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Show 12- That's one worry I no longer have. For one thing, he loves me and wants always to be right; and I love him and feel bound to tell him when he's wrong, which makes him squirm like a trussed-up calf. For another, I'm hardly a perfect parent, as one good instance will show. Though I can't make baking-powder biscuits the way my father could, I can unpeel those paper tubes which contain what in appearance but little else resembles the real thing, and I do so on Sunday mornings when my wife sleeps in, taking that necessary break from the rest of us. My son helps me and on this particular Sunday he's gone it alone, biscuits too, and when I come into the kitchen he's strutting around the place like he's really got it made and I'm obsolete. But I'm hung over and I take one look at all his preparations and snarl that for Christ's sake he's not even started the coffee yet. I catch him halfway to the table with the pan of biscuits; he panics, shoves the hot pan at me and rushes after the percolator, with the pot-holder. Stupidly I've taken the pan, and more stupidly I try to set it on the table, getting really burned. Then I drop it anyhow, biscuits skidding across the floor, and at that point I say some unrestrained things, things the ideal father never says in a tone the ideal father never uses, most of it to the effect that he is a goddamned stupid clumsy child who can't do anything as well as his little brother, let alone his six-year-old sister. You'd think he was the one who got burned, giving me a mute agonized roll of the eye like a branded calf. It is that look followed by a defiant sulk which tells me of the future. I grumble an apology and there I leave it because I've accepted my own fallibility at least to the point of hoping that mine will help him see and accept his, and I have some notion that feeling sorry for the young can be like feeling sorry for the wind, which the next minute changes and strengthens and blows you away. I also know that the young do well enough feeling sorry for themselves. I certainly did in those many years past. My father would set me to something like hoeing corn and I would drag woefully toward the field, a slave with eternal charity for myself and a spite-blackened heart for the tyrant who ruled my life. One afternoon when I calculated that the twenty-five acres of a certain corn field added up to over a million square feet of dirt, I felt myself in tune with the martyrs of the ages. In actuality it was pleasant dreaming 228 |
