I realize it’ll be hard to write this without sounding like an overbearingly judgmental asshole.  I may be setting myself another impossible task today.   For one thing, we live in a society whose values I consider insane, one where “winning” is the only goal, admitting fault and sincerely apologizing are often derided as weakness, the marks of a hesitant loser.   We argue in order to make ourselves feel that we are right and the other party is an asshole.  We omit the best points of our opponent’s arguments, reduce them to the stupidest things they’ve said, the most foolish or despicable choices they’ve ever made.   We win!   We win!   (Or we take our ball and go home.)

We win like the twitching chicken that used to play tic tac toe in the Chinatown Arcade on Mott Street.   For fifty cents you could play tic tac toe with a scrawny caged bird.   Most often, at the end of the match, the sign would flash “BIRD WINS!” and the victorious poultry hen would peck hungrily at the two or three grains of dried corn that dropped down a chute as its reward.   It was impossible to beat the bird, she went first.   A skillfully played game would result in a tie, which was as close to a win as the paying human could come.   I saw my proudest, toughest third grader humbled by the bird, in spite of my warnings that the game was rigged.   His classmates laughed at him and, for once, Roscoe did not retaliate, he hung his head.    My friends, this is the world we live in, playing as purported equals on a grotesquely tilted playing field.     

I’ve spent much of the last twenty-three months reimagining my troubled father’s life.  It has been a productive exercise for me, getting a much more nuanced understanding of my difficult father, probably because I am wired that way.   My father was called the Dreaded Unit, and his dreadedness was the result of an implacable will never to be defeated.   The phrasing is deliberate.  He fought doggedly, on many fronts, and I see now that his desire was not to “win”, he had little hope of that, but was simply a desperation not to “lose”.   

Consider how disabling this need would be to a person, to a friend, to a colleague or parent.   My father was very smart, knowledgeable, funny, capable of great empathy, full of traits that made him good company– his burden was living determined not to be defeated in any contest, no matter how small.   He didn’t play games, as a rule, since the prospect of losing was so painful to him, I guess.  His need to not lose restricted his view of life to a black and white funnel through which he saw every encounter.  It was a worldview he expressed great regret about as he was dying, trying to imagine how much richer his life would have been if he’d allowed himself to see all the nuance, gradation and color in the world.

Here is the divergent approaches to life point I allude to in the title.   Among our choices every day: you can accept what is in front of you, God having granted you the serenity to accept the things you cannot change and all that, and not fret over the many things you are powerless to influence; you can look at life through a straight-forward, narrow lens, pursuing happiness and your goals and interests as best you can; you can ponder and try to make sense of things that make little sense, hope to reach an understanding of vexing things that will lessen their sting, enable you to remain calm in the face of them.   This is a clumsy attempt, on my part, to set the stage for the hideous sounding thing I am poised to say.   I will dance towards my point.   

My father, at one point toward the end of their friendship, reserved special venom for his long-time friend Caroline, who was always running to do good deeds but, when my mother was hospitalized after her cancer surgery, and later confined to bed for several weeks, apparently didn’t find her way five blocks to visit her old friend.   I wasn’t there, I take his word for it.  I don’t recall quizzing my mother about it, although I think she confirmed it.  My mother didn’t appear overly hurt or angry about it, but my father was inconsolably peeved.   

“Caroline always runs a full flight pattern,” my father grumbled, stoking his anger at her and selling the righteousness of it to me.  “Since she’s always running, she can’t be responsible for the things that fall through the cracks, she’s too busy, you know.   She didn’t once, in all her frantic running around being everyone’s best friend, manage to make the long five block trek to visit her good friend who was laid up.   If I confronted her about it, she’d put her ears down and become immensely guilty, but why would I bother?   The point is, that type of neurotic person can always justify why it was impossible for them to do something that would have been easy enough, like drop off a bowl of soup, sit for ten minutes with a friend who can’t get out of the house, because they run a full flight pattern.”   

The full flight pattern is one mode of coping with a challenging, frantic, sometimes mad world, particularly since time is money.   You keep your schedule tight, your day productive, you run from one meeting to another, one task to another, stay busy, stay on point, feel good because you are ticking off important boxes many times a day.  At the end of the day you’re tired, fall into a deep sleep, wake up early the next day and do the same thing, try to get to the things you didn’t do the day before.   With a full flight pattern you can never actually do everything you need to do on a given day, but that only makes it more important to run faster and book more flights the next day.   

I get it.  I read a quote once that many people in our society have an absolute dread of leisure.  Leisure (unless an earned vacation) is equated with laziness, and laziness is the deadly sin of Sloth.  A good person does not slack, shirk, relax until the jobs are all done, a good person is tireless and productive.  I kid myself, I suppose, that I am not lazy but doing the hard work of trying to recover fully from a traumatic childhood to lead a better, more useful life, attempting to leave a road map for strangers to make use of.  I tap these keys in a quiet room, make my thoughts as clear as I can, and feel I am not just lazily indulging myself but doing something important.  I am lazy, even if I am also doing hard work most people would not even consider thinking about.   

Here’s the divergent approach to life bit:

I had the luck to spend many long visits with my father’s first cousin Eli, during the last few years of Eli’s long life.  Eli, seventeen years older than my father, had been a larger-than-life, opinionated fly on the wall during my father’s infancy and childhood.  We eventually became close enough friends, Eli and I, that he felt compelled to give me whatever difficult insight he could express to shed light on my vexing relationship with my old man.   Eli greatly loved my father.  He told me that the roots of our family were impossibly tangled and supremely difficult to understand or explain.  It was worse than that, most of our large family had been murdered by people empowered by those intent on making Germany Great Again and there was no way to even explore any but a couple of living roots.  There were warring factions in our small family– one tiny group didn’t have any contact with the others.  Hitler’s work was done.   

Brief meta-aside: 

When we hear a story we want a fairly straight line, a narrator who leads us on a fascinating tour without a hundred distracting detours.  Every detour has a dozen potential side detours and each side detour a suite of hidden rooms.  Soon the story is as clueless as the world itself and there is no way forward.  I get that.  I’d like to avoid footnotes today.  Here then, to tie a bow on this for you.   

When I returned from Eli’s, with new stories that shed light on my father’s torturous childhood and on my father’s often baffling stances as an adult (we pretty much agreed about politics, but he found cause to argue every time we spoke on the subject), my father hunched into a defensive crouch and hurled curses at fucking Eli, the closest thing to a father he’d ever had, a man he loved.   

He discredited Eli in a long torrent of reasons Eli was full of shit.  Eli had a violent temper, was deluded, falsely insisting he could have been a millionaire several times in the course of his egotistical life, if others hadn’t screwed him, Eli had a cockeyed view of life, was a bullshit historian, Eli had been a despicable tyrant to his kids, all of whom avoided him, one of whom hated him.   Yeah, ask Eli’s kids about fucking Eli, he suggested.   My father fought so hard to fend off whatever Eli might have told me that it never came up for discussion.  It was all intensely painful to my father, I realize now, and it was his choice neither to discuss it or to attempt to get, or give, any insight into any of it.  The thing was to fend it off, even if it meant savaging the character and the soul of the cousin he loved the most. 

My sister seemed to share the D.U.’s horror that I was probing into this painful past.  She was offended on his behalf when I asked my father, when the three of us were on line at a wedding buffet table, if he still considered verbal violence the same as physical violence, in terms of the psychological harm it does.  He told me he did.  I asked him, in light of that, if he’d consider my sister and me to have been victims of child abuse.  He told me he did.  My sister glared at me angrily, empty plate glistening in her hand. 

Our father’s life, she once told me insightfully, a few years after he died, had been shame-based.  He lived with deep shame and his existence was devoted to warding off any sign of shame.  Shame is a motherfucker, no question about it.  Among violent inmates in prison, a psychiatrist who spent many years speaking to them came to understand, virtually all of them had done violence out of an unbearable sense of humiliation.   “All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem,” wrote James Gilligan, the man who’d spent years working with violent inmates. 

The point is, with our divergent approaches, some find comfort in moving forward, at the greatest possible speed.   The demons that may dog them in rare unscripted moments can usually be outrun.  Others find more comfort in this careful chewing, turning the thing over and looking at it from different angles, with different light sources.  I should not wonder that my sister has not responded once to the last six or seven slices of this manuscript I’ve sent her over the past year.   I imagine that even the most merciful, least revealing of these pieces fills her with dread of what the others might contain.   Everyone has their own style for minimizing pain. 

As for mine, there is incalculable value, to me, in trying to see as much of the vexing, endlessly fascinating picture as I can, even as it delays me in rushing toward the goal line to do my victory dance. 

Even as it sets me up as an easily mocked self-righteous asshole who has never learned how to make a living and who sits alone, feeling smart, as he edits his thoughts for clarity, that they might be read by half a dozen people once in a while.