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But What Will Your Parents Think?

Illustration by Mark Wang

Morgan Jerkins | Longreads | May 2018 | 11 minutes (2,609 words)

 

This past February, during the book tour for my essay collection, This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female and Feminist in (White) America, one of the recurring questions I received most frequently from readers was about how I pushed past the fear to write about the most intimate aspects of my life? I assumed the crowd expected to hear about some grandiose regimen I followed — half an hour of meditation followed by an hour-long chat with a therapist, combined with some amount of whiskey drinking, or chain-smoking. Nevertheless, I told them the truth: I never did fully push past the fear when I wrote about my internalized anti-blackness, my surgically-modified labia, or my indulgence in pornography. Fear was ever-present as I worked on my book. I found it was best to acknowledge it, but not let its presence stun me into paralysis.

Fear is the little sister my mother never gave birth to. She appears and reappears in the furthest corner of the room in which I write and inches closer and closer as I approach the heart of a confession. I’ve discovered throughout the years that the best approach to meddlesome siblings is to acknowledge that they’re there, because if you don’t, they will wreak havoc and derail whatever it is you set out to do. This essay is the longer answer to that question.

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The Dying Days of the New West

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Tori Telfer | Longreads | May 2018 | 15 minutes (3,912 words)

The American West brings out a hunger in people. I’ve felt it myself — an urge to disconnect from society, buy a horse, live next to a giant saguaro. My husband and I have talked for hours about moving to the town of Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, where we were invited to live by an elderly gay couple we met beside a Tucson, Arizona pool. They told us that houses were cheap and everyone was friends and they’d be our uncles; we took their business card home and spent nights looking at houses on Zillow, cooing over cacti. The destiny was almost made manifest, then real life intruded. Guess where we’re moving instead? New York City.

The urbane, European-inflected East Coast has looked at the West with a strange blend of envy and hope for most of United States history. While the United States was built partially on the idea that the West was our manifest destiny, an East/West rivalry has also been baked into our identity from the beginning; even the famous “Go west, young man!” dictum contained within it some eastward scorn. That cry came from an 1865 New York Times editorial, in which Horace Greeley, the newspaper’s editor, exclaimed that “Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.”

In 1836, the writer Francis Grund speculated that westward expansion would only stop when some “physical barrier must finally obstruct its progress”; by the late 1800s, the ocean proved to be no such barrier, as America’s westward colonization encroached on the islands of the Pacific, reaching as far as the Philippines; in 2018, there is so little West left to discover that when we want to dream about the idea of the “frontier,” we look to Mars. Today’s West is a place of deep irony: lands that look wide-open to the naked eye but are actually choked by bureaucratic red tape. In fact, “the West” is more of a mirage than a reality, these days. But the hunger is still there. Read more…

The Roaring Girls of Queer London

Moll Cutpurse, 1611. (Getty)

Peter Ackroyd | Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day | Abrams Press | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,408 words)

The story of same-sex love among women was bequeathed another chapter with the rediscovery of the clitoris by anatomists of the mid sixteenth century. It had been known to the Greeks but then disappeared from view. It could not have come as a surprise to women themselves that some organ or other was capable of arousal, but finally it had been named. A medical compendium of 1615, Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia, announced that the clitoris “comes of an obscene word signifying contrectation [touching or fingering] but properly it is called the woman’s yard [penis]. It is a small production in the upper, forward . . . and middle fatty part of the share [genitals] in the top greater cleft where the Nymphs [labia] do meet and is answerable to the member of the man.” The member of the man need have nothing to do with it, however, and the reintroduction of the clitoris heralded the rise in public awareness of the tribade, the fricatrix, the rubster. These were the women who knew how to manipulate “the seat of women’s delight” with a hand, a dildo or a massively enlarged clitoris.

Helkiah Crooke himself remarked that “sometimes it grows to such a length that it hangs without the cleft like a man’s member, especially when it is fretted with the touch of the clothes, and so struts and grows to a rigidity as does the yard of a man. And this part it is which those wicked women do abuse called Tribades (often mentioned by many authors, and in some states worthily punished) to their mutual and unnatural lusts.” It is sometimes suggested that lesbianism was, before the twentieth century, an unmentioned and invisible act; in fact it has a historical identity arguably as long as that of love between men. Wherever there are bodies, there are lovers. It is found, for example, at the end of the twelfth century, in a vision of Edmund, a monk of Eynsham Abbey. He was taken to purgatory and led to that site where the souls of those guilty of same-sex love were consigned for their own particular suffering. To his astonishment, among them were a great number of women. He was surprised because he had not suspected women to be capable of such a deed. But there they were, suspended in woe and pain. Read more…

O, Small-bany! Part 1: Spring

Illustration by Senne Trip

Elisa Albert | Longreads | May 2018 | 17 minutes (4,229 words)

They poisoned the water in the lake again. It’s actually more of an enormous pond. They poison it a few times a year. I’m not listening to music, for a change. My battery’s at 10%, anyway, and I want to eavesdrop. Washington Park’s full of people. Just like the Seurat painting, minus the class status and pointillism.

There’s a black man fishing with his tiny son crouching beside him. The man’s biceps are impressively built and inked. The boy says, “Tell me when you see a fish.” There’s a middle-aged white couple with a contented aura, walking a mid-sized grey mutt. There’s a very petite brown woman in tight blue athleisure berating a man who is pushing a baby in a stroller. Not a status stroller. Athleisure woman is on this man about something. He hadn’t been on time to pick her up. He is playing it cool (“Well, I came, didn’t I?”) but she is unrelenting (“Not when you said you would! Not til after you…”) and then they are out of earshot. There’s a young white mother from the nearby cult (I’m sorry: Intentional Community), holding a toddler’s hand. The Intentional Community manufactures the kind of old-fashioned wooden toys for which my bored mom friends and I go wild. They live and work in a huge brick mansion near the park. There’s free literature about their intentionality to be had in a little kiosk at the entrance to their driveway. Books about making peace with death and living in accordance with the laws of nature. When I was a new mother, I used to loiter around that kiosk. Should I join? They wear homemade clothing and raise children communally. I yearn deeply for the latter but I have a quasi-sexual weakness for fashion, and ultimately I’m not much of a joiner. The young mother in her homemade ankle-length skirt and bonnet is talking to a black man on a bench by the boathouse. He rests one arm on yet another stroller (not status), in which sits a toddler with a delightful head of tight, ombre ringlets. The man reaches out his hand to me.

“Hello!” he says, like we know each other; I don’t think we know each other.

“How are you?” he wonders.

I smile, nod: fine, fine, thank you, and you? I do this intuitive sort of bow, and continue on my way. The cult woman slightly glares at me from under her bonnet. Her glare (real? imagined?) trips some anxiety about running into people I’m not fond of, by which I mean people not fond of me. There’s this one woman in particular, your standard bad-vibes-in-small-town situation, and my nervous system goes insane every goddamn time.

***

Officially Albany is a city of a hundred thousand, but it feels like a very small town. Which can make it hard to take a walk sometimes. Small-bany, some call it. Shmalbany, I prefer. Albanality, a friend of mine says, but the syllables don’t work out. There’s not that fantastically freeing anonymity of your big exciting status places. State capitals are often kind of weird places. It’s a small goddamn town. So much chit-chat always waiting to be had. Just around that bend? Just over this hill? Just past that tree? I arrange my face in a blank mask and bland smile, practicing. I catch myself doing so, catch my thoughts circling this dumb anxiety; shake it off. You are safe, I tell myself. My whole goddamn sympathetic nervous system gets caught up in small town anxiety. It’s hard trying to be friends with everyone all the time. It’s okay if not everybody likes you. I used to kind of seek out people with bad energy, try to make them like me, but that only makes them like you less. I learn slowly.

You are safe, I tell myself, and it works. I am safe. Relatively speaking. More often now I seek to avoid or minimize encounters with people who don’t like me, people who bring out the ugly. This is progress, according to the meditation teacher.

Isn’t this the kind of inner drama we all share? Useless, banal. Best kept to oneself, only then how are we to take comfort in the knowledge that we’re all the same!?

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Five Early Lessons in Parenting

(RichVintage/Getty)

Steven Church | I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part| May 2018 | 16 minutes (4,362 words)

1. How to Be a Superhero

My son came home one day from his progressive and politically correct Providence, Rhode Island, pre-school and informed me that he was not allowed to talk about superheroes.

“Why not?” I asked, flabbergasted. This couldn’t be true, I thought. There must be some kind of mistake.

“Because, Daddy,” he said patiently, “Superheroes solve their problems by fighting and not with their words.”

“Yeah, but…” I tried to respond but couldn’t. I was stumped, struck dumb and silent.

He was right. But for Chrissakes, they’re superheroes. They’re the fabric of childhood. I could barely imagine my own without superheroes. Their stories helped me believe I might actually survive the nuclear 1980’s. A superhero’s problems were not the kind you could just talk about, like parking tickets, traffic jams, or sub-prime mortgages. A superhero had to deal with evil super-villains, rogue mutants, and extra-terrestrial war-mongerers. A superhero had the kind of problems that you might only be able to solve by fighting.

One of my favorites, the Incredible Hulk, couldn’t even use words. He just grunted, bellowed like an animal, and smashed things. But his anger, his insecurity and pain, was his superpower. His existential angst made him special and allowed him to help others with his unique physical gifts. What better role model for a child of the 80’s?

Still I had to admit that my son (or his teachers) had a point. It was just difficult for me to deal with the idea that he could have a superhero-free childhood or, worse yet, that he would think the model of a superhero was this guy on TV named “Sportacus.”

If you haven’t seen an episode of “LazyTown,” you’re missing one of the most bizarre television experiences. A lot of children’s shows are strange, but this one is a truly odd mixture of public service and entertainment. Sportacus, the star of the show, teams up with a spunky little pink-haired girl named Stephanie and a gang of children wearing rubber puppet suits. An adult male outfitted in a tight blue spandex flight-suit and aviator goggles, Sportacus speaks with a faux-French accent and wears a handlebar mustache waxed to sharp points. He champions lifestyle choices like physical activity and eating fruit. Pretty much any problem in LazyTown can be solved with exercise and an apple.

But what good would Sportacus be in the face of real danger? How would he handle a supervillain like Magneto or Lex Luthor or Doctor Octopus? What dreams of survival would he inspire? His beloved fruit would be poisoned with radiation. Exercise is difficult when you have a second head growing out of your shoulder and sort of pointless if you’ve mutated into a Ninja reptile. LazyTown is yet another reminder that my son lives in a world that is both eerily familiar to and strikingly different from my own childhood reality.

Some days I feel terribly ill-equipped to teach him anything.

After watching the animated film The Incredibles, we had another superhero discussion, about Mr. Incredible’s reasons for lifting train cars like dumbbells.

“Why did he do that, Daddy?”

I told him that Mr. Incredible was working out, getting stronger to fight evil, sort of like when Daddy lifts the dumbbells at home.

Then I asked, “Do you think Daddy could lift a train car?”

“Yeah,” he said, and with no prompting at all from me, “’Cause you’re a superhero.”

I just let that one settle in for a while. I let it linger in the rarified air of our minivan.

Then I repeated the story over and over again, telling friends and even strangers. But the more I told it, the more self-conscious I became, the more aware of my own shortcomings as a potential superhero. I have bad knees and bad ankles. My shoulder is wrecked. I’m lactose intolerant. I’m generally afraid of confrontation, and I trust strangers and freaks way too easily. I have more curiosity than common sense. And I look terrible in tights.

I’m glad I didn’t ruin the moment, but part of me thinks I should have politely informed him that I am no caped crusader. I’m a regular guy who makes bad choices sometimes, and he probably shouldn’t depend on my superpowers to protect him from harm. But then again I figured he’d have the rest of his life to learn this lesson. So I decided to let him believe for a while that I could lift some trains or maybe even—following his example—use my words instead of my fists to save the world and protect my family; because perhaps all children need these sorts of fictions to feel safe.

2. How to Play Dead

When I was 5 or 6, a huge scar creased my face, and I towered over many of the other kids. Not only had I pulled a pocketknife on my best friend and booted a kickball through a school window, but I regularly led a gaggle of boys around the playground in a militaristic march, while chanting, “Crush. Kill. Destroy.”

I had some issues. But I overcame them. Mostly.

So I wasn’t really worried when my son’s preschool teacher pulled me aside one day to tell me that he’d been playing a game with the other kids where they put a baby in the oven.

When she said this she said the last part almost in a whisper, a baby in the oven. She folded her hands in front of her as if in prayer and stretched her lips out thin like a knife. This was the same teacher I had to talk with about my son’s repeated reference to his colon and his drawings of the digestive system. She was one of those preschool teachers who just seemed completely incapable of understanding little boys; but she did get me thinking a bit about where he might have learned such things.

Then I remembered that I’d recently read Hansel and Gretel to him, and let me tell you, that is a seriously dark and twisted story. But I thought about it more and realized there are actually quite a few children’s stories about children being shoved into ovens or cooked in pots or cakes. One of our favorites, Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, features a naked boy baked in a cake by portly bakers with Hitler mustaches. And then I thought about a game my son liked to play with his mother. It was called “The Baby Bagoo” game, and it was a regular part of our everyday life in Rhode Island. I figured it was the kind of imagination play that good parents are supposed to do with their precocious children.

This is how it went: My son would climb up on the bed and curl into a fetal position. He’d coo and babble like a baby.

Then my wife would walk into the room and say, “Yes, I’ve come to the orphanage today because I would like to adopt a baby,” and then, “Oh, look at all these babies. I want a little girl baby. Where are the little girl babies?”

My son would cry and babble urgently.

“Oh, look at this cute baby!” my wife would say. “Oh, but he’s a boy baby.”

“Ga. Ga. Ga. Goo. Goo,” my son would say.

“What’s your name, baby?”

“Baaagoooo.”

“Bagoo?”

My son nodded his head.

“Oh, you’re such a sweet baby Bagoo. I want to take you home,” she said as she wrapped him up and carried him to another part of the room or the bed.

“Now, I’m going to leave you here by the river/ocean/lake/bathtub, OK, Baby Bagoo? Don’t go anywhere.”

She’d turn around and Baby Bagoo would promptly roll into the water and go under.

“Oh my god!” she’d yell, “My baby! My baby!” as she pulled him out of the water, limp, eyes closed. “Bagoo? Bagoo? Speak to me. Oh no, my sweet Baby Bagoo is dead.”

On cue, my son’s eyes would flutter and open wide. His arms would begin to flail and he’d rise up, cooing and babbling and saying “Bagoo” over and over again. He would be born again, newly risen, and then we’d go about our normal routines.

Of course, I recognized that my son was working through a lot of fears—layers of fear—with this game. It somehow touched on fear of abandonment, death and water, issues of gender, and the promise of reincarnation. But it was an admittedly strange game, one that other people might not understand. It even freaked me out sometimes.

I never told my son’s teachers about Baby Bagoo. I thought they might worry about us. But what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them—unless of course they were hurt by the un-tethered imaginations of children. Our cultural avoidance of death and our ignorance of its meaning begins at an early age. One of the things that makes little kids so morbid, so creative, and so fun to be around is that they are not afraid of death. Or rather they have not yet been taught to face death through fear rather than through curiosity. For my son, curiosity generates questions—and it is these that I’m constantly encouraging him to pursue. “Never stop asking questions,” I say in my more parental moments. Fear only leads us into the darkness of easy answers, to avoidance and ignorance…and this is usually about the time he stops listening to me.

“Daddy?” my son asked me once at a restaurant.

“Yes?”

“Why do we not like George Bush?”

Silence. The sound of guilty pride. Or the sound of me trying to come up with a reason that would make sense to a 4-year-old, or trying to just pare down the list I keep in my head.

“Is it because he doesn’t share his toys?”

For my son, this was the ultimate knock against one’s character.

“Kind of,” I said.

I was trying to speak his language.

“And because he’s fighting a war in the desert and killing people for oil?’

“Uh huh,” I said.

I swear I didn’t prompt him to say this.

“Daddy?” he said, pausing to blow bubbles in his soda. “Why is he doing that?”

“Good question,” I said.

I didn’t have an answer either. I also didn’t have an answer for why people want to bomb trains or planes or malls or sporting events, or why so many stories are about the loss of innocence. I just knew that we had to keep telling them. And I worried sometimes that fear would rise up and fill the void of answers, that he would stop saving babies from ovens and rivers because someone told him he’d got the story wrong.

3. How to Get Rich

In 2006, shortly after we moved to Fresno, California, I bought my son a frog-shaped sandbox and two hundred pounds of sand from Home Depot. As we were driving home with it in the back, he asked me if I thought a robber would come and steal his sandbox.

I laughed. “I don’t think a robber would be interested your sandbox.”

“Why not?” he asked.

This made me stop and think. I didn’t want to admit that his sandbox wasn’t valuable because you couldn’t sell it for crack, crank,  or a bottle; that it wasn’t valuable because you couldn’t hock a sandbox or recycle it for cash. Lately, the robbers in Fresno had been targeting street-lights in the nice neighborhoods, pilfering yards and yards of copper wire and selling them to recycling plants. More recently there had been a rash of thefts of catalytic converters from cars parked in driveways and public parking lots. Something about the stuff inside that could be sold on the black market.

My son’s sandbox really only had sentimental value. It was not worth money on the black market. It couldn’t be resold or recycled easily. But what if there was a black market that trafficked in sentimental value, an underworld where my grandfather’s typewriter is worth more than my laptop, or where a child’s sandbox is worth more to a meth-head than the copper wiring in the street-lights?

If there were such a market for sentimental value, we’d be rich.

With a few exceptions, most of what we owned was valuable purely for sentimental reasons. We liked our neighborhood, but it was not affluent. There were five vacant, essentially abandoned houses on our block, four of them at our end of the street. Though just one house away from an elementary school, we were also in some gang’s territory. I didn’t know which one. The only real evidence I could see were graffiti tags on our trash cans. Our neighborhood was not high-crime—mainly because there wasn’t much to steal. My son asked us once if we were ever going to be rich, and we gave him our standard line about being teachers and writers and how we were rich in “the things that matter.”

I didn’t want to say his sandbox wasn’t valuable; but I also didn’t want him to be afraid of robbers or bogeymen or the people who picked through our recycling bin, looking for bottles and cans. We’d had a few scares recently.

Once when my son and my wife were out walking the dog, they spotted the black-and-white police helicopter—a ubiquitous presence in our neighborhood at night—hovering just a block away. A voice boomed over the chop, ordering someone to “come out now with your hands up”; they hightailed it home.

Another morning, during our regular walk down to the bakery, my son and I passed a corner roped off with police tape. We found out later that a man had fired shots at a police officer, led the police on a high-speed chase into someone’s yard, crashed his car, and was shot more than 80 times by pursuing officers. I wanted to alleviate my son’s fears about a robber stealing his sandbox, but I couldn’t pretend that crime wasn’t real, and I didn’t want to tell him his new toy was worthless.

Instead, I told him this: “You know what? Your sandbox would probably just be too heavy for robbers to lift. There’s two hundred pounds of sand in there,” I said. “That weighs almost as much as Daddy.”

This was mostly true. I weigh quite a bit more than his sandbox. But it seemed to help. He sat there for a while, perhaps imagining the robbers trying to lift his frog full of sand or his Dad. I often tried to deflect and distract with humor, and I hoped he was imagining me curled up in the frog.

Then he said, “Daddy, I think robbers are golden.”

“Golden?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think robbers are golden and have three golden horns.”

“Golden horns, huh?”

“And they’re made of metal,” he said finally.

I imagined tri-tipped monsters of golden metal clanking and clunking through the side gate—a team of them, four or more with shovels, emptying his frog-shaped sandbox into five-gallon buckets they would trade for cash at the asphalt plant; one of them hefting the plastic frog onto his shoulder and dragging the lid across the concrete. I rose from slumber to the sounds of scraping metal and labored breathing. I dialed the police and watched the golden robbers squeeze into a blue van, ducking so their three horns didn’t hit the door frame. If I wanted to, I could see them circling the neighborhood, pilfering tricycles, soccer balls, and boxes of sidewalk chalk for their weekly haul to the other black market, the warehouse full of battered toys, worn-out t-shirts, and sagging recliners; shelves piled high with emotional attachments, a warehouse full of the most obscurely valuable things you could imagine. I hoped that if I tried hard enough, I could pretend that all robbers were golden sentimentalists, burdened by their metal skin and their guilt over stealing a child’s sandbox; but I knew that if they were, we’d be the target.

4. How to Be a Hummingbird

Providence, Rhode Island, 2005. The rain had been coming down in sheets for nine days straight, seeping through the walls in our basement, leaving puddles beneath the oil tank. We needed to get out of the house, and we drove fast, just barely tethered to the asphalt, headed for a movie in Massachusetts, a movie about a giant Were-Rabbit ravaging the village gardens. The red and green and yellow lights flowered in the moist fog. They twinkled and blinked intermittently with green. It was too much sometimes, too heavy. This place. This moment in time. The white noise of water-spray competed with the radio voices. My son blithely chattered away in his car-seat, conversing with his invisible friend, Tum-Tum the elephant.

Meanwhile, my wife and I talked openly about recent bomb threats to subways in New York City. We said whatever we wanted—things like, “bound to happen,” and “nothing we can do,” or “just gets worse and worse.” We admitted that this was our reality now. But a claymation movie about a giant Were-Rabbit awaited us, and we were happy about this. We were out of the house and not thinking, just driving and living. We were good Americans. It was early October 2005, and we’d already decided not to go to New York before the bomb threats were issued—mainly because we couldn’t afford the trip. But when we’d heard the reports of threats to subways and public transit, we were both honestly relieved to be anywhere but the city.

“Can you imagine that?” my wife asked, responding to another NPR update on the car radio.

“Getting bombed?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Or living with that threat every day like they do in so many other places.”

“No, no I can’t imagine.”

I suddenly realized that our son had gone silent; and the moment began to stretch and expand, distended with silence. He was listening to everything we’d said. He was paying attention to all the words and possibilities, looking for the suggestion of violence or fear or conflict because he had Doppler radar for such drama.

“Who’s getting bombed, Daddy?” he asked.

“Nobody, honey,” my wife said, “Daddy and Mommy were just talking . . .”

“It’s a figure of speech,” I chimed in, but I was kidding myself.

He understood. He listened to NPR every morning and heard me ranting at the voices. I didn’t want him to be afraid of war and bombs. I didn’t want him to feel targeted. I wanted him to stay young and innocent and fearless as long as possible. But I also didn’t want to shelter him from the truth or from real danger. I had to prepare him to live in a world where people bombed trains or sporting events or buildings. But how was I supposed to do this? I was in the midst of a full-on parental pause, a seizure of language, and I didn’t know what to say.

Then my wife swooped in with this diversion: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

He paused for a moment, letting the possibilities balloon.

“Hmmmm, “ he said, “Maybe a hummingbird.”

***

April 15, 2013, Fresno, California: My son the hummingbird, born almost nine months after 9/11, will soon turn eleven. He’s just a few years older than Martin Richard, the youngest victim of the Boston Marathon bombing. My son is a bright boy who takes painting lessons, plays the trombone, and dreams of being a filmmaker. He still likes birds but he doesn’t want to be one when he grows up. His mother now has a house a few blocks away from me. My son and his sister live with me half-time, splitting the weeks. Things have changed a lot in eight years. But my son tells me that he still likes listening to NPR in the car because he learns cool things. These days he’s been listening to the news of the Boston Marathon bombing and the subsequent manhunt with what appears to be a kind of careful detachment, a calculated pre-adolescent disinterest. But he knows all the details, knows the bombs were packed in pressure cookers, knows they blew apart peoples’ legs, and he knows the bombs killed a young boy.

My 5-year-old daughter seems mostly oblivious to the news; she makes up songs in the back seat as we drive from school to home and listen to the radio reports. She doesn’t ask the same questions that my son asked years before, but I know from experience that she’s listening. I know she’s absorbing it all. And I suppose that’s what I’m reminded of every time something like this happens. Such things—these bombings, this terror—have the capacity to shrink your reality down to what really matters, making the world seem tiny and impenetrable, while simultaneously expanding things exponentially until your world seems immense and fragile and impossible to maintain.

I was still a new parent when my son first became aware of bombs, when he first started to ask “why” questions about war and violence. I can’t say that I know a lot more now than I did then. But perhaps he knew something then that we can all try to remember.

He may have been small, but he thought big and wild and in ways I aspired to match, ways that I still hope to preserve in my daughter and myself. If I could, I’d take them both out in the yard the next time a bomb or some other violence tears through the fabric of our days. Just the three of us, our faces pressed up close to the flowers, and I’d tell them to remember the nectar, remember their wings, their imaginations, and the way they can beat against the pull of violence. It’s a simple matter of defying gravity. I want to free them and protect them with this one fact: a hummingbird can beat its wings seventy times in one second. A simple blur of breath and flesh, and they could be gone.

5. After School Lessons

The other father schooled me during first-grade pick-up time.

“Saw some local fauna in the backyard,” he said and kind of rolled up on the balls of his feet.  He had the tanned muscled calves of a postal worker or a soldier, someone who’d walked a lot of ground.

“An opossum,” he said, nodding his head. “The wife wanted me to kill it, but I said, ‘No, let it be.’”

I told him and another mom about the raccoon I’d seen crossing busy VanNess Avenue and the Coopers hawk that took down a grackle on our street corner.

I’d called my kids to the window. “Hurry,” I said, “check this out,” and we watched the hawk stomp on the smaller bird, plunging its talons into the heart, puncturing the tiny chambers until the grackle bled out and stopped shuddering and flapping. It took a long time for that little bird to die. And then we watched the hawk carry it away.

When I finished my story, the mom gasped, “Oh, dear. I don’t know . . . ,” She put her hand up to her throat, covering the scar where she’d had her thyroid removed. “I can’t even . . .”

“It’s not violent,” I said. “It’s natural. The order of things.”

***

In one hand, the other father clutched a snack baggie stuffed with fruit. Strawberries and grapes, maybe a raspberry or two. A gift for his daughter. A treat for the walk home. He brought her something special every day.

“I freaked my sister out,” he said, gesturing toward me with the fruit baggie.

The children had already begun streaming out the doors, single-file, gravitating toward parents or guardians, gathering on the grass to wait.

“I poured salt on a block of dry ice,” he said over the chaotic noise of children.

“Watch,” he’d said to his sister. “Wait for it.”

And the deer did come. Two of them. Put their tongues to the salt. Stuck there, they pulled against the dry ice. Anchored to the lick, they strained to break free. And I wanted to tell him to stop.

“And my sister was like, ‘What are you going to do to them?”

I could see the deer pulling on their tongues, practically yanking them from their skulls. Panicked, they must have strained against their own anchor.

The other father handed his daughter the fruit baggie, “Here you go, honey,” he said and then he finished his lesson:

“And I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not doing nothing,’ and that’s when I slit their throats.”

He smiled, nodding his head again. There was a breeze that day. Unusual for Fresno. But it could not carry his words away. They dropped into the space between us.

The children flocked to their parents, gathering around us like metal fragments to a magnet. Drawn to our shelter. And I wanted to hold them all, to drag them all away from the image of the deer pulling against their tongues, their throats spilling blood.

The other father’s daughter looked up at him, his words hanging there, waiting to attach and take root. My own daughter, oblivious to the gore, grabbed my hand and begged, “Can I?” pointing at the playground; so I let her go, watching her legs kick up, bouncing toward the cedar chips.

His daughter watched, too, staring at the other girls at play. She wrapped her arms tight around the baggie and squeezed until it burst. Pop! Like a shot. And the fruit spilled down around her feet. Grapes rolled like they were trying to escape. The strawberries just sat there, wet and seedy on their flat-cut sides. And the girl looked up at him.

“Why did you squeeze it?” the other father asked, squatting to the concrete, sitting back on the heels of his Army boots.

“I don’t know,” the girl said, talking into her chest and twisting her toe on the ground.

“Consequences, baby,” he said. “Consequences,” as he picked up the fruit, and tossed it into the grass for the squirrels.

* * *

From I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part: On Work, Fear and Fatherhood by Steven Church. © 2018 by Steven Church. Reprinted with permission of Outpost19.

Of Breakdowns and Breakthroughs

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Jenny Aurthur | Longreads | May 2018 | 28 minutes (6,886 words)

 

On the Monday before Thanksgiving in 2004, my father went missing. I was at the Santa Monica apartment I’d been subletting to a friend while working for three months in New York City, getting ready for bed when my phone rang. It was my mother, wondering if I’d spoken to him. I had not seen or heard from my dad since he’d picked me up from the JetBlue terminal at the Long Beach Airport three days earlier. I was 30 and had returned home to L.A. from New York to spend the holiday with my family.

I’d never missed Turkey Day with my folks. Nothing about my childhood had been typical. I was raised by atheist, socialist activists who called me “Jenny Marx,” never just Jenny, after Karl Marx’s wife. They skipped religious holidays, but observed Thanksgiving, well, religiously.

Fort Green, 1974

Thanksgiving had solidified into a legendary event among our friends, and most years we had a full house. It wasn’t unusual for so many people to show up that some had to sit cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the living room wall. The food was so good, and the company even better, that no one minded not having a seat at the table. My father cooked for an army, and there was never a shortage of food. Our parties were lively and conversations were raucous, everyone talking over one another. We were an opinionated bunch. Current events were passionately discussed, and my parents were walking encyclopedias. Topics ranged from global warming to recent movies to the upcoming local and presidential elections. The musical selections were just as diverse as the crowd, from Dixieland jazz to gospel to classical to Dylan.

Everyone got quiet when the food was ready. We passed around two kinds of homemade stuffing — one for vegetarians and one with Italian sausage. Huge bowls of steaming sweet potatoes, buttery green beans, thick slices of light and dark meat my father carved from the 20-pound bird, fresh cranberry sauce with tart orange zest, loaves of freshly baked sourdough bread, green salad, and a ceramic pitcher of hot gravy barely fit on our dining room table.

***

I started having friends come over for the holiday when I was in junior high. My mother, Elinor, and my father, Jonathan, were popular with my classmates and considered the “cool parents.” During the years I was in school and well into my twenties, our house was the place to be. After Thanksgiving dinners with their own families, droves of my old pals showed up to our house. Everyone loved being around my parents. When I was in high school, one of my best friends, Leisa, was having trouble at home, and my mom took her in. Another friend, Ania, also lived with us a couple of years later.

“I wish Elinor and Jonathan were my parents,” my girlfriends would often say.

This year, though, Thanksgiving would be different. I’d been living in New York since the late summer. Preoccupied with my work, I put the holidays on the back burner. My parents and I had decided to keep it mellow for once. Eight years after my younger brother’s suicide, for the first time, it would just be the three of us.

***

Historically the kitchen was my father’s territory, and when I was growing up, my mother, my brother, Charley, and I were careful to stay out of his way. He loved being the king of his castle, but he pretended not to enjoy it. “I’ve been burning my ass over a hot stove for the last three days for you ingrates,” he complained, acting annoyed, wiping sweat from his forehead. He loved this yearly charade, and we went along with it, rolling our eyes and laughing.

The aromas coming from the forbidden room made our mouths water and stomachs growl impatiently. Under the pretense of being helpful, my mom, my brother, and I would wander into the kitchen and lurk over the stove and poke around. We were shooed out immediately. “Everyone out of the kitchen,” my dad said with mock exasperation. The table had been set for hours; that was my job. I pulled out and polished the prized Tiffany family silver that had belonged to my grandparents, for its once-a-year appearance. My mother was responsible for buying lilies and dahlias. She also designed beautiful Japanese-style flower arrangements that she’d made in her ikebana class. Charley was in charge of dusting and vacuuming. We liked a late dinner and by the time we ate at 8:00, we were famished.

“Now can I sit down?” my dad asked, drawing out the “now,” acting like an indentured servant finally getting a break. Collapsing into his chair with a dramatic sigh, he surveyed the bounty of food, enough for Henry VIII’s court. “Well,” he said, “if we don’t have enough we can always order pizza.”
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Poe, A Love Story

Dr. Irene Pepperberg with Alex, an African Gray Parrot (Anacleto Rapping/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Accompanied by intimate portraits of birds and their owners by photographer Miisha Nash, for Topic, bird enthusiast Karen Abbott recalls her beloved, quirky, slightly devious African gray parrot, Poe, who passed away of heart failure at the very young parrot age of 18.

I have never wanted children, but I’ve always wanted birds—a realization that dawned in December 1997 in the unlikeliest of places: Las Vegas’s MGM Grand casino, where my husband and I were celebrating our first wedding anniversary. One afternoon, in between rounds of $5 blackjack, I wandered to a lobby and discovered a long perch supporting a dozen parrots—scarlet and hyacinth macaws, eclectuses and lilac-crowned Amazons among them—riotous bursts of red and blue and yellow and green, a preening, chirping string of jewels. I’d owned birds since childhood, a succession of mild, low-maintenance parakeets, beginning with a pastel beauty named Jake who rested on the wire rim of my 1980s orthodontic headgear. But parrots were different beasts, exotic and unpredictable. And some breeds have a life span of 60 to 80 years. A parrot, I thought, could outlive us both.

I had promised my husband I would look but not buy. We were 24 years old, had just bought our first house, and owed a combined $100,000 in student loans. The bird cost $1,500, not counting cage, formula, and toys, and required a nonrefundable $500 deposit. I lifted her close to my face. Struggling, she managed to pry one obsidian eye fully open and met my gaze. I named her Poe, after the writer.

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No Journalist Should Have to Know How to Survive in Prison

Courtesy the author

Alice Driver | Longreads | May 2018 | 11 minutes (2,616 words)

 

“Welcome to the Democratic Dictatorship of Myanmar,” said a slight, young woman on the street in Yangon, Myanmar. She was referencing the number of journalists in the country who had been threatened or jailed by the theoretically democratic government. Yangon is tangled roots and the shade of 100-year-old trees; it is the sound of hundreds of wings flapping as young men feed pigeons, their feathers flashing golden in the early-morning light; it is journalists imprisoned for speaking truth to power.

***

When I arrived in Yangon in January 2018, Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo had been in prison for a little over a month. Much had changed since I had lived in the city in 2006, volunteering at an international high school with my best friend Tien, both of us living at a government-run hotel and eating Hershey’s chocolate bars out of her suitcase.

In 2015, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy, swept elections, and both citizens and the international community had high hopes that she would support press freedom. At a press conference a few days before the election, Suu Kyi referenced a “communications revolution” as millions of citizens watched her via Facebook, which at that time also promised to be a beacon for democracy. Facebook arrived in Myanmar in 2011, and since that time has racked up at least 14 million users, 93% of whom accessed it on their mobile phones.

In a country where burgeoning press freedom and the appearance of Facebook coincided, media literacy has proved a challenge. During my time there in 2006, I helped students apply to colleges in the United States and Australia — basically anywhere outside of Myanmar, which at that time had a dysfunctional university system. One of the students I worked with ended up attending Berea College, my alma mater in Kentucky, which I had encouraged her to apply to since they provide funding to low-income students. Yangon University, which was once Myanmar’s most famous university, reopened for the first time in two decades in 2013. Between the lack of independent media and the lack of access to higher education during the years before the democratic opening, it didn’t surprise me that media literacy was low.

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It’s Like This and Like That and Like What?

Death Row / Interscope Records, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | May 2018 | 11 minutes (2,912 words)

 

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

In the entirety of 1990, exactly one hip-hop single made it to the top spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. This was “Ice Ice Baby,” and the LP whence its dope melodies came, To the Extreme, also ruled the Billboard album charts for the final eight weeks of that year — knocking off the previous number one, another rap record, Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em. (It turned out that if U were Vanilla Ice, U could, in fact, touch this.) As the nineties rush-rushed in, aching to break out of the previous decade’s noxious forcefield of Aqua Net, one thing was clear: American Top 40 radio was ready for hip hop — so long as it was squeaky clean, or, failing that, performed by a white guy with the wackest eyebrows in history.

By the end of the decade, the landscape had shifted almost beyond recognition. Synth-pop was the stuff of nostalgia nights; rock was emitting the first gurgle of its death rattle (which sounded like this); and what had heretofore been called “hardcore” hip hop was so ubiquitous in “mainstream” (read: white) culture that its ubiquity became a bit in Mike Judge’s 1999 cult classic Office Space.

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Searching for a Future Beyond Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg
Jose Luis Magana / AP Photo, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

 Jacob Silverman | Longreads | May 2018 | 9 minutes (2,206 words)

 

 

For the better part of two decades, an important set of assumptions has underwritten our use of the internet. In exchange for being monitored — to what degree, many people still have no idea — we would receive free digital services. We would give up our privacy, but our data and our rights, unarticulated though they might be, would be respected. This is the simple bargain that drove the development of the social web and rewarded its pioneers — Facebook, Google, and the many apps and services they’ve swallowed up — with global user bases and multi-billion-dollar fortunes. Read more…