Kevin Tudish's Blog: A mid-life perspective
April 20, 2019
Resilience
Pneumonia was something that killed people. It killed the brother I would have had. The third child who was alive in our family by force of memory, by force of repeating over and over the details of his short life until he was nearly as real as the older sister who tormented me.
And by repeating over and over the details of his death, the horror of seeing your child snatched away by an invisible virus and the inability of science to intervene.
By the relentless, furious determination of a mother to make sure death never had another opportunity to steal a child. “Bundle up. Cover your chest. Don’t forget your jacket.”
When the doctor came back with the x-rays and said I had pneumonia, all my five-year-old consciousness could manage was to start screaming “Am I going to die? Am I going to die?”
Face down on the exam table, writhing and screaming. Each parent holding a leg, the nurse trying to immobilize the rest of me. The doctor trying to explain that I must hold still so he could administer the million units of penicillin that were going to save my life.
I lived. At five, I had survived what killed my brother, survived the worst of what the world could throw at you.
Later that year, I survived a misjudged, face-first dive onto the corner of the coffee table, and the surgery to remove the tumor that resulted from the impact.
And the next year, in the gray, wet cold of Northern France, I survived bout after bout of bronchitis.
Mumps, measles, chickenpox the year after.
Broken bones, dog bites, falls from trees.
All the things that slowed but never stopped me.
The Hatfield Power Plant sat at the edge of the Monongahela so the coal barges could tie up and deliver fuel. The plant used its own power to light every inch of the structure, its own massive ornament in the rainy December night. My aunt, my mom, and I crossed the bridge past the lights, on our way to Uniontown to start our Christmas shopping.
My next few memories are moments of consciousness days later in the ICU, and dreams of food brought on by being nourished from an IV drip the whole time.
My aunt was driving. My mom was sitting up front with her. I was sitting behind my mom. My mom and aunt remembered everything. The lights of the other car suddenly glaring into the windshield, blinding them both. The impact. Pleading with the police and the EMTs to get their boy of the back of the car. No one being able to see me at first beneath the overturned rear seat. “There’s nobody there, lady.” But the implausibility of two women having the same hallucination finally prevailed and they looked again.
My dad told me later that the doctor encouraged him to say goodbye to me because I wouldn’t live through the night. They opened me up sternum to navel to repair what they could, but the spinal injuries were out of scope. If I lived, the concussion would take care of itself, but my legs might wither while my back healed.
I lay mostly unconscious for a week in the ICU.
Then I spent a week downstairs in a regular ward clamoring for pain medication.
They released me on Christmas Eve. The candy striper put her knee in my back trying to get the wheelchair over the threshold of the elevator. I screamed. I wasn’t going to survive all that only to be felled by a teenage volunteer on the way out.
I was a 15-year-old boy who had been invincible. Bent in half by the seat belt that saved my life. Stitches holding together the gash in my side, the incision down the front. Tension stitches spanning my abdomen so I wouldn’t split apart.
They fitted me for a chair brace, two metal strips alongside the new shape of my spine. Each week they bent them a little more and cinched me into the brace in an effort to regain something of the original shape of my spine.
I was a 15-year-old boy who wondered if I would ever stand up straight again, if I would ever have anything like a normal body again, a normal life.
Being a little hyperkinetic helped: as soon as I could, I’d strap on the brace and walk outside.
And I grew that year. Nearly eight inches.
When I was 17, I performed on the trampoline for the May Day celebration at my high school.
When I was a junior in college, I was offered a scholarship at a ballet school, and the following year was performing at The Kennedy Center with The Washington Ballet.
I was a 22-year-old man who was invincible.
And by repeating over and over the details of his death, the horror of seeing your child snatched away by an invisible virus and the inability of science to intervene.
By the relentless, furious determination of a mother to make sure death never had another opportunity to steal a child. “Bundle up. Cover your chest. Don’t forget your jacket.”
When the doctor came back with the x-rays and said I had pneumonia, all my five-year-old consciousness could manage was to start screaming “Am I going to die? Am I going to die?”
Face down on the exam table, writhing and screaming. Each parent holding a leg, the nurse trying to immobilize the rest of me. The doctor trying to explain that I must hold still so he could administer the million units of penicillin that were going to save my life.
I lived. At five, I had survived what killed my brother, survived the worst of what the world could throw at you.
Later that year, I survived a misjudged, face-first dive onto the corner of the coffee table, and the surgery to remove the tumor that resulted from the impact.
And the next year, in the gray, wet cold of Northern France, I survived bout after bout of bronchitis.
Mumps, measles, chickenpox the year after.
Broken bones, dog bites, falls from trees.
All the things that slowed but never stopped me.
The Hatfield Power Plant sat at the edge of the Monongahela so the coal barges could tie up and deliver fuel. The plant used its own power to light every inch of the structure, its own massive ornament in the rainy December night. My aunt, my mom, and I crossed the bridge past the lights, on our way to Uniontown to start our Christmas shopping.
My next few memories are moments of consciousness days later in the ICU, and dreams of food brought on by being nourished from an IV drip the whole time.
My aunt was driving. My mom was sitting up front with her. I was sitting behind my mom. My mom and aunt remembered everything. The lights of the other car suddenly glaring into the windshield, blinding them both. The impact. Pleading with the police and the EMTs to get their boy of the back of the car. No one being able to see me at first beneath the overturned rear seat. “There’s nobody there, lady.” But the implausibility of two women having the same hallucination finally prevailed and they looked again.
My dad told me later that the doctor encouraged him to say goodbye to me because I wouldn’t live through the night. They opened me up sternum to navel to repair what they could, but the spinal injuries were out of scope. If I lived, the concussion would take care of itself, but my legs might wither while my back healed.
I lay mostly unconscious for a week in the ICU.
Then I spent a week downstairs in a regular ward clamoring for pain medication.
They released me on Christmas Eve. The candy striper put her knee in my back trying to get the wheelchair over the threshold of the elevator. I screamed. I wasn’t going to survive all that only to be felled by a teenage volunteer on the way out.
I was a 15-year-old boy who had been invincible. Bent in half by the seat belt that saved my life. Stitches holding together the gash in my side, the incision down the front. Tension stitches spanning my abdomen so I wouldn’t split apart.
They fitted me for a chair brace, two metal strips alongside the new shape of my spine. Each week they bent them a little more and cinched me into the brace in an effort to regain something of the original shape of my spine.
I was a 15-year-old boy who wondered if I would ever stand up straight again, if I would ever have anything like a normal body again, a normal life.
Being a little hyperkinetic helped: as soon as I could, I’d strap on the brace and walk outside.
And I grew that year. Nearly eight inches.
When I was 17, I performed on the trampoline for the May Day celebration at my high school.
When I was a junior in college, I was offered a scholarship at a ballet school, and the following year was performing at The Kennedy Center with The Washington Ballet.
I was a 22-year-old man who was invincible.
May 16, 2015
What should the last time be like?
I was almost 59 when my dad died. Even though the inevitability was more apparent every year, after that long you start to think maybe there’s an exception to the rule here and there.
My sister and I gave him a new driver for his 90th birthday. He told us it made a difference in his league play that summer.
When I visited him for his 92nd, we got in at least one round.
He was slowing down. He took naps, let an oxygen concentrator run while he slept.
“I can only work half a day now,” he said.
But every year when we visited, on the phone every Sunday in between, it was the same guy: lucid, engaged, ready with a new joke he’d heard somewhere. Maybe he’d live to be 100, see his granddaughter graduate from high school, get a couple years of college under her belt.
The winter after his 92nd birthday, my mom started sprinkling the phone calls with He doesn’t have much of an appetite and He’s sleeping a lot.
That spring, my dad started talking about things he wanted to get done around the house when we visited again in the summer. Extend the gray-water drain we’d put in the year before. Get the deck painted. Trim the pine trees so the weight wouldn’t be so biased toward the driveway if there were a big snow. Things he couldn’t do anymore, things he didn’t want my mom to have to worry about.
“I’m down to 125 pounds,” he said.
That was only a few pounds more than my wife.
Maybe he was just going to reduce to some minimum size and stop, harden against time like the lumber in an old barn and fix himself in our landscape.
“Dr. D___ took me aside the last time we were at the clinic,” my mom said. “He told me, ‘You need to know that he’s dying. You need to prepare for that.’”
“Emotionally?”
“That, and the care he’ll need. So far, I’ve been able to take care of him. He doesn’t need a lot right now. The last thing he wants is to end up in a hospital or a home. You’ll see a big change in him when you get here.”
It was the first year he didn’t drive to the airport to pick us up.
“He didn’t want to be away from home that long,” my mom said.
But he was awake and ready when we got there, happy to see his son and his family, the granddaughter who’ll be the last one to carry his name.
He looked frail for the first time, felt tiny when I hugged him.
After the red eye, we always nap for a couple hours—trying to settle in for the night in coach is like trying to get comfortable behind your child’s third-grade desk. As soon as we lay down, so did he, and we could hear the pop-sssh of the oxygen machine in his room.
He was still sleeping when we got up, but he made it out of bed for happy hour.
As long as I can remember, those couple hours before dinner were reserved for a beer and something salty, pretzels or popcorn. A time when my mom and dad could sit together at the end of the day, catch up on what had happened, figure out how to take on what might lie ahead.
My mom would finish her beer in the kitchen while she started dinner. When I visited, my dad and I would finish ours on the back porch, or in the breezeway by the TV.
The first couple days, we planned which projects to tackle first. We had to time the deck around the weather, make sure we had a couple of dry days in a row. Rebuilding the fire pit would be better on a dry day so the mortar could set. Better not to have to dig the drain when the soil was mud, but not impossible. I could trim trees any time.
“If we can get all that done,” my dad said, “we’ll be all set.”
It’s nice to just idle for the first few days. Shake off the work life, get used to being back in your childhood home, adjust to the changes in your parents over the last year.
Through their sixties, seventies, even early eighties, the changes were slight year to year. Late eighties into the nineties, the effort of a long life starts to show a little. For the past few years, they’d started looking older when I first saw them waiting for us at the airport, but by the time we’d driven home, I didn’t notice any more. My mom would head straight for the house to unlock the door. My dad would grab one of the bags out of the back. “That’s heavy,” he’d say. “Let me get that.” He’d hold the door, let his family file in ahead of him.
Even if he was a little slower, he was still strong in the world.
That last summer, though, the shock of his frailty lingered. He’d changed in a way that was too much of a departure. He was a man falling through ice that couldn’t bear even that slight weight, and so far out that no hand or line would reach.
But we were there to work and to celebrate this birthday, not dwell on the inevitable.
93.
It’s a long haul. The Great Depression, Guadalcanal, the Bay Area during the Sixties, the digital age. How do you celebrate that journey through history? That constant presence in our lives? Pushing 59 years for me, longer for my sister.
Two and a half weeks. Just be. Nothing out of the ordinary. Breakfast and lunch around the kitchen table. Happy hour. Dinner in the dining room. Poker after we cleaned up the dishes.
Projects all day. One at a time, talk about how we wanted to approach it, haul out the tools, start arguing midway through. Thirty years in the Air Force, he was used to running a project, but my sister and I each had a solution in mind, too. Would he like it if just once it went his way without a fight, or would he think we were taking a dive? He wants to argue for his vision, let him argue, let him duke it out. Maybe he’s right. Maybe all this gravel needs to come out so we can find the end of the pipe, add another 20 feet so it empties over the bank.
He pulled up a lawn chair, started going at the gravel with his trench shovel. You kids don’t get to do all the work. I’ll find the end of the goddamn pipe.
He couldn’t make it from the house to the edge of the yard without a rest, but he could pull up a chair and go at it with a shovel a few strokes at a time.
“Relax,” I said. “Ninety-three, you can take a break, let somebody else hump it.”
But when work defines you, when you know yourself by the visible things you accomplish every day, how you keep every engine running, every faucet water tight, every door on its hinges, you don’t go gently into fatigue. Not when you’re out there with your kids.
Knowing it wasn’t going to get any better, that adding or dropping a medication wasn’t going to make him stronger, that it was only going to get worse didn’t bring on any acceptance or resignation, only frustration.
I wanted him to be able to settle into a state of appreciation, look back at the gift of a long life and feel thankful. Easy to want when it’s not the end of your life, and he didn’t seem to be having any of it. He was going to rail on like one of those guys who tells the executioner to kiss his ass even as the floor is falling away and the noose is about to snap his neck.
His life, his death, and since he wanted to dwell on the former, we could only go along like it was any other summer.
I had a mostly nice relationship with my dad.
When I was little, he adored me, like most parents adore their kids when they’re little. He’d carry me on his shoulders, bring home a new toy when he cashed his paycheck. Sprung for an electric train when I was two. That was a bid deal on an airman’s pay.
He let me hang around when he was working on cars. He’d patiently untangle the fifty feet of parachute rope he’d given me the day before. Anything I broke, he fixed.
It went south a little when I entered my teens, mostly around long hair and drugs. The military wanted to maintain order not only among the ranks but also among the families. There was a focus and an image to maintain. We were a loaded weapon that might have to get turned on Russia or China or who knows who at any moment, and how would it look if the men who were meant to annihilate you were raising a generation of dissidents?
When the kids caused trouble, the brass put heat on the fathers. In addition to the the general agitation of military life, your old man had his C.O. even farther up his ass, and then you were the beneficiary of a doubly strung-out guy. No fun for anyone.
When my dad retired, though, things changed. We moved to rural Pennsylvania where he and my mom grew up. The concrete of the flight line was replaced by miles of forest in every direction. He put on fatigues because they made great work clothes, not because he had to show up in uniform. He was his own C.O.
He could build his house. Take off the morning to get in nine holes with his friends, and still get back in time to put up a wall or frame a window.
How long my hair was didn’t matter.
We weren’t one of those families where fathers and sons were best friends, but we got along. He’d let me have a beer on the weekend. I caught him tapping his foot to Led Zeppelin III one morning. If I was out golfing with him, he’d hand me a cigar when he and his friends lit up.
We were on the same side of a lot of political arguments. He read "Fire in the Lake" when I brought it home from school, and he decided that Vietnam hadn’t been Washington’s most righteous effort. Neither of us thought the Republicans had much interest in doing anything good for the working class.
We rooted for the Steelers. And the Pirates and the Pens if they got anywhere near the post season.
We were happy to see each other on holidays, and when I was there in the summer for his birthday. We talked on the phone every weekend.
So, when this last visit came around, when we all knew but wouldn’t say that it was probably the last one, we didn’t have to spend time trying to make up for things we’d missed along the way, trying to warm over an icy history.
We could do what we’d always done. Tackle the projects around the house. Knock off for happy hour. Settle in on the back porch, listen to the birds usher out the afternoon. Dinner, and then poker.
Two and a half weeks of life as we knew it every time we got together.
My sister and I gave him a new driver for his 90th birthday. He told us it made a difference in his league play that summer.
When I visited him for his 92nd, we got in at least one round.
He was slowing down. He took naps, let an oxygen concentrator run while he slept.
“I can only work half a day now,” he said.
But every year when we visited, on the phone every Sunday in between, it was the same guy: lucid, engaged, ready with a new joke he’d heard somewhere. Maybe he’d live to be 100, see his granddaughter graduate from high school, get a couple years of college under her belt.
The winter after his 92nd birthday, my mom started sprinkling the phone calls with He doesn’t have much of an appetite and He’s sleeping a lot.
That spring, my dad started talking about things he wanted to get done around the house when we visited again in the summer. Extend the gray-water drain we’d put in the year before. Get the deck painted. Trim the pine trees so the weight wouldn’t be so biased toward the driveway if there were a big snow. Things he couldn’t do anymore, things he didn’t want my mom to have to worry about.
“I’m down to 125 pounds,” he said.
That was only a few pounds more than my wife.
Maybe he was just going to reduce to some minimum size and stop, harden against time like the lumber in an old barn and fix himself in our landscape.
“Dr. D___ took me aside the last time we were at the clinic,” my mom said. “He told me, ‘You need to know that he’s dying. You need to prepare for that.’”
“Emotionally?”
“That, and the care he’ll need. So far, I’ve been able to take care of him. He doesn’t need a lot right now. The last thing he wants is to end up in a hospital or a home. You’ll see a big change in him when you get here.”
It was the first year he didn’t drive to the airport to pick us up.
“He didn’t want to be away from home that long,” my mom said.
But he was awake and ready when we got there, happy to see his son and his family, the granddaughter who’ll be the last one to carry his name.
He looked frail for the first time, felt tiny when I hugged him.
After the red eye, we always nap for a couple hours—trying to settle in for the night in coach is like trying to get comfortable behind your child’s third-grade desk. As soon as we lay down, so did he, and we could hear the pop-sssh of the oxygen machine in his room.
He was still sleeping when we got up, but he made it out of bed for happy hour.
As long as I can remember, those couple hours before dinner were reserved for a beer and something salty, pretzels or popcorn. A time when my mom and dad could sit together at the end of the day, catch up on what had happened, figure out how to take on what might lie ahead.
My mom would finish her beer in the kitchen while she started dinner. When I visited, my dad and I would finish ours on the back porch, or in the breezeway by the TV.
The first couple days, we planned which projects to tackle first. We had to time the deck around the weather, make sure we had a couple of dry days in a row. Rebuilding the fire pit would be better on a dry day so the mortar could set. Better not to have to dig the drain when the soil was mud, but not impossible. I could trim trees any time.
“If we can get all that done,” my dad said, “we’ll be all set.”
It’s nice to just idle for the first few days. Shake off the work life, get used to being back in your childhood home, adjust to the changes in your parents over the last year.
Through their sixties, seventies, even early eighties, the changes were slight year to year. Late eighties into the nineties, the effort of a long life starts to show a little. For the past few years, they’d started looking older when I first saw them waiting for us at the airport, but by the time we’d driven home, I didn’t notice any more. My mom would head straight for the house to unlock the door. My dad would grab one of the bags out of the back. “That’s heavy,” he’d say. “Let me get that.” He’d hold the door, let his family file in ahead of him.
Even if he was a little slower, he was still strong in the world.
That last summer, though, the shock of his frailty lingered. He’d changed in a way that was too much of a departure. He was a man falling through ice that couldn’t bear even that slight weight, and so far out that no hand or line would reach.
But we were there to work and to celebrate this birthday, not dwell on the inevitable.
93.
It’s a long haul. The Great Depression, Guadalcanal, the Bay Area during the Sixties, the digital age. How do you celebrate that journey through history? That constant presence in our lives? Pushing 59 years for me, longer for my sister.
Two and a half weeks. Just be. Nothing out of the ordinary. Breakfast and lunch around the kitchen table. Happy hour. Dinner in the dining room. Poker after we cleaned up the dishes.
Projects all day. One at a time, talk about how we wanted to approach it, haul out the tools, start arguing midway through. Thirty years in the Air Force, he was used to running a project, but my sister and I each had a solution in mind, too. Would he like it if just once it went his way without a fight, or would he think we were taking a dive? He wants to argue for his vision, let him argue, let him duke it out. Maybe he’s right. Maybe all this gravel needs to come out so we can find the end of the pipe, add another 20 feet so it empties over the bank.
He pulled up a lawn chair, started going at the gravel with his trench shovel. You kids don’t get to do all the work. I’ll find the end of the goddamn pipe.
He couldn’t make it from the house to the edge of the yard without a rest, but he could pull up a chair and go at it with a shovel a few strokes at a time.
“Relax,” I said. “Ninety-three, you can take a break, let somebody else hump it.”
But when work defines you, when you know yourself by the visible things you accomplish every day, how you keep every engine running, every faucet water tight, every door on its hinges, you don’t go gently into fatigue. Not when you’re out there with your kids.
Knowing it wasn’t going to get any better, that adding or dropping a medication wasn’t going to make him stronger, that it was only going to get worse didn’t bring on any acceptance or resignation, only frustration.
I wanted him to be able to settle into a state of appreciation, look back at the gift of a long life and feel thankful. Easy to want when it’s not the end of your life, and he didn’t seem to be having any of it. He was going to rail on like one of those guys who tells the executioner to kiss his ass even as the floor is falling away and the noose is about to snap his neck.
His life, his death, and since he wanted to dwell on the former, we could only go along like it was any other summer.
I had a mostly nice relationship with my dad.
When I was little, he adored me, like most parents adore their kids when they’re little. He’d carry me on his shoulders, bring home a new toy when he cashed his paycheck. Sprung for an electric train when I was two. That was a bid deal on an airman’s pay.
He let me hang around when he was working on cars. He’d patiently untangle the fifty feet of parachute rope he’d given me the day before. Anything I broke, he fixed.
It went south a little when I entered my teens, mostly around long hair and drugs. The military wanted to maintain order not only among the ranks but also among the families. There was a focus and an image to maintain. We were a loaded weapon that might have to get turned on Russia or China or who knows who at any moment, and how would it look if the men who were meant to annihilate you were raising a generation of dissidents?
When the kids caused trouble, the brass put heat on the fathers. In addition to the the general agitation of military life, your old man had his C.O. even farther up his ass, and then you were the beneficiary of a doubly strung-out guy. No fun for anyone.
When my dad retired, though, things changed. We moved to rural Pennsylvania where he and my mom grew up. The concrete of the flight line was replaced by miles of forest in every direction. He put on fatigues because they made great work clothes, not because he had to show up in uniform. He was his own C.O.
He could build his house. Take off the morning to get in nine holes with his friends, and still get back in time to put up a wall or frame a window.
How long my hair was didn’t matter.
We weren’t one of those families where fathers and sons were best friends, but we got along. He’d let me have a beer on the weekend. I caught him tapping his foot to Led Zeppelin III one morning. If I was out golfing with him, he’d hand me a cigar when he and his friends lit up.
We were on the same side of a lot of political arguments. He read "Fire in the Lake" when I brought it home from school, and he decided that Vietnam hadn’t been Washington’s most righteous effort. Neither of us thought the Republicans had much interest in doing anything good for the working class.
We rooted for the Steelers. And the Pirates and the Pens if they got anywhere near the post season.
We were happy to see each other on holidays, and when I was there in the summer for his birthday. We talked on the phone every weekend.
So, when this last visit came around, when we all knew but wouldn’t say that it was probably the last one, we didn’t have to spend time trying to make up for things we’d missed along the way, trying to warm over an icy history.
We could do what we’d always done. Tackle the projects around the house. Knock off for happy hour. Settle in on the back porch, listen to the birds usher out the afternoon. Dinner, and then poker.
Two and a half weeks of life as we knew it every time we got together.
March 26, 2014
South Pacific (not the musical)
A short excerpt from health happiness love longevity peace prosperity and safety
My dad made it sound like some kind of lark in the tropics. Despite the shelling and sniper fire, Japanese soldiers sneaking out of the jungle at night to toss grenades into the tents. Despite the canon and machine-gun fire from his own P-39s turning the Japanese into a blizzard of body parts on the beach.
“We took a Dutch freighter from Australia to Tongatabu. The captain was Dutch; Javanese crew. Twenty-six P-40s in crates. Fifty-five-gallon drums of high-octane fuel. We would’ve been one big fireball. All they had to eat was mutton. Hanging up on deck, collecting maggots. Scrape the maggots off, cut off a piece for dinner. I couldn’t eat it. I lived on bread for two weeks. When we got to Tongatabu, the old man had a pallet of Bulimba Red Top waiting for us. He had it under guard, though, until we assembled the planes. The moment we were finished… warm, but boy did it taste good. Then somebody figured out if you dripped the high-octane fuel on the bottles, it would evaporate so fast it cooled off the beer.”
On Tongatabu, the mechanics figured since they put the planes together, and kept them together, they were entitled to a little fun.
“The P-40s were heavy, and you had to get up a lot of speed to get the tail up before takeoff. We didn’t get them off the ground, but we had a little contest to see who could get the tail up. Well, one of the guys did, but then tipped it over and tore the nose off. The old man wasn’t too happy about that.”
Tongatabu to New Caledonia, then sometime in late October, 1942, onto a C-47 for Guadalcanal. Twenty-one years old, sent ahead to set up for the 68th Fighter Squadron.
“We stayed about ten feet above the water so the Japanese planes couldn’t see us. We landed, they threw our gear out, and the guys from the 67th climbed on board and took off.”
Twenty-one and setting up for what would be some of the worst fighting in the Pacific, some of the most gruesome moments in American history.
“They gave us Marine uniforms. Pants with no back pockets. We cut ‘em off and made shorts. Shorts and a pair of boots. And a 45, two extra clips. Mostly the Marines took care of any Japs that came into camp, but you had to be armed. And it was so hot. The first few nights, we rolled up the sides of the tents to let some air in. Some Jap snuck in, tossed a grenade into one of the tents. That happened a couple of times. We rolled the sides back down, and took turns standing guard. Didn’t happen after that. We had trenches right outside. The shelling would start and you’d have to be out of your bunk and into the trench before you had a chance to wake up.”
In a military family, war is never an abstract. You live around the armament, climb in and out of it on field trips. Everything your dad does every day is in preparation for it. Almost everyone has seen combat. But my dad never made it sinister. It was always a possibility, even a likelihood, but it was just something we were ready for, not something that kept us up at night or contaminated our lives.
He knew how awful it was, how it would never be beyond the periphery of our lives, so he made it an entertainment.
“One of the cooks used to make wine out of grape jelly. Or you could cut a hole in a coconut, pour in some sugar and plug it up for a week to make some hooch.”
“They used to shoot at us from the jungle. One day, we were taking sniper fire, so we got down behind the wheel of a P-39. This Marine comes strolling down the beach. He’s got a Browning Automatic, and ammo strapped all over him. All I could think was, Man, if they hit him, we’re all going up. ‘Jump out and draw some fire,’ he says, ‘so I can see where it’s coming from.’ We drew a few shots from the jungle and he let go with that Browning.”
It was all candid information about life in a war zone, but he talked about it the same way he talked about being able to ice skate on Dunkard Creek all the way from Davistown out to Poland Mines, where the creek empties into the Monongahela; or how he talked his way into every funeral in town so he’d have a chance to ride in a car. There was an affection for his experience, for learning to improvise and survive.
I wanted to give my own kid that sense that there’re catastrophic forces at work, things that can annihilate you in an instant, but you don’t have to live in fear of them. You have to be aware, be willing to learn and improvise, understand what’s going on and what your options are. You can’t prevail if you’re stupid about it, but you sure increase your odds if you pay attention.
My dad made it sound like some kind of lark in the tropics. Despite the shelling and sniper fire, Japanese soldiers sneaking out of the jungle at night to toss grenades into the tents. Despite the canon and machine-gun fire from his own P-39s turning the Japanese into a blizzard of body parts on the beach.
“We took a Dutch freighter from Australia to Tongatabu. The captain was Dutch; Javanese crew. Twenty-six P-40s in crates. Fifty-five-gallon drums of high-octane fuel. We would’ve been one big fireball. All they had to eat was mutton. Hanging up on deck, collecting maggots. Scrape the maggots off, cut off a piece for dinner. I couldn’t eat it. I lived on bread for two weeks. When we got to Tongatabu, the old man had a pallet of Bulimba Red Top waiting for us. He had it under guard, though, until we assembled the planes. The moment we were finished… warm, but boy did it taste good. Then somebody figured out if you dripped the high-octane fuel on the bottles, it would evaporate so fast it cooled off the beer.”
On Tongatabu, the mechanics figured since they put the planes together, and kept them together, they were entitled to a little fun.
“The P-40s were heavy, and you had to get up a lot of speed to get the tail up before takeoff. We didn’t get them off the ground, but we had a little contest to see who could get the tail up. Well, one of the guys did, but then tipped it over and tore the nose off. The old man wasn’t too happy about that.”
Tongatabu to New Caledonia, then sometime in late October, 1942, onto a C-47 for Guadalcanal. Twenty-one years old, sent ahead to set up for the 68th Fighter Squadron.
“We stayed about ten feet above the water so the Japanese planes couldn’t see us. We landed, they threw our gear out, and the guys from the 67th climbed on board and took off.”
Twenty-one and setting up for what would be some of the worst fighting in the Pacific, some of the most gruesome moments in American history.
“They gave us Marine uniforms. Pants with no back pockets. We cut ‘em off and made shorts. Shorts and a pair of boots. And a 45, two extra clips. Mostly the Marines took care of any Japs that came into camp, but you had to be armed. And it was so hot. The first few nights, we rolled up the sides of the tents to let some air in. Some Jap snuck in, tossed a grenade into one of the tents. That happened a couple of times. We rolled the sides back down, and took turns standing guard. Didn’t happen after that. We had trenches right outside. The shelling would start and you’d have to be out of your bunk and into the trench before you had a chance to wake up.”
In a military family, war is never an abstract. You live around the armament, climb in and out of it on field trips. Everything your dad does every day is in preparation for it. Almost everyone has seen combat. But my dad never made it sinister. It was always a possibility, even a likelihood, but it was just something we were ready for, not something that kept us up at night or contaminated our lives.
He knew how awful it was, how it would never be beyond the periphery of our lives, so he made it an entertainment.
“One of the cooks used to make wine out of grape jelly. Or you could cut a hole in a coconut, pour in some sugar and plug it up for a week to make some hooch.”
“They used to shoot at us from the jungle. One day, we were taking sniper fire, so we got down behind the wheel of a P-39. This Marine comes strolling down the beach. He’s got a Browning Automatic, and ammo strapped all over him. All I could think was, Man, if they hit him, we’re all going up. ‘Jump out and draw some fire,’ he says, ‘so I can see where it’s coming from.’ We drew a few shots from the jungle and he let go with that Browning.”
It was all candid information about life in a war zone, but he talked about it the same way he talked about being able to ice skate on Dunkard Creek all the way from Davistown out to Poland Mines, where the creek empties into the Monongahela; or how he talked his way into every funeral in town so he’d have a chance to ride in a car. There was an affection for his experience, for learning to improvise and survive.
I wanted to give my own kid that sense that there’re catastrophic forces at work, things that can annihilate you in an instant, but you don’t have to live in fear of them. You have to be aware, be willing to learn and improvise, understand what’s going on and what your options are. You can’t prevail if you’re stupid about it, but you sure increase your odds if you pay attention.
February 16, 2014
A warning sign at the edge of reality
A short excerpt from health happiness love longevity peace prosperity and safety
You indulge a couple years of Pretty Pretty Princess, and now she’s calling seven-card stud, deuces wild when it’s her deal.
And she’s as anxious to win as you are.
You don’t want her passing through your life without leaving a wake, unknown to you.
“What are you watching?” I said.
“Toddlers and Tiaras. Have you seen it?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“These little girls compete in beauty pageants. It’s so weird.”
“Why are you watching it?”
“I don’t know.”
“At least you understand that it’s weird.”
“Look at this mom.”
An overweight mother, spilling out of her sweat clothes, was gyrating in the audience, a massive cue card to keep her daughter’s performance on point.
“Do you wish Mommy and I had entered you in beauty pageants?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t want to get all made up like that and have a giant hairdo?”
“Dad.”
“Just checking. I’m supposed to facilitate your dreams while you’re a kid. I don’t want some dream going unfulfilled because I was negligent.”
“I just like watching. I don’t want to do it.”
“That’s comforting.”
Comforting, too, to see that we share a fascination with the bizarre, the sign posts for the outer limits of human behavior. And good to have a gyrating warning sign when you get too close.
You indulge a couple years of Pretty Pretty Princess, and now she’s calling seven-card stud, deuces wild when it’s her deal.
And she’s as anxious to win as you are.
You don’t want her passing through your life without leaving a wake, unknown to you.
“What are you watching?” I said.
“Toddlers and Tiaras. Have you seen it?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“These little girls compete in beauty pageants. It’s so weird.”
“Why are you watching it?”
“I don’t know.”
“At least you understand that it’s weird.”
“Look at this mom.”
An overweight mother, spilling out of her sweat clothes, was gyrating in the audience, a massive cue card to keep her daughter’s performance on point.
“Do you wish Mommy and I had entered you in beauty pageants?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t want to get all made up like that and have a giant hairdo?”
“Dad.”
“Just checking. I’m supposed to facilitate your dreams while you’re a kid. I don’t want some dream going unfulfilled because I was negligent.”
“I just like watching. I don’t want to do it.”
“That’s comforting.”
Comforting, too, to see that we share a fascination with the bizarre, the sign posts for the outer limits of human behavior. And good to have a gyrating warning sign when you get too close.
January 20, 2014
The bucolic primacy of the suburbs
A short excerpt from health happiness love longevity peace prosperity and safety
“Did you notice how quiet it was when we walked out this morning?” I say.
My daughter maintains her silence. Maybe better to ignore her until she’s fed.
I was impressed, though. With how much quieter it is here in San Jose than at my parents’ out in the middle of nowhere.
My parents’ property is at the midpoint in a long hill, and coal trucks run twenty-four hours a day, back and forth to the power plant. Empty trucks roar down the hill to get another load, the hollow metal banging against itself. Full trucks rev and downshift to get 120,000 pounds uphill as fast as possible. The diesel exhaust pours out and the noise fills the woods. The roads buckle and heave under the weight. But the lights stay on in that corner of the state.
October through January, hunting season is in full swing, and most guys who aren’t working are out in the woods with a gun trying to kill something. Sunup to sundown, the pop and crack of rifles echo back and forth.
You can walk back through the woods far enough that the trucks are a distant grinding, but then you realize you’re not covered in orange, and to the nearsighted your movement through the trees might be mistaken for game.
The trucks in San Jose stay mainly on the freeways. And gunfire is mostly east of the 101. Our neighborhood, nestled at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains, is serene except for the occasional motorcycle or teenager with a car stereo. The sound of commerce is mostly the drone of traffic to Apple and Google. We fire our power plants with natural gas. Softball and cricket are how men test themselves. The primacy of technology provides a more pastoral life here in the city.
“Did you notice how quiet it was when we walked out this morning?” I say.
My daughter maintains her silence. Maybe better to ignore her until she’s fed.
I was impressed, though. With how much quieter it is here in San Jose than at my parents’ out in the middle of nowhere.
My parents’ property is at the midpoint in a long hill, and coal trucks run twenty-four hours a day, back and forth to the power plant. Empty trucks roar down the hill to get another load, the hollow metal banging against itself. Full trucks rev and downshift to get 120,000 pounds uphill as fast as possible. The diesel exhaust pours out and the noise fills the woods. The roads buckle and heave under the weight. But the lights stay on in that corner of the state.
October through January, hunting season is in full swing, and most guys who aren’t working are out in the woods with a gun trying to kill something. Sunup to sundown, the pop and crack of rifles echo back and forth.
You can walk back through the woods far enough that the trucks are a distant grinding, but then you realize you’re not covered in orange, and to the nearsighted your movement through the trees might be mistaken for game.
The trucks in San Jose stay mainly on the freeways. And gunfire is mostly east of the 101. Our neighborhood, nestled at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains, is serene except for the occasional motorcycle or teenager with a car stereo. The sound of commerce is mostly the drone of traffic to Apple and Google. We fire our power plants with natural gas. Softball and cricket are how men test themselves. The primacy of technology provides a more pastoral life here in the city.
January 15, 2014
Driving (now and then)
From health happiness love longevity peace prosperity and safety
It’s two and a half miles to Whole Foods, but you can encounter any number of bad and potentially lethal drivers along the way. Texting moms in SUVs trying to make up for a late start. People who think there’s some grace period after the light turns red. Bounders who interpret all pavement as part of their lanes.
“Do you watch how people drive?” I say.
“Yeah.”
She’s focused on her iPod.
“This is a great opportunity. Pay attention now and you’ll be way ahead when you start driving.”
“Um hm.”
I try to start things early with her. From the first diaper change, getting that restless little body into a onesie. “Left arm,” I’d say, slipping the sleeve over. “Right arm.”
“This guy who just cut us off: yakking on his cell phone, no signal.”
“I know, Dad. Coma, broken back, you almost died.”
“Because someone wasn’t paying attention.”
Part of our abstract family lore, like my dad’s stories about Guadalcanal. Interesting, but meaningless until there’s some proximal experience. “Don’t touch that, it’s hot” was just a challenge until she saw what happened when her friend placed a hand flat on a burner. “Honey, this is why we tell you not to do some things.” It worked for a while: her friend’s visits to the hospital, the oozing burn, the bandages, her obvious discomfort and contrition. There was a temporary suspension of disbelief about our having her best interests at heart.
The onset of puberty, though, seemed to fill her with contempt (for us) and self confidence.
I didn’t want her to have to experience the destruction of an auto accident first hand, though, to understand the wisdom of becoming a good driver. Sitting in the backseat in what amounts to a leather sofa on wheels, bathed in surround sound, doesn’t suggest any sense of what can go wrong. It shouldn’t. A kid should feel safe with her parents.
In the era before seatbelts, my parents’ car was my playground. In our Olds 98, I could walk around in the back seat. I could stand back there, feet on the floor, arms folded across the top of the front seat, and watch the colors on the speedometer change the faster we went. Somewhere around 100 it turned red. Never when my mom was in the car, but whenever it was just my dad and I and he could find some unoccupied stretch of road.
It’s two and a half miles to Whole Foods, but you can encounter any number of bad and potentially lethal drivers along the way. Texting moms in SUVs trying to make up for a late start. People who think there’s some grace period after the light turns red. Bounders who interpret all pavement as part of their lanes.
“Do you watch how people drive?” I say.
“Yeah.”
She’s focused on her iPod.
“This is a great opportunity. Pay attention now and you’ll be way ahead when you start driving.”
“Um hm.”
I try to start things early with her. From the first diaper change, getting that restless little body into a onesie. “Left arm,” I’d say, slipping the sleeve over. “Right arm.”
“This guy who just cut us off: yakking on his cell phone, no signal.”
“I know, Dad. Coma, broken back, you almost died.”
“Because someone wasn’t paying attention.”
Part of our abstract family lore, like my dad’s stories about Guadalcanal. Interesting, but meaningless until there’s some proximal experience. “Don’t touch that, it’s hot” was just a challenge until she saw what happened when her friend placed a hand flat on a burner. “Honey, this is why we tell you not to do some things.” It worked for a while: her friend’s visits to the hospital, the oozing burn, the bandages, her obvious discomfort and contrition. There was a temporary suspension of disbelief about our having her best interests at heart.
The onset of puberty, though, seemed to fill her with contempt (for us) and self confidence.
I didn’t want her to have to experience the destruction of an auto accident first hand, though, to understand the wisdom of becoming a good driver. Sitting in the backseat in what amounts to a leather sofa on wheels, bathed in surround sound, doesn’t suggest any sense of what can go wrong. It shouldn’t. A kid should feel safe with her parents.
In the era before seatbelts, my parents’ car was my playground. In our Olds 98, I could walk around in the back seat. I could stand back there, feet on the floor, arms folded across the top of the front seat, and watch the colors on the speedometer change the faster we went. Somewhere around 100 it turned red. Never when my mom was in the car, but whenever it was just my dad and I and he could find some unoccupied stretch of road.
January 11, 2014
Why I love language as a medium
Writing takes the common currency of communication—language—and turns it into art. Visual art takes as its subject what we see (or hope to see, or imagine we see), but the media aren’t common—not everyone wields a brush and paint or a chisel and stone. Dance is closer—most of us move—but the vocabulary of dance is so abstracted from day-to-day movement that it has only the barest relationship to how most of us move through our lives. Most writing, though, is built from the same language we hear every day, the same vocabulary we use to order coffee, ask directions, talk our way out of a ticket. It’s the same language, the same medium, but with a little sleight of hand, it can be transformed into poems, novels, essays, and plays.
I love the esoterica of other arts, seeing someone do something that few others can: take a brush and paint and turn a blank canvas into the sensuous body of a woman or the shape of a muslin curtain around a gust of wind; defy gravity and the physics of the body, turn midair and hover on the music. Those things can intoxicate you like the mix of a quaalude and a black beauty, leave you reeling and breathless.
Writing can do the same thing (I caught this morning morning’s minion). It sidles up to you like any evening when the light starts to change, but this day the clouds ignite and the sun burns down the horizon, suddenly the sky you’ve know all your life isn’t just quietly turning dark, but is exposing itself as a vantage point on the turmoil of the universe, a way to see how planets hurtle around exploding stars, set fire to the cosmic dust around them, and let you stand quietly in the middle of it all.
I love the esoterica of other arts, seeing someone do something that few others can: take a brush and paint and turn a blank canvas into the sensuous body of a woman or the shape of a muslin curtain around a gust of wind; defy gravity and the physics of the body, turn midair and hover on the music. Those things can intoxicate you like the mix of a quaalude and a black beauty, leave you reeling and breathless.
Writing can do the same thing (I caught this morning morning’s minion). It sidles up to you like any evening when the light starts to change, but this day the clouds ignite and the sun burns down the horizon, suddenly the sky you’ve know all your life isn’t just quietly turning dark, but is exposing itself as a vantage point on the turmoil of the universe, a way to see how planets hurtle around exploding stars, set fire to the cosmic dust around them, and let you stand quietly in the middle of it all.
January 7, 2014
Winters in New England
Winters in New England go on forever. The cold settles so far inside you that no quilt or down vest or hissing radiator can shake it loose. You're cold, and the world is blurred by the layers of ice on the windows. A cloudless January taunts you with a blinding, frigid sun.
It starts around Thanksgiving and goes on until April. Sometimes it snows in May
Spring in New England is amazing. After the long assault of winter, the air becomes warm and fragrant. The sun coaxes a million buds from the trees and that skeletal gray landscape is suddenly littered with iridescent yellow-green, the coltish color of a world reborn. The skies thaw, turn plush and black with rain. Lilacs pour upon one another, imbue the air around them with the scent of a season indulging itself.
Everyone's horny in the spring. Bodies emerge from layers of down. People make eye contact instead of tucking in against the cold. You're at ease with the world, eager to join in that hum of living things. Every stray thought is buttressed by the promiscuous glee of nature. The sun lingers on your skin and whets your appetite for another body. The rich green smell of the air has the heady nose of her excitement, that sticky wet smell of her when she's naked beneath you.
Then one day it's summer. The gentle warmth of spring catches fire overnight and you head for the beach. Revere Beach at the edge of the city. The women are uncomplicated, and Kelly's serves up a lobster roll like nobody else. Or head north past Gloucester, out through Ipswich to Crane Beach. Over the dunes and into the breeze off the bay. Pull into Woodman's for fried clams and beer on the way home. Catch the ferry to Provincetown for the day. Park down the road from the ranger and walk through the night to the far side of Walden Pond, drop your clothes on the shore and glide through the dark water.
Sometime in September, you notice how the days are getting shorter, how the afternoons start to cool off a little earlier. Yellow starts to creep into the trees. The clear blue afternoons of Indian Summer interrupt the slide in temperature for a week or two, but then a week of cold rain strips the trees, and the descent into winter is on.
The first snow is a reprieve from the austerity. One afternoon a sky nearly low as the rooftops starts dropping a few flakes. That dead air of a cold season is suddenly decorated with the soft patter of falling snow. The whole space outside your window gathers momentum: as far as you can see down the streets and sidewalks the air is humming quietly with the falling geometry of snowflakes. Moisture crystallizes in the cold air, draws the cold into itself and spins downward, piles on the gardens and window sills. By evening, the hard lines of a city are lost under the rolling landscape of snow. Traffic crawls, and the noise of rush hour is muted. Time is undone by the weather and the city becomes a postcard from a century before.
You fall asleep to the pat of snowflakes against the windows, and wake up to the luminous transformation of every tree branch and rooftop, every hedge and porch rail. The sky has snowed out but hovers like gray batting overhead, mutes the daylight and lets you gaze wide eyed at a world tuned white.
Maybe your footsteps are the first ones down the walk, the first tracks in the new wilderness of your neighborhood. If you're out early, you can hear the squeak of each footprint, the groan and cracking of the trees under the weight of the storm.
And then you hear the grating of a snowplow against the pavement, the hiss of salt and cinders. Cars are buried to their windows in the wake of the plow, and when you dig yours out, you mark the spot with lawn chairs, or a big two-by-four across a couple garbage cans. By afternoon, those drifts along the curbs are black with ash and freezing in place.
Any day above 32 and the crosswalks are submerged in the melt. The snow starts to slush, then turns to ice overnight.
The next storm compounds the crud, and the romance of winter is hurried away on the jet stream. January is bitter and unforgiving, and you're left to dream of temperatures ascending into the teens.
Copyright © 2014 Kevin Tudish
All Rights Reserved
It starts around Thanksgiving and goes on until April. Sometimes it snows in May
Spring in New England is amazing. After the long assault of winter, the air becomes warm and fragrant. The sun coaxes a million buds from the trees and that skeletal gray landscape is suddenly littered with iridescent yellow-green, the coltish color of a world reborn. The skies thaw, turn plush and black with rain. Lilacs pour upon one another, imbue the air around them with the scent of a season indulging itself.
Everyone's horny in the spring. Bodies emerge from layers of down. People make eye contact instead of tucking in against the cold. You're at ease with the world, eager to join in that hum of living things. Every stray thought is buttressed by the promiscuous glee of nature. The sun lingers on your skin and whets your appetite for another body. The rich green smell of the air has the heady nose of her excitement, that sticky wet smell of her when she's naked beneath you.
Then one day it's summer. The gentle warmth of spring catches fire overnight and you head for the beach. Revere Beach at the edge of the city. The women are uncomplicated, and Kelly's serves up a lobster roll like nobody else. Or head north past Gloucester, out through Ipswich to Crane Beach. Over the dunes and into the breeze off the bay. Pull into Woodman's for fried clams and beer on the way home. Catch the ferry to Provincetown for the day. Park down the road from the ranger and walk through the night to the far side of Walden Pond, drop your clothes on the shore and glide through the dark water.
Sometime in September, you notice how the days are getting shorter, how the afternoons start to cool off a little earlier. Yellow starts to creep into the trees. The clear blue afternoons of Indian Summer interrupt the slide in temperature for a week or two, but then a week of cold rain strips the trees, and the descent into winter is on.
The first snow is a reprieve from the austerity. One afternoon a sky nearly low as the rooftops starts dropping a few flakes. That dead air of a cold season is suddenly decorated with the soft patter of falling snow. The whole space outside your window gathers momentum: as far as you can see down the streets and sidewalks the air is humming quietly with the falling geometry of snowflakes. Moisture crystallizes in the cold air, draws the cold into itself and spins downward, piles on the gardens and window sills. By evening, the hard lines of a city are lost under the rolling landscape of snow. Traffic crawls, and the noise of rush hour is muted. Time is undone by the weather and the city becomes a postcard from a century before.
You fall asleep to the pat of snowflakes against the windows, and wake up to the luminous transformation of every tree branch and rooftop, every hedge and porch rail. The sky has snowed out but hovers like gray batting overhead, mutes the daylight and lets you gaze wide eyed at a world tuned white.
Maybe your footsteps are the first ones down the walk, the first tracks in the new wilderness of your neighborhood. If you're out early, you can hear the squeak of each footprint, the groan and cracking of the trees under the weight of the storm.
And then you hear the grating of a snowplow against the pavement, the hiss of salt and cinders. Cars are buried to their windows in the wake of the plow, and when you dig yours out, you mark the spot with lawn chairs, or a big two-by-four across a couple garbage cans. By afternoon, those drifts along the curbs are black with ash and freezing in place.
Any day above 32 and the crosswalks are submerged in the melt. The snow starts to slush, then turns to ice overnight.
The next storm compounds the crud, and the romance of winter is hurried away on the jet stream. January is bitter and unforgiving, and you're left to dream of temperatures ascending into the teens.
Copyright © 2014 Kevin Tudish
All Rights Reserved
December 30, 2013
The downside of heredity
From health happiness love longevity peace prosperity and safety
The downside of heredity is that your kids not only inherit the good things from you—an interest in the arts, a tendency toward longevity—but also the stuff on which you’ve maxed out your therapy benefits—a reluctance to let people help you, absolute conviction in your interpretation of the world.
In mathematics, a double negative is a positive. With progeny, it just creates conflicts.
“Dad, I know how to do it.”
“I’m just trying to give you the benefit of my experience.”
“Let me do it my way.”
“What if there’s a better way? Wouldn’t you want to know that?”
“What’s wrong with my way? And you’re the one who’s always saying mistakes are how you learn.”
“But I want you to make different mistakes than I made. This is why they don’t have to reinvent the automobile every year, why we have shoulder belts and airbags now, why they don’t design the Chevy Vega every year—there are decades worth of mistakes they can look at so they don’t repeat the same ones over and over.”
“What’s wrong with how I’m doing it?”
“If you want nice even color over a big area, make sure you’ve got a long point on the pencil, and use the side of the lead, not the tip. When you use the tip, you get these hard marks and it looks all scratchy instead of soft and even.”
“Maybe I want it all scratchy. Maybe I don’t want it all soft and even.”
“Okay. I didn’t consider that. I was thinking about a traditional approach, and tried-and-true technique to achieve what I thought you were after, but I didn’t stop to consider that you may have had an entirely different vision, and there I was blindly trying to intrude.”
“Thank you.”
“I did have classes in colored-pencil technique.”
“Dad!”
“Okay, but there’s a vast store of knowledge here if you want to avail yourself.”
She stared at me, the green pencil motionless over the page, until I walked away.
The downside of heredity is that your kids not only inherit the good things from you—an interest in the arts, a tendency toward longevity—but also the stuff on which you’ve maxed out your therapy benefits—a reluctance to let people help you, absolute conviction in your interpretation of the world.
In mathematics, a double negative is a positive. With progeny, it just creates conflicts.
“Dad, I know how to do it.”
“I’m just trying to give you the benefit of my experience.”
“Let me do it my way.”
“What if there’s a better way? Wouldn’t you want to know that?”
“What’s wrong with my way? And you’re the one who’s always saying mistakes are how you learn.”
“But I want you to make different mistakes than I made. This is why they don’t have to reinvent the automobile every year, why we have shoulder belts and airbags now, why they don’t design the Chevy Vega every year—there are decades worth of mistakes they can look at so they don’t repeat the same ones over and over.”
“What’s wrong with how I’m doing it?”
“If you want nice even color over a big area, make sure you’ve got a long point on the pencil, and use the side of the lead, not the tip. When you use the tip, you get these hard marks and it looks all scratchy instead of soft and even.”
“Maybe I want it all scratchy. Maybe I don’t want it all soft and even.”
“Okay. I didn’t consider that. I was thinking about a traditional approach, and tried-and-true technique to achieve what I thought you were after, but I didn’t stop to consider that you may have had an entirely different vision, and there I was blindly trying to intrude.”
“Thank you.”
“I did have classes in colored-pencil technique.”
“Dad!”
“Okay, but there’s a vast store of knowledge here if you want to avail yourself.”
She stared at me, the green pencil motionless over the page, until I walked away.
December 27, 2013
Embracing your child's aesthetics
An excerpt from health happiness love longevity peace prosperity and safety
You want your kid to love what you love, if only as a starting point for appreciating things. And maybe it turns into something you share over a lifetime.
Celtics basketball, Italian food, cars, motorcycles, crime dramas.
But you have to start out where she is. The Berenstain Bears, Pretty Pretty Princess, the shows on Disney and Nick where kids scream from start to finish. You have to take the first step, like what she likes, inhabit her world.
Your aesthetic boundaries broaden to include the culture of her childhood. Or you create secondary boundaries to embrace those things. Yes, pretty funny how Zach and Cody always get over on Mr. Mosley. Hm, Josh seems to be channeling Jackie Gleason for a lot of his shtick. Not really interesting in this context, but still some nod to higher art.
You stay there with her, try to see the world she sees. The two of you settle in for an hour of kid shows. Does she get what’s going on? Does she understand which ones are weasels and which are the good guys? Hard, because the kids’ networks seem to glorify the weasels. Who writes this crap?
But she’s addicted, like you were when you were a kid. You had the advantage, though, of all TV being G rated, so you could watch the adult shows, too. Perry Mason, Sea Hunt, Divorce Court. It wasn’t all Three Stooges and Bugs Bunny. But even Moe and Larry assaulting one another seemed to have more thought behind it than this crap.
You loved what you loved when you were a kid because it resonated somehow. What if your dad had sat down with you and the two of you had a belly laugh over the Stooges? Or if the two of you tried to figure out who the killer was before Mason outted him in the courtroom? Maybe childhood would’ve been an entirely different experience.
So you sit with your daughter, get to know the characters, follow the story lines. And one day she says, “Dad, you know what happened on Zoey today?”
A couple years later, you’re watching The Mentalist together, looking for clues, trying to figure out who the killer is before Jane sets up a sting and hands him over to Lisbon.
You indulge a couple years of Pretty Pretty Princess, and now she’s calling seven-card stud, deuces wild when it’s her deal.
You want your kid to love what you love, if only as a starting point for appreciating things. And maybe it turns into something you share over a lifetime.
Celtics basketball, Italian food, cars, motorcycles, crime dramas.
But you have to start out where she is. The Berenstain Bears, Pretty Pretty Princess, the shows on Disney and Nick where kids scream from start to finish. You have to take the first step, like what she likes, inhabit her world.
Your aesthetic boundaries broaden to include the culture of her childhood. Or you create secondary boundaries to embrace those things. Yes, pretty funny how Zach and Cody always get over on Mr. Mosley. Hm, Josh seems to be channeling Jackie Gleason for a lot of his shtick. Not really interesting in this context, but still some nod to higher art.
You stay there with her, try to see the world she sees. The two of you settle in for an hour of kid shows. Does she get what’s going on? Does she understand which ones are weasels and which are the good guys? Hard, because the kids’ networks seem to glorify the weasels. Who writes this crap?
But she’s addicted, like you were when you were a kid. You had the advantage, though, of all TV being G rated, so you could watch the adult shows, too. Perry Mason, Sea Hunt, Divorce Court. It wasn’t all Three Stooges and Bugs Bunny. But even Moe and Larry assaulting one another seemed to have more thought behind it than this crap.
You loved what you loved when you were a kid because it resonated somehow. What if your dad had sat down with you and the two of you had a belly laugh over the Stooges? Or if the two of you tried to figure out who the killer was before Mason outted him in the courtroom? Maybe childhood would’ve been an entirely different experience.
So you sit with your daughter, get to know the characters, follow the story lines. And one day she says, “Dad, you know what happened on Zoey today?”
A couple years later, you’re watching The Mentalist together, looking for clues, trying to figure out who the killer is before Jane sets up a sting and hands him over to Lisbon.
You indulge a couple years of Pretty Pretty Princess, and now she’s calling seven-card stud, deuces wild when it’s her deal.
A mid-life perspective
New writing, and excerpts from older stuff.
- Kevin Tudish's profile
- 1 follower
