February 14, 2010

 

Valentines

Fantastic Valentines crowd, music, and food last night. It was the sort of music that makes me float-away, silly-stupid-happy, and Mary was the chief cook last night, so it was fun to work together. It's not like we have to light an Olympic torch on cue in front of a stadium full of people and a world-wide audience, but there's a lot to putting these events together and Mary, Jon, and Angela make it look easy. Compliments all around.

When I was about nineteen, Mom sent me on an errand to drop off some bread, I think, at the apartment of a young church couple. Let's call them the Deacons. I think Paul Deacon was about twenty-six years old, and his wife had four children under five years old, including a set of infant twins. The apartment had thick, dense white rugs, pale cream walls, and next to no decoration. The whole house was a nursery, and Paul Deacon had a baby on his hip when he answered the door. The two twins were on the floor behind him, and somewhere, down the hallway was the smell of baby diapers, and the screaming of another child.

"Hello, young Mr. Riley," Paul said. "Care to come in?"
"I'm just dropping off the bread," I said. "I actually need to get back."

That was not quite true. The idea of trying to have a conversation in a room that was too warm, with someone I didn't know, over the wail of a screaming child and that oppressive diaper and sour milk smell just spurred me on through the pleasantries and right back into my car.

"I'm outta here," I thought, rolling down the window, turning on the radio, and singing, "..runnin' down the road, tryin' to loosen my load, ...such a fine sight to see..."

I'm not sure if it was that song, of course, but it could have been almost any song on the radio, or any TV show, or any magazine ad, or any of the mass-produced cultural messages of our era, all with that single shameless theme of hyper-self-indulgence. There were then, and there are now, very few mythic legends devoted to family life, devoted to that difficult, thankless task young couples face when they bring children into the world. I can remember Loggins & Messina singing "Danny's Song" or Bobby Goldsboro's "Watchin' Scotty Grow," but, really, most of the Rock 'N Roll era has been all about the glory of the love-hunt, or the bittersweet taste of lost romance, but never really about the triumph of having a family, much less, say, the old world legends of the extended clan. A young Scottsman years ago would hear songs of his ancestors and their conquests, as a family, as a fighting band of brothers and uncles. Now he's more likely to hear a driving electric bass and a tribute the one night stand.

Myths, in the good sense, in the sense of "legend" and "heroism," are terribly important. They help you endure the tedium of hard work. In one sense, they help a young mother remember that it's not just a day of laundry ahead of her, it's a day of training up great statesman and warriors and poets. A good legend tells a father, he's not just clocking in at the plant, he's building a kingdom. He's hunting game for the feast back at the shire. Those are hard legends to write, to make credible, especially when you think that God did most of the work in writing the legend of a beautiful woman. It's easy to mythologize love, and it's lazy too. It's much more difficult mythologizing the tedium and the trials of parenting a family.

I was once there at the "Paul Deacon" stage, and I can remember getting my comeuppance when we took one year old Mallory to a party full of college kids. One of them didn't even bother covering up his distaste for parenting. He actually said something like, "yuck, children, reproduction, gross." I felt like smacking him, but I was already on the way to feeling sorry for him, too, since how could anyone know, in our generation, pre-parenthood, what an incredible blessing it really is? The story-tellers had stopped telling the "Father Knows Best" story and they had moved on to the perpetual dating world of "Friends" and "Seinfeld" and "Cheers" and "Frasier."

That's all a big, sad lie. When poor Frasier Crane was still trying to find the perfect match for his every neurotic impulse, I was listening to my son, Samuel, assemble his clarinet downstairs, all by himself, without prodding. When poor George Costanza was finding humor in never finding the girl, I was listening to a whole roomful of the most engaging conversationalists I've ever met-- my kids.

More of the Farm Journal --February 12, 2010