrated, one at a time, with no other parent around to shove this onto, and all the work things going wrong, and the car, and the money, and I — JUST —

There’s an instant, so small it seems between instants, when something in you makes a decision. It can be to fight, to explode, to rage… If you’ve never been taught what to do during that instant, it feels like there’s no other way. I never have been taught.

Nothing feels worse than two minutes after you explode at your kids, when the adrenaline drains out — unless it’s ten minutes after that, when someone tells you your kids have to learn that Dad’s human. It’s worse because not only does it underline that yeah, you WERE just an unacceptable asshole to the most vulnerable people in your own family, but in addition to dealing with the fallout from the explosion, you’ve also got to figure out what to do with well-intentioned enablers making excuses for bad behavior.

Yes. You were just an utter asshole. No, it was not OK. Yes, you scared someone.

Yes, there was more stress than you could handle. Yes, you resisted for days, minutes, seconds, whatever. Sure, if you want credit for that, I guess you get it, but no, what you did after that was not OK. In the instant that’s so small, it’s between instants, you made that left turn. Yes, I know you couldn’t find anywhere to turn right, and the brakes were out. You still made the left.

I’ve told therapists, in various contexts, that I need to know what to do. I need a plan that I can have ready to go, so I can just pull it out and follow it when I need it. I think it’s useless to tell someone what not to do, or even for them to realize it themselves. It’s only useful to give them something to do. In couples’ counseling, I was smiled at after I said that, and the conversation was guided elsewhere. I may have brought it up twice or so, I don’t remember, exactly, but not three times. After that, I didn’t bring it up again. But I still thought it was true.

So at some point this year or last, after losing it after X number of frustrating things I couldn’t handle piled on top of each other in too short a time period, I decided next time, at that instant, I’d just walk out. That would be the plan I could remember and reach for at that instant. It would feel bad to me — partly because it’s blatantly disrespectful to whoever I’m walking out on, and partly because it feels like losing when all my hormones are boiling up for the very purpose of NOT LOSING — but it couldn’t possibly feel as bad as two minutes after exploding at my children.

So… I did. The instant between instants came, and I knew that if I moved even a single muscle, or said a single word, a whole giant dam of lava would burst out.

And I walked OUT. I didn’t look at the child, say a word, nothing. I stormed out of the kitchen and out the front door and went and stood on the lawn and looked out at the entire universe I was enraged at.

And the rage dulled a little. But I’m middle-aged and know what happens when you go back into something after counting to ten. All you’ve accomplished is a ten-count intermission, and here we go, back to it, and now we’re in Act II, which has the climax. So I went over to the sidewalk, still in that state where if I were younger, I could convince myself it was time to go back in. I didn’t go back in, and started walking instead.

My kids are twelve years old. As the finale to a scary crescendo, they’d been abandoned in their house at night.

I kept walking, turned a corner, and tried to stay selfish as the guilt started sneaking in. Though I have my helicopter moments, I’m basically not a hoverer — I don’t repeat the exceptions to that statement once I notice them, and I expect Urgent Care visits as part of parenthood — but I felt deeply that leaving them was wrong. I kept walking. The plan was to disengage, and I was following it, though I couldn’t remember why. I just knew it was the plan.

There’s a gas station at the corner of the next street. I went in and bought ice cream.

I did not go the shortest way home with the ice cream. I went the long block instead of the little alley street. It was dark. My house had the kitchen lights on. My kids were inside near tears. Neither knew where I’d gone, or when I’d be back. One probably felt it was his fault. They were both scared.

First positive reinforcement: I was right. It didn’t feel as bad as two minutes after an explosion.

So I explained that I didn’t know what else to do, but I knew I was going to explode, so I broke the cycle. Maybe I did a good job, maybe I didn’t. Maybe it was the right thing, maybe it was the wrong thing. But that’s what I was trying to do: break the cycle. And I did.

Second positive reinforcement: They understood. And look — now we can just apologize to each other, nobody got exploded at, nobody feels awful — bad, sure; scared, sure; but not awful — and we have ice cream.

They told me some more how scared they were, I apologized some more for that, and we all thought, you know… that was actually kind of good.

Let’s try to do that next time, too.

They were bickering in the kitchen, and the crescendo was building. Remember what we talked about, I said when I walked in. Remember what I did that other night? Remember breaking the cycle? It ended with one of them leaving. He was NOT happy. His brother DID complain about him when he left. There ABSOLUTELY WAS stewing and steaming.

But we did it.

Break the cycle, I told them again, when they were bickering again, and a child with a face as resentful as faces can get, red and blotchy and ready to blow, walked out.

I was working in the living room one day, and a child came and sat down next to me and said nothing.

Okay, I said, when the distraction was too much for my work concentration. What’s up.

I’m breaking the cycle, he said.

And I was like—

Whoah!

This works?

Not the cycle thing, but the modeling behavior and having them practice it thing? It works? After just two practices?

We added to it: Tell the other person that’s what you’re doing instead of just leaving.

And then a week or a month later. Plop. Child. What’s up? I’m breaking the cycle.

This is a Rosh Hashanah post. Junior Chef and I made challah today, and took the loaf to a local park with running water for tashlich. Tashlich is a Rosh Hashanah tradition of casting your sins away, in the form of bread crumbs. We’ve done it every year, even back before we were a three-dude family, and every year, I re-explain what we’re doing. We’re not feeding ducks, we’re throwing away the mistakes we’ve made and thinking about how to do better. The Jewish concept of sin isn’t the Christian concept. All it means is you missed, try again better. You know what you were supposed to do. So we’re throwing away our guilt or depression about the miss, and just taking a better shot.

Today, it came to me what tashlich really meant this year: We hadn’t missed.

We hadn’t missed.

We put the frisbee in the car and went over onto the little bridge while a local Jewish group started their guitar playing and speeches on a makeshift stage a few hundred feet away, and I said:

My grandfather — your great-grandfather — had a temper…

— And my father …

— And I …

— And you …

And in four generations — probably a hundred years — you are the first ones who can break the cycle.

So yeah, think about whatever you did this year that you need to do better. We’re still doing that. But we’re not really here to throw our sins into the lake this year. We’re here to say:

Well done.

L’shana tovah.

Little house of men

MY FATHER MADE it clear to me that I was mechanically inept. “Sometimes it skips a generation,” was the phrase, and we believe what we’re told by people we believe love us. He had it, I didn’t, and because it had skipped me, I never would.

ALL THE QUOTES are from Pastime, a 1991 Spenser novel.

“Remember,” I said, “there were no women. Just my father, my uncles, and me. So all the chores were done by men. There was no woman’s work. There were no rules about what was woman’s work. In our house all work was man’s work. So I made beds and dusted and did laundry, and so did my father, and my uncles. And they took turns cooking.”

The first thing I bought to improve my kitchen was a serving spoon. I was working at Scholastic Books in Manhattan, and across from it was Dean and DeLuca, a very expensive gourmet shop where sometimes, to make myself feel better, I’d drop several dollars more on a treat than something only a scant degree less enjoyable would have cost at Cafe Duke.

They had utensils there, too, not just tony takeout. I thought about it and bought this big, pretty, satin-finish serving spoon.

THEN, BECAUSE I was reading Consider the Fork, and she swore by tongs, a pair of those, also from Dean and DeLuca; and thanks to a minor casino windfall of my wife’s, a rice cooker from Mitsuwa Marketplace—the largest Japanese grocery store in the US, which I’d sometimes stop into after riding my bike into New Jersey, to pack my single pannier with sake for me and mochi or candy for my family. Then the Microplane Zester/Grater—I think that was also from Consider the Fork—and I don’t remember the order of acquisitions after that. A thing here, a thing there. All haphazard, probably, from the outside, but tightly integrated to the emerging pattern in here. A pretty serving spoon was only needed if I was going to take food seriously enough to want to present it; we already had black nylon cooking spoons, which we used for both stirring and serving. This would not be used for stirring. Tongs were only necessary if I wanted to risk, on the say-so of a book, money on a utensil I’d never felt the lack of, but which an expert called her most valuable. And a rice cooker is a long-term decision about nutrition, expense, and self-reliance…and I have this Kurusawa/Mifune thing. The ronin in The Seven Samurai—as determined, scarred, and self-reliant as any knight-errant gumshoe—accept rice as payment.

Separated by weeks and freelance checks came: a good garlic press, a balloon whisk despite already having a spiral one, a small mortar and pestle, two nice big white serving bowls from Sur La Table, nested, even though mixing bowls had been serving the same purpose just fine. Each item requiring a second or third thought, and usually a second or third visit, before the purchase.

 

“So all of you cooked?”

“Yeah, but no one was proprietary about it. It wasn’t anyone’s accomplishment, it was a way to get food in the proper condition to eat.”

 

MY MARRIAGE ENDED, after a quarter-century, in July, 2014. She moved first, to the county in Connecticut we’d agreed on so the boys could have good schools and I could have train access to Scholastic. By the time the moving started, Scholastic had given all my work to a much larger vendor that could offer bulk pricing. No time to react. Two weeks later, I landed in the same county, different town.

I got the old raw-wood Ikea utility table. On our first weekend together, I had the boys sand and stain it with me, and it moved into our new kitchen as our new prep table. It fit perfectly. We didn’t have anywhere to eat yet, or even a wastebasket, but I knew what kind of little family of men I wanted.

THEY TURNED TEN soon after we moved. Now they’re eleven.

I called them to the top of the stairs to their room this evening, and said to the one who’s only intermittently interested in cooking, “There are two things I need done, and you can choose which. One, you can wash some dishes and set the table. Two, I need the chain taken off my folding bike, which is in the bike garage on the workstand, and put to soak in cleaner.”

“CHAIN!”

His brother’s dream is to be on MasterChef Junior; I’ve been working with him on cooking since we moved here. This boy’s equivalent started four days ago, when he began his career as a mechanic by replacing the rear dérailleur and shifter cable on a little secondhand mountain bike his mom bought to keep at her place. His career will probably not be as a mechanic; he wants to be a scientist. I will probably never be able to send him to college, but I was struck, long ago, by Richard Feynman’s stories of being “The Boy Who Fixes Radios By Thinking,” and I can at least give him a tactile understanding of basic physics. The classical simple machines are lever, wheel and axle, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and screw. Bicycles are compound collections of four out of six, and the other two (wedge, inclined plane) are integral to fixing and riding them.

And not just of basic physics, but of applied physics; felt physics. Reading about springs and being able to repeat that they store energy is not the same as getting your finger pinched when a dérailleur snaps back on its hanger. The abstraction of reading says the physical world is readily understood and easily manipulated. The orneriness of reality teaches you that perseverance and endurance are the only things that really ever manipulate it.

The bike garage is the only room in the house where he’s allowed to swear.

I’ve struggled with dérailleur adjustment for two years, since I bought my first workstand and bike tool set during the same life epoch that pushed me to buy the serving spoon. Lightly guiding my budding mechanic through his own first repair blew away the last of the obstacles. I now get it. Last night after seeing my boys at a school concert and then leaving them and driving half an hour home by myself, I needed to make myself feel better, so I shouldered my randonneuring bike down the basement stairs and tuned up its winter-beaten drivetrain. I didn’t refer to any of my previous printouts from the web. It just makes sense.

It made sense to mechanical boy in a single day. Mostly I just tightened things his hands were too small for, made him stop when he jumped to the wrong conclusions, and told him not to hit himself in the face with the cable.

I also had him touch the cable near the shifter while turning the grip, to feel what’s going on up there, and then had him do it again while watching the dérailleur. His light bulbs went off so much faster than mine ever have. He’s got that thing I don’t.

 

“Your father sounds as if he were comfortable with his ego,” Susan said.

“He never felt the need to compete with me,” I said. “He was always very willing for me to grow up.”

 

SO I HAVE my fantasy house, my little family of men. I yell at them sometimes, which Spenser’s fictitious father and uncles never did, and feel unforgivably shitty and apologize. I’m trying to be an ideal, and that’s something nobody can maintain outside the hermetic chamber of a book. But even an unattainable ideal lies in a direction, and if we don’t aim for it, we don’t travel in that direction, and can’t get reshaped by the effort.

We’re still jerks sometimes, all three of us, including the one who’s not eleven, but I think we’re teaching each other how to be better men, one generation to the next.

IT WAS A very simple dinner tonight because of work and being tired and not-recovered-yet broke, and as a pan heated, I went downstairs, plausibly to make sure the mechanic knew where the Chain Brite was before he got started, but really to see about fingers not being pinched, and he was already done. The chain and master link were soaking in the yellow Domino Sugar tub. So I agreed that yes, it is very fun and he should totally do more of this kind of thing, and went back up to the kitchen and his brother said, “Can I butterfly these sausages for you, Dad?”

I know how I got here. I don’t want to sound disingenuous. It was intentional.

This is just a night when I had that moment, and am amazed.