This is just a bit of silliness that came to me while attempting to refill a prescription this week. I’ve reached the age where I pretty much always have a prescription waiting for me, so I interact with that particular phone menu a lot.
Back during my previous work-life, my boss came to me and said, “I’m thinking of installing an automated phone system on our main number.” I cheerfully responded, “In God’s name why?” I think I also suggested that, if he nurtured a pathological hatred for our public, he should seek therapy. The answer, of course, was that the admin staff fought over whose turn it was to answer the phones and each jealously tracked the number of hours they had to do so up against the number of minutes their co-workers did.
Now, I was fairly senior in leadership, but I believed in pitching in. I offered to answer the phones, if someone would train me on the intimidating, button-studded sidecar that attached to the designated hardware and on the Byzantine maze that was the set of flip cards for finding extensions and outside numbers. I was never trained. Maybe it had something to do with that fact that I consider, “In God’s name why?” a cheerful response.
“…the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
It’s unusual that I quote Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Overall, I’m not a fan, but the man knew how to make an emotional impact on his listeners. He spoke the words above during his first inauguration to the U.S. Presidency, March 4, 1933.
America was in the middle of the Great Depression, the worst economic downturn in our history as a nation. People were angry, tired, desperate… and scared. F.D.R.’s proposed, with his New Deal programs, to calm that fear and address the very real suffering of the population. Current wisdom says The New Deal did not end the Great Depression, (more here) but he did take positive steps to end suffering.
And he was right about fear. There’s no emotion more paralyzing, nor more counter-productive. Even avarice and blind lust drive us to do something. Fear stops us in our tracks, unless it becomes panic. Then it does make us do something, usually something very stupid.
Somewhere in my parents’ house (because nothing ever leaves my parents’ house), there is a copy of a slim paperback titled, Why Not the Best?
Okay, it’s not my parents’ house anymore, it’s mine. My son and his family live in it. And it’s likely that the book in question did leave, because my mother went on a binge of book donating late in life. She got so obsessive about it that she started donating books that belonged to other people. We had to have a talk.
This book was, I believe, a bestseller, and it introduced the world to a man named Jimmy Carter, just-departed Governor of Georgia. Richard Nixon had, only two years earlier, resigned the United States Presidency amidst scandal, and his elected Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, had preceded him in leaving office amidst scandal. So the Presidency fell upon a non-elected Vice President, Gerald Ford. By all accounts (including that of his opponent in the 1976 Presidential election, the aforementioned Jimmy Carter), Ford was a good and competent man, and, observed John Chancellor of NBC news, even a gifted athlete. Unfortunately, Jerry Ford had a habit of tripping and falling on camera. Jerry Ford pardoned a man that a lot of people hated then as much as many now hate the color orange. Saturday Night Live, already gearing itself up to be the sole source of political news for a large segment of the American electorate, had Ford portrayed by Chevy Chase as a dithering, absent-minded bumpkin.
The Presidency was not in good shape. The Democrats had last controlled the White House in the person of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, despite an ambitious and oft-lauded program of domestic reform–“The Great Society”–lost mass approval for his expansion of the unpopular Viet Nam War. The Democratic Party was in no better shape than was the G.O.P. vis a vis credibility of Presidential candidates.
Along came an outsider, a peanut farmer, a Southern Baptist, a Sunday School teacher, a Southern governor, who not only won the Democratic Party’s nomination (away from the third political scion of the Kennedy dynasty, no less) but triggered something of a cultural phenomenon. Jimmy Carter’s prominent teeth were caricatured far and wide. The antics of his brother Billy served to fill the cultural void left by the mass-cancellation of rural comedies like Green Acres and the Beverly Hillbillies a few years earlier. Indeed, a two-season rural sitcom, Carter Country, earned decent ratings for ABC starting in 1977.
I’ve been accused of eliciting tears with some of my stories. I wrote this piece eight years ago, and I think it’s one of those stories. I didn’t share it before because It’s sad, and it might sound self-pitying. It also might result in my receiving a lot of “Dude, are you okay?” messages, not to mention recommendations for therapists. I assure you, I’m okay.
I offer this account, first to break a cycle of second-guessing myself and fearing everything I write will somehow backfire on me. Second, I aim not to dwell on the negatives of my life, but to add some depth to my overall story. I think, publicly, I’m a positive person. I accomplish things. I help people. A lot of people say I’m supremely confident. Well, I’m not. Not always. There are internal negatives there. And I think it’s important to know that we all have them. Finally, hope this story will help remind the reader that no human being is meant to be a tool. No matter how useful we are, we should be considered as people first.
And now, about this beagle…
I guess I was twelve, maybe thirteen. We had two dogs—Benji and Lady—who were born in the Spring when I was nine. Lady would stay with us until I was in college, but Benji, well, he was an unaltered male. He wandered. Sometime around the Summer of ’78 he left us for good. Before he did, though, he brought home a girl from his travels. The girl was a beagle. She was a very nice dog, friendly and well-behaved. Personally, I wanted to just let her stay with us.
We had a problem, though. Lady was used to having Benji’s full attention. She didn’t want him to have a wife or a girlfriend or whatever the beagle was. But, as happens with dogs, someone’s the Alpha, and that someone made the decisions. That someone was Benji. He was married now, or engaged, or shacked up, or whatever, and his sister needed to make the best of it.
“…Take these pinions, fly behind me: I’ll go ahead, you Follow my lead. That way You’ll be safe. …While he talked, he was fitting The boy’s gear, showing him how to move Like a mother bird with her fledglings. Then he fixed his own harness To his shoulders, nervously poised himself for this strange New journey; paused on the brink of take-off, and embraced his Son, couldn’t fight back his tears. They’d found a hilltop – above the plain, but no mountain – And from this they took off On their hapless flight. Daedalus flexed his wings, glanced back at His son’s, held a steady course. The new Element bred delight. Fear forgotten, Icarus flew more Boldly, with daring skill. Then the boy, made over-reckless by youthful daring, abandoned His father, soared aloft, Too close to the sun: the wax melted, the ligatures Flew apart, his flailing arms had no hold On the thin air. From the dizzy heaven, he gazed down seaward In terror. Fright made the scene go black Before his eyes. No wax, wings gone, a thrash of naked Arms, a shuddering plunge Down through the void, a scream – “Father, Father, I’m falling –” Cut off as he hit the waves. His unhappy father, a father no longer, cried “Icarus! Icarus, where are you? In what part of the sky Do you fly now?” – then saw wings littering the water. Earth holds his bones; the Icarian Sea his name.
From Ovid, The Art of Love: Book 2, translated by Peter Green
Daedalus and Icarus by Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire
Anyone judging by our popular culture would have trouble distinguishing between an American father and any of the many residents of a clown car, unless maybe that father happens to be a murderous ogre.
On one hand, we have Dad jokes and Dad bods.
On the other, the Latin root-word “Pater” is largely familiar to us for lending the much-despised “Patriarchy” its first syllable.
Viewed through that lens, fathers are either a bit ridiculous, or more than a bit menacing.
But then…
I came across this passage in my reading this morning. The ancient Roman poet Ovid tells the story of Daedalus and Icarus, oddly enough in an erotic poem attempting to illustrate how a male lover might attempt to pin down the wings of Eros, god of love. It’s an odd placement, in one way. Or is it a cautionary tale? A man who ensnares a woman, as Ovid proposes here, risks becoming a father.
If he becomes a father, he risks ever so much more.
Daedalus, it now occurs to me, is quite the figure of a father. At first glance, perhaps, foolish, even ridiculous. Who makes wings out of bird feathers and wax, and proposes to fly with them? Who gives them to a boy, and expects him to follow instructions while using them?
But Daedalus was desperate. He and Icarus lived as slaves under King Minos, who used the father’s genius to his own ends. Daedalus had betrayed Minos, resulting in the death of the King’s beastly son, the Minotaur. Perhaps Minos would not kill his genius slave, but would Daedalus’s son be safe? It seems like a no-brainer that the best revenge for the death of one son would be the death of another.
Daedalus had to get his son away from the isle of Crete. Since Minos controlled shipping and a giant bronze robot guarded the shores, the only way out was up. If he wanted his son to grow to manhood, Daedalus had to give him wings, risk him flying too close to the sun, let him soar. Driven, desperate, ingenious, loving. And this classical example of a concerned father fell prey to every father’s nightmare. The boy flew too close to the blazing chariot of Helios, the Sun, his wings melted, he plunged to his death.
Like Daedalus then, fathers now want to protect their children at all costs. We don’t want them to come to violence. We don’t want them to suffer disease, addiction or poverty. We don’t want them to fly too close to the sun.
And yet we must give them wings. And we must fly on and let them take to the sky.
Oh, we look back a lot. And we cry out a lot, demanding to know where they are. And the nightmare flies beside us all the way, right to the end. We lose sleep, and hair, but probably not weight. We’re ready at any moment to swerve, to fly back, to build any ridiculous device we have to in order for them to escape.
I guess I’ve seen and done a lot in 43 years of work. I’ve done interesting work and known remarkable people. I’m never at a loss when someone says, “Tell me an interesting fact about yourself.”
A dozen books published, three times that many conventions planned, countless articles, stories, novels, scripts, software packages written, fifty plays written, directed or acted, and half again that many radio plays. I’ve found mentors and coached promising young people. I’ve developed a reputation as a guy who will find the answers.
But, when I look back… I feel no nostalgia. Not for my time on the job, not for rehearsing all those shows and running myself ragged at those cons… maybe a little for the people I’ve met along the way, the ones who are no longer here, or who are just distant. I’m almost always happy to see old friends when they emerge. I will tell stories about funny things that happened.
