Michael Chabon: Manhood for Amateurs

We’ve had a run of crazy stuff going on around here lately, culminating (for the moment) with global economic collapse and my mother-in-law’s suffering an injury that looks as if it may permanently alter the contour and quality of her life, as well as the whole family’s — a pair of calamities that followed on a series of unpleasant surprises, diagnoses, minor crises, the dog undergoing a “spinal stroke,” professional setbacks, sorrows in the second grade, the loss or destruction of many objects of value, a brutal twenty-month-long presidential campaign, and all the usual, unusual alarums and disruptions that result when six people and a Bernese mountain dog, requiring various mental, emotional, and physical accommodations, therapies, and treatments, conduct an ongoing experiment in measuring mutual interference in one another’s reality distortion fields by sharing a house in Berkeley, California, a place that may, at any moment — which will, given the way things have been going lately — be destroyed by a massive once-a-millennium earthquake, or by a raging October wildfire, or by the fire that immediately follows the earthquake. And when I say lately , I’m using the term very loosely. This shit has been going on around here for years.

The thing is, we are six lucky people (and a dog), and all our needs and desires are amply met. We have set up the household to run smoothly when possible and to recover quickly when smooth is not an option. The children do their chores and their homework, the adults our work as spouses, parents, and writers, and if you took a sample of any random hour any day, if you employed some human calculus to arrest our progress, to ascertain our state at any given instant, you would find contentment with one another’s company, love and respect, a fruitful exchange of ideas, compulsive storytelling, joking around, even the odd outbreak of peace and quiet. But since this thing with my poor mother-in-law (broken femur, shattered wrist), I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out how long it has been since the days around here have been normal. Steady. Routine. Productive. Neither beset nor fraught nor teetering on some brink of disaster, free of emergency and crisis. I spend a lot of time thinking about, wishing for, working to arrange and to render inevitable, the return to our lives of Normal Time. And yet in trying to work my way back to the last golden era, I find myself casting my memory so far that the exercise begins to call into the question the very idea — an idea, by the way, that forms the basis of my understanding of our family life, here on our notional seam between the fault line and the burn zone — that there has ever been such a time. It turns out that the whole thing may be a delusion.

Like everyone — I hope — I suffer from a number of delusions, many of them apparently ineradicable. There are the geographical delusions. When I am in Pittsburgh or Paris, for example, I can never prevent myself from thinking of the point where the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio conjoin as facing eastward, or of the Left Bank as extending to the north of Notre-Dame. Most of my delusions of longest standing have to do (such is my legacy as a human being) with the acuity of my judgment, of my memory, and of my insight into the hearts of others. But the worst and most wondrous of the delusions that plague me tend to take the form, like this idea of Normal Time, of vague but unquestioned certainties about the nature and course of my life.

Here’s an example: I am forty-five years old. By even the most conservative estimate, it has been nearly a quarter of a century since I climbed eagerly aboard this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood and left the planet of my childhood forever in my starry wake. I know this. My grandparents, my boyhood bedroom furniture, a miniature schnauzer of admirable character named Fritz, the dazed and goofy splendor of bicentennial America: I will never see any of those or a million other things again. And yet always lurking somewhere in the back of my mind is the unshakable, even foundational knowledge — for which certainty is too conscious a term — that at some unspecified future date, by unspecified means, I will return to those people and to those locales. That I am going back.

No, that’s false. The delusion is not really that I believe or trust that I will be returning one day to the planet of childhood; it’s that the world I left behind so long ago is still there, somewhere, to be returned to; that it continues to exist, sideburns, Evel Knievel, Spiro T. Agnew, and all, like some alternate-time-line Krypton that never exploded, just on the other side of the phantom-zone barrier that any determined superman would know how to pierce. When I watch a film or a television show from the period and see again the workingmen wearing short-sleeved shirts with neckties, or the great wide slabs of Detroit automobiles, or the blue mailboxes with the red tops, or when I happen to hear from some random radio the DeFranco Family singing “Heartbeat (It’s a Love Beat),” I do not think merely, Oh, that’s right, I remember that or the more pathetic I wish I could go back there again . What I feel is something more like gratitude, a sense of relief, the way you feel when you wake from a dream in which your beloved has died, and the world is grief and winter, and then you find her warm and snoring in the bed beside you.

But even that delusion pales beside this mad hankering, this utopian or millenarian yearning for the coming days of Normal Time, of time to spare, of time in plenty. Time not just for work and reflection and unhurried lovemaking but for all kinds of fine and tiny things. Time to learn German. Time to print out the digital photos and reorganize the albums. Time to lavish on my younger children as I seem to have lavished it on their older siblings (though back then I thought there was never enough time for anything). Time for regular lunches with my mother. Time to get deep into a baseball season again, to linger over the box scores in the morning, to watch a meaningless game between teams I don’t care about, just out of fondness for the game. Time to write the short stories I used to fling like Frisbees out into the blue, the libretto for an opera of The Long Goodbye , an annotated version of my failed, never-completed novel Fountain City . Time simply to stretch out, to play with, to dandle and dilate and waste with my children and my wife.

Instead it’s just, as Arnold Toynbee or Henry Ford or Dr. McCoy used to say of history, one damn thing after another, and often several damn things at the same time, overlapping swaths of color on the digital calendar, conflicts and cancellations, two tasks half-done badly where one might have been pulled off in style. There is never, in the words of Irish poet Tom Paulin, any “long lulled pause / before history happens.” Only days after my wife and I guided our last baby into kindergarten, we began preparing in earnest to send our half-grown woman off to high school next fall; in the interval, the stock market crashed and my mother-in-law fell down a flight of stairs. There is no Normal Time, or rather, this is it, with all its accidents and discontinuities. With a breathtaking sequence, your last child leaves home, gets married, has children, and then you fall and break your leg, and the next thing you know, you’re approaching the point at which space curves back on itself or doesn’t. The end, unless the end, too, is a delusion. After that, either way, there is no time at all, and you’re never going back again.