Familyhood Read online

  “DAD!!!!” MY BOYS WHINE in that special way they have. (Who exactly invented that, by the way—the Petulant Child Eye Roll? Any idea? Because I’d like to talk to them and, at the very least, make sure they’re not working on anything new. Like an Abrasively Dismissive Ear Tug. Or a Huffy Irritable Mouth Pucker with Optional Sucking Noise. The kids seem to be doing fine with just the Eye Roll.)

  I can, admittedly, be a little overreaching in orchestrating these photo ops.

  “Hey,” I cheerily suggest. “Why don’t we all just get up and go into the living room where the light is better?”

  “No! Forget it,” come the cries of resistance.

  “Okay,” I counter. “Why don’t we just open up the curtains and maybe stand near the—”

  “Daaaaad!”

  At this point my wife will generally suggest—as gently as she can—that the moment has perhaps sailed away, and it might be best to cut our losses and move on. I try to salvage at least one shot—albeit not in the optimum setting.

  “Okay, just stand right there—this will only take a second. And I promise you guys: one day you’ll be glad you have this.”

  “No we won’t!” the boys say in unison. (It’s nice to see how they can work together when they want to.) I take the picture.

  “Finally!” the boys say. They’re relieved. Now they can get back to having fun. Almost.

  “Wait, wait,” I call after them. “I want to get it on video too.”

  “Aww, Dad! Why? You just took pictures.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Can’t you just scroll through the pictures really fast so it looks like a movie?”

  “First of all,” I feel obliged to mention, “that’s very funny. And second of all, no. They didn’t come out that great. You were moving. Now, go stand next to Grandma and do . . . something video-worthy. Hug her. Smile. Wave.”

  “Do we have to?”

  “Yes.”

  So with literally no joy or love in their heart, they drag their feet over to the couch and sit next to Grandma, and proceed to be entirely still.

  “Do something,” I tell them.

  “Like what?” they ask.

  “I don’t care. Just say something.”

  “What should we say?”

  “Whatever you want. Maybe you could talk about what you think your life will be like living on your own starting tomorrow.”

  The subtlety lands. They grudgingly mug and goof around and say funny things for the camera.

  “There you go,” I say, happy to have this production finally up and running. I check the camera viewer.

  “Oh, nuts,” I blurt out.

  “What?”

  “The memory card is full. Let me just—”

  “Daaaad!!!”

  “Hold on. Hold on—I just have to clear some of this old stuff from the chip. Just keeping doing what you’re doing—having fun, enjoying the moment.”

  “We’re not enjoying anything!” they clarify.

  “It’s okay, let them go,” Grandma graciously suggests. “We’ll do it another time.”

  “No, no—I’m almost ready, here—oops—that’s the wrong button.”

  “Daaddd!”

  Truth be told, I am not particularly skilled or competent with technological things in the first place. Add to that the pressure of single-handedly trying to orchestrate a moment that everyone else present is actively resisting, and my performance suffers. I consistently do every wrong thing that can be done. I shoot with batteries that are near empty, memory cards that are near full, I leave the lens cap on, I’m recording when I think I’m not, or I’m not recording when I think I am. Way more often than you’d think possible, I unwittingly have some button pressed that makes everything look like I’m either shooting from the center of a fire or, conversely, like I’m looking through night vision goggles in a bleak desert storm and the only image discernible is a dimly lit three-inch circle in the middle of the screen—usually of some indeterminate stomach.

  And while it’s possible I’m imagining this, it seems to me that the moments most frequently lost to human error are exactly the ones you’d most want to have. The ones least likely to ever repeat. Those are the ones I’ve almost never gotten. On the other hand, looking out a plane window and shooting into the sun—that I’ve never missed. If that’s something you enjoy seeing, by the way, you’ve got to come over. I have hours on end of nothing but airport runways barely visible behind blinding sun flares.

  There may be a perfectly valid explanation for this, though. Some larger law of the universe may in fact be at play. I believe it’s entirely possible that the Higher Powers don’t actually want you to record for posterity the most magical of moments. By not having the image tangibly in hand, they’ve decided, you’re forced instead to remember more clearly, investing yourself more deeply in that golden moment. This way the memory can only grow in recollected detail and mythological import, whereas the actual earthly footage would have likely only disappointed. (Even if this is not the case—which might be the case—I’m going to choose to believe it anyway. It sure beats accepting that I am as untalented in this arena as I appear, and that I’m doomed to a life of pained apologies and disappointed loved ones.)

  I just want to have a nice keepsake that we can treasure later on. Is that too much to ask?

  The irony is that my boys love looking at old photos and always wish we had taken more. What they don’t like is the intrusion necessary to get them.

  Surely they are not the first to feel this way; they are part of a long-standing tradition of annoyed and put-upon artistic subjects. I’m guessing that had Da Vinci actually been alive to paint The Last Supper at the time that it really was the last supper, the Apostles would’ve been very irritated with him.

  “Uh . . . Peter? Could you hold the goblet up a bit and maybe stand closer to—”

  “I’m Matthew!”

  “Sorry, sorry. Matthew. Could you lift your head just a bit? I’m having trouble seeing your face and—”

  “Da Vinci!!!!”

  “Sorry, sorry . . . but you guys are going to want to see everybody’s face.”

  “Just paint it already, for crissake!”

  “Hey!”

  “Oh. Sorry, Jesus.”

  It just can’t be helped. The second a tender moment occurs, a bell goes off in my head, alerting me that not only is this a wonderful moment, it would also make a great photo.

  I don’t know if this is a uniquely male characteristic, or something that I just inherited from my particular father, but I see that I now regularly do exactly what he used to do, which he did much to the irritation of myself, my siblings, and every relative within camera range.

  My father did have a genuine fascination with emerging technology that I did not inherit. I remember the first indoor flashbulbs he used with his old 8mm movie cameras. (It could have been 16mm. Or 144—this was quite some time ago.) My recollection is that the flash consisted of about a dozen bulbs—each the size of a small melon—mounted on a cumbersome wooden stick, and taken together, they gave off enough light to land an incoming Spitfire in the depth of night. I have an image of my father standing on a chair over the Thanksgiving dinner, holding up this substantial stanchion of lights with one hand, aiming the prehistoric 8mm camera with the other, and shouting at us to “Just be natural and eat the turkey.” I don’t recall it being a particularly relaxing evening.

  Then there were the early Polaroid cameras that involved chemically treating each photo as it came out. We had to take this little pink scraper about the size of a small cigar and run it over the image with a sticky, foul smelling gel, so the intrusions to the family’s great moments were not only chaotic, but also came with a nauseating toxic fume.

  There were virtually no occasions too sacred for my dad’s inescapable camera.

  Late in his life, we were at the funeral of one of my uncles (the husband of my dad’s sister), and my dad very casually pulled out his newes
t toy—a sweet little German spy–type of camera—and clicked off some shots of the proceedings. I remember taking his defense when he got a bunch of nasty looks and snippy comments for this breach of decorum. On the way out, he even took a “lighthearted” snapshot of one of my other uncles—the unpredictable and more free-spirited of the family patriarchs—clowning around and doing a funny wave as he left the grave site and headed to his car.

  As fate would have it, Uncle Funny passed away ten days later. This photo—the last one of him ever taken, waving good-bye in front of a sea of gravestones—was suddenly the collectible item in the circle of family and friends, and my father was suddenly the sought-after artiste of the family, his persistence and diligence no longer an annoyance or a point of mockery but now a virtue to be celebrated. (Though not for long. At the funeral of the waving uncle, not fully two weeks after the funeral of the first uncle, my father again took out his camera, only to be assaulted with an immediate and virulent chorus of “Enough already!”)

  But I was forever informed by that photo and the tacit lesson involved: they may give you a hard time when you take the shot, but they’re going to be happy they have it later.

  WHEN YOU CONSIDER how technology has made it so easy to record our special moments—disposable cameras, phones, and music devices that capture anything at the push of a button—not ruining the moment by taking a photo feels downright irresponsible and lazy.

  So, yes, we can now capture every fleeting tender moment. But that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s that much more to capture. People don’t get married more, or have more birthdays, or have more kids. Babies haven’t gotten cuter, kittens aren’t playing in hammocks with balls of yarn more frequently than they used to.

  But we’ve made adjustments; we’ve expanded our notion of what constitutes a tender moment. College graduations and high school graduations don’t allow enough opportunity for recording special moments, so we’ve started making a bigger deal out of elementary and kindergarten graduations. We film Open School nights. We film the opening of every gift and greeting card. We record not only “Baby’s first solid food” but also every dinner partner’s first bite of “You won’t believe how good this is!”/“You won’t believe how spicy this is!”/“You won’t believe how disgusting this is!” We film sunsets. We film people looking at sunsets. We film people learning how to use their new memory-capturing device while standing in front of a sunset. We record anything that seems important or that could, upon reflection, later seem important or, at a bare minimum, anything that might someday make a nice screen saver.

  This kind of Emotional Event inflation can only go so far. Modern fishermen have used all kinds of complicated machinery to catch so many fish that now we’re running out of certain species entirely. So too we may have depleted our stock of tender moments to such a degree that fewer and fewer things feel truly spontaneous, meaningful, and real. The expectation and practice that everything special will be recorded has led us to treat everything as special, the result being that now nothing feels so special. Instead, it all feels like movies we’ve seen before, reruns from our own lives.

  WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, my father always described our family vacations as “making memories.” We didn’t have to enjoy the trips; we just had to go, and take pictures.

  I am blessed to have so many nice memories. And thanks to the technology we have now, these memories flash across my computer screen all day.

  Next to my computer on my desk is a black-and-white photograph of my mother and father on their wedding day. They look impossibly young: he, in his army uniform, looking like a cross between John Garfield and Glenn Miller; she, beautiful and sparkling, a Jewish Donna Reed. Stare at it long enough and you can just make out the sounds of their thoughts, the excitement for the future. Knowing what will and what will not be for these two young people, my parents, makes it almost unbearably beautiful and sad. The photo captures a tender moment that I wasn’t alive to experience. It’s photos like that which compel me to risk my boys’ irritation. One day, I imagine, long after I’m gone, maybe they’ll look at a photo of their mother and me and wonder what we were thinking and feeling. (I can give them a hint: My wife was wondering why I had asked this stranger or waiter or bus driver to take yet another photo. And I was thinking: “Why couldn’t this guy count before he took it? Who doesn’t count to three before taking a photo?”)

  THE TRUTH IS my boys probably won’t be able to even find a photo. Our generation takes more pictures than any before it, but if I actually want to find a particular picture, I have no idea where it is. Never been cheaper and easier to take photos and videos, yet somehow none of them seem to last. They disappear into files or onto flash drives or into thin air. Photos are becoming like pensions: something we relied on and assumed would be around forever, but then turn out, to our great surprise, to have all pretty much evaporated.

  And it’s not just me, either. NASA spent a lot of money taking photos and filming their trips. Understandably; if you go to the moon, it’d be nice to see a picture. Well, apparently, they lost a whole bunch of film from the moon landings. This is NASA we’re talking about, not me. They captured the moment—they just can’t remember where they put it.

  A YEAR OR TWO AGO, I actually dug into the thousand million hours of home videos we’d accumulated over the years and decided to make a “greatest hits” video for my wife for Mother’s Day. I spent weeks and weeks clandestinely selecting and editing video clips and finding just-the-right songs to go with it (because there’s a fine line between getting someone a little teary-eyed and putting them in the hospital). When it was all done, I’m going to be honest with you: It came out pretty darn well. She loved it as much as I knew she would.

  Though above and beyond the joy of watching her watch it (which was enough of a reward for me, frankly), I also had the singular experience of having sifted through all that stuff to begin with. Literally thousands of hours of video that included—but was not limited to: virtually every hour of the first six months of each of our children’s lives, every birthday party, every holiday, every visit, every vacation, every new pair of pants my boys tried on—you name it, we had it recorded, labeled, and somewhere in a shoebox. But until I decided to make that video I had never looked at any of it. Other than when I shot it and wanted to check that the battery was working, I had never seen this stuff. And as dull as 99 percent of it is—sorting through the out-of-focus, blurry, herky-jerky parts, and the long patches where you were unaware the camera was running and unintentionally recorded hours on end of your own thigh—when you get past that, there is indeed spectacular treasure to be mined.

  ONE DAY we were trying to clean out a packed-to-the-rafters closet at home and we came across an old box of photos. Some from the recent past—my kids as infants, toddlers, preschoolers—and some from life before they were here. The early years of our marriage. And the years leading up to that; the dating, the single years, our college years, our own childhood birthday parties. Boy, did our kids love looking through those pictures! Making fun of our bad haircuts and horrendous fashion choices, how undeniably corny we look waving and posing everywhere, how clichéd our family get-togethers look on camera—like Norman Rockwell if his family overate and squabbled and hated being photographed.

  The hour or so that we sat on the floor of that closet—a full family doing something as organic, unforced, and joyful as going through family pictures and telling the stories—was one of the sweetest times I can recall ever spending. The sorting through memorialized golden moments was becoming itself a new golden moment. One that should probably itself be memorialized.

  As I stood to get my camera—to get a photo of my family looking at photos—my wife and children turned to me with a collective look of disappointment. In the heartbeat that it took to register the look, I sensed that it wasn’t the usual irritated “Daaadd, wouldya cut it out!” It wasn’t a response of annoyance. It was something deeper, and more generous. This was them appea
ling to me for my benefit. This was “Why would you get up and leave this when this is so wonderfully perfect?”

  And they were right; sometimes it is better to leave the tender moment alone.

  The Car Door Ding

  I wouldn’t say I’m a great driver. I’m certainly a very safe driver—just not particularly good. For example, I tend to park by sound. I use the sound of me hitting something to indicate it’s now time to go the other way. Those cement things that you’re supposed to stop in front of? I stop on them. “Plenty of room, plenty of room, plenty of room—BOOM—okay, no more room.”

  So, consequently, my car always has an impressive array of scrapes, dings, scratches, and plastic things dangling unattractively. And I never rush to fix them, because I’m pretty confident I’m just going to bang them up again anyway, so why bother?

  Plus, it’s just not that big a deal to me. But it really does bother other people, I’ve noticed. I see strangers very unkindly pointing and ridiculing. They don’t think I hear them, but I do. “Look at that car! There’s a person who clearly has no regard for himself or anyone else, either. Look at that bumper! Disgusting! If he treated his dog like that, we’d report the sicko!”

  Of course, it’s not a dog. It’s a car. But, nonetheless, when the pointing and ridiculing gets too severe, and I notice my wife and children slumping down in the seats, disassociating themselves from both the car and me, I will, in the name of community—and family—harmony, bring the car in and get things cleaned up.