Pocket Dispatch from the School Yard
Photo by Papaioannou Kostas on Unsplash
On the school yard, at drop-off and pick-up, I meet more like-minded adults at once than anywhere else. The last time I met so many people around my age and at my same stage of life, I was a freshman in college.
I am an extrovert, and I crave social interaction at this scale. Especially after two years of pandemic.
But this mass networking mixer is different from most. The parents at school don’t enjoy the anonymity that marks similar occasions and affords a person the opportunity of reinventing oneself. Normally, entering a new context and meeting a lot of new people at once allows us to roll all the hard lessons and heartbreak of our life, combined with our bitter compromises and character aspirations into the silhouette of a new, better self.
Instead, at the school yard, our banal daily struggle is laid bare. We benefit from instant camaraderie among other parents of children the same age, but at the price of any opportunity to reinvent ourselves. The context of school drop-off on a gray morning, where we shiver in the damp air, sober and under-caffeinated, shows us publicly struggling to cajole our children into clothing and shoes on time for school. Struggling to grasp our careers while milking every waking minute for productivity, or spending it caring for others, always weighing the costs of working and often concluding we pay a premium for the privilege.
How can we be expected to talk about the best new albums, or our own art, when someone has forgotten a backpack, a lunch, a pair of gloves? Now someone is crying. Is that one of mine? No. Wait, where are my kids? Shit. It’s time to line up.
I’m not ungrateful to have so much company who can relate to my most taxing moments of the day. We form a supportive community, we commiserate, we make friends alongside our kids.
But this is the kind of kinship I crave elsewhere, at a different hour. I want to meet people at this rate and form bonds this deep with musicians at shows, in bars and clubs, artists at galleries, writers and poets in bookstores. I want to relate to artists as artists and en masse.
Photo by Sai De Silva on Unsplash
Take, for example, a recent evening at Cafe Mustache. A friend interviews bands in front of a live audience there every month for her podcast on mental health in the music industry. I’ve wanted to go for years but only made it for the first time this week. I scanned the audience and saw young and queer creatives everywhere. I doubt I can relate to any of them over much in the realm of traditional life topics. But we all struggle to balance those lives with making things and putting them out into the world. I’m confident we could talk for a long time about wondering if we’re good enough to carry on bothering sometimes, or whether there’s still any point to making anything when we live on such a noisy internet.
There are the people I want to find. I just have to keep burning the candle at both ends, and melting it at a few spots in the middle, to meet them where they are.
Pocket Dispatch from Downtown Cincinnati
Leisure for parents can be defined as simply as spending time away from structured time. For a significant wedding anniversary, or even a visit without special occasions, children stay with grandparents and the generation in the middle goes out to remind themselves what it’s like to do nothing in particular on purpose.
On this latest occasion, we booked a night in a hotel in Cincinnati, a city of biographical significance to my in-laws and to my wife in her infancy, but otherwise foreign to me. We explored on foot through a hillside neighborhood called Mount Adams that overlooks the Ohio River and evokes San Francisco via New England. Skinny rowhouses with bold pastel accents reach three or four floors but look just large enough for a family of four, like trippy Easter baskets crowded on a clearance shelf.
After drinking coffee and meandering for an hour or so, we drove downtown, shopped garages for reasonable overnight parking, and walked through an attached complex of office, retail, and another hotel before reaching the street and rounding a couple corners to our own.
The air was damp and unseasonably warm for late December. The ground was wet and gritty from melting snow and ice mixed with dirt from the construction happening everywhere. Cincinnati is an American downtown whose blight rubs shoulders with renewal everywhere. Modern public transit and high concept art spaces wind through blocks of vacant storefronts and the occasional deserted department store. But everywhere there are people turning its wheels, even between two winter holidays.
After check in, we walked up a flight of stairs to our room, a large corner suite with low ceilings, blue-white CFL lighting, and locks on the window shades to keep you from getting too much sunlight. It was bizarre, but large, and most importantly, easy to get to from the entrance without a lot of social interaction at the front desk or on a late night elevator ride.
We changed for an evening out and left as quickly as we could to sit quietly and contemplate cocktails at the first bar, the clock never far from our minds. Precious boredom is not to be wasted.
Pocket Dispatch from the Alley
Throughout the western world on Christmas morning small mountains of trash accumulate as presents are opened, and it is the solemn duty of parents—a father, traditionally, if one is available—to haul it to the bin outside.
At 10:00 AM on this particular Christmas, it was still 10º F from an historic winter storm that had swept across the country. But by now the snow had stopped and the sun had finally returned and, in two jackets, good mittens and thick boots, it wasn’t so bad being outside in the sun and solitude.
As I carried the last load to the alley behind our apartment, I recognized a neighbor walking back from the gas station and smoking a cigarette. He’s an older man, maybe in his early 70’s, with adult children, though I think he lives with only his dog. In the five years I’ve lived here, we’ve had one exchange that was similar to a conversation, plus a few pleasantries. I believe he works as a vocal coach for a living. I’ve always found his quaint smoking charming, and I revel in the irony of someone who teaches people to use their vocal chords treating his own so harshly.
His building is a block north of mine, also on a corner, and features enormous planters shaped like human faces cut off just below the eyes, with large plants sprouting from where foreheads would be.
The timing of my task brought me to the apron of the alley just as he crossed it on the sidewalk.
“Good morning!” I said, surprised by my own cheery tone. The narrow sidewalk in front of my building forced us into an awkward configuration where I had to walk directly behind him, trailing him by just a step or two. A beat passed before he answered me.
“Good morning,” he said, with equally surprising emphasis. It didn’t occur to me then that he may have been mocking me, but the little I know about him is that he is warmer, gentler, and more outgoing than you’d expect from his gruff appearance.
More pleasantries followed, then some comments about the weather, before I reached my gate and we had to part ways. I would have loved to have talked long enough to reach a topic of any substance, but I was happy enough with the interaction we had. The feeling continued to permeate as I climbed the fire escape steps to my landing.
The sun was low and direct over the building across the street, and I noticed in that moment that I had never heard my own street so quiet before. I bent over the railing and turned by head both ways. There were no cars for a block in either direction, and I could barely hear traffic in the distance.
Joy continued to bubble up to a buzzy fizz in my mind: It’s Christmas Day, my neighborhood is sunny and quiet, and even though most of my neighbors are strangers, I enjoy talking with them when I can. The banal aspects of my daily life were emulsifying with the comforts of my charmed existence. I carried this feeling with me for half an hour while I swept snow off the rest of the stairwell and put down de-icer for no reason.
Pocket Dispatch From the Kitchen Floor
My dad groans when he bends down to the kitchen floor with his dust pan to sweep up piles of crumbs he has gathered with the broom. I watch him do this several times each day during our visits. It’s his way of trying to always be useful, which I once derided as a symptom of declining value and influence but now understand to be a selfless expression of humble and generous love.
I watch him groan, his old joints cracking and popping, and the image imprints on my concept of old age.
Then, at home, I too sweep my kitchen floor again and again, both as an expression of love, and as an exasperating symptom of parenthood. I unconsciously hold my breath as I crouch, and as my skeleton folds, density forces the air from my lungs. My right knee makes its usual cracking sound, and as I finally reach the floor, I groan.