A Sentimental Man

"I am a sentimental man,
Who always longed to be a father.

That's why I do the best I can,
To treat each citizen of son of Oz
As son or daughter.

So, Elphaba, I'd like to raise you high,
'Cuz I think everyone deserves the fly.

And helping you with your ascent,
Allows me to feel so... parental.

For I am a sentimental man."

That's how my favorite song from "Wicked" goes. Yes. I'm a 31-year-old straight guy, and I have a favorite song from "Wicked". Wanna fight about it?

My favorite song from that show is not in the "Wicked" Easy Piano songbooks that pony-tailed tweens used at creative arts summer camps for a few years so that they could sing "Popular" and "For Good" at low-budget showcases and talent shows the world over.

"A Sentimental Man" didn't turn into a smash hit, and it isn't very memorable, or complicated, or vocally or musically interesting either, I suppose. It isn't particularly long, so it's easy to forget. One minute and seventeen seconds, the way Broadway legend Joel Grey does it anyway. Back when I worked in the creative arts, I tried to find the sheet music to the song so I could sing it at an outdoor cabaret, but I couldn't locate the music. So I sang Eric Idle's "The Galaxy Song" from "The Meaning of Life" instead.

That's life sometimes.

It's funny, because "The Galaxy Song" is a funny song, about the dimensions of the universe and the insignificance of our mortal toils and foibles, and it's sort of a modern interpretation of a patter song, the type I love to sing in G&S operettas, and, to many folks who know me, that's the sort of song they might use to identify me. But I think, to those who really know me best, "A Sentimental Man" says more about who I am, what I feel inside, how I operate, what I value and what I long for most.

Tomorrow night, at 7:00pm, my wife and I are to arrive at the hospital so that she can be induced. If all goes as it should, the twins should be making their appearance on Thursday the 15th. And my life will change forever. Because, of course, it will no longer be my life.

Well, that changed some time ago, I suppose. On October 22nd, 2006, under a chuppah covered in radiant sunflowers, I married my best buddy. A girl whom I turn towards in the car or on the couch or in the bed and sometimes just look at, because I like the way it feels. I like to look in her eyes, or at her cheeks, or her lips, or her chin. She's shorter than me, by a decent margin, and, when we hug, I like to hold her head against my chest. I love the shape of her head-- I know that sounds goofy, but sometimes I'm like that. Her head feels great against my chest and in my hand.

From that day forward, it was no longer my life. It was ours. And now ours is getting a wee bit bigger.

I had a terrifying moment of insecurity last night. As my wife and I dined in the restaurant where we had our first date, as we ate our meal alongside her father, an intelligent though disheveled psychiatrist, I suddenly felt very small in his shadow. The shadow of his expectations and his value system, and his romance with formal educational success, of which I had not very much to speak of. I'm a reasonably talented writer, but I couldn't tell you what a gerund is. To me, it sounds like a weapon used against Jews in the Holocaust.

Speaking of Jews, I felt excluded-- muted-- as my father-in-law and my wife discussed Torah portions as if they'd both just read them yesterday. I can tell you what a Torah looks like, and I know how heavy one is to carry, but that's about it. And I shared my feelings of intellectual insecurity with my wife as we lay on the couch together after the meal was over and her father meandered his way back to his hotel.

"What am I going to be able to teach them?" I asked her, "What am I going to be able to help them with?"

"You're going to teach them about how to be good people," my wife said, which, I have to say, didn't make me feel much better.

There's an insidious air of intellectual superiority about my wife's side of the family. Conversations always seem to revolve around mocking or critiquing "simpler" people in their neighborhoods or schools or workplaces when they lived in upstate New York. My father-in-law is keen to present himself as the one who's always correcting other psychiatrists medical errors, or mis-diagnoses, or over-prescribing tendencies where he works, and my mother-in-law is always one to express judgement over how other people live, but she'll be the first one to correct you if you try to do it. And maybe they do it to cover up their own flaws, or maybe they don't know they're doing it. Or maybe it's just my perception but, as many a psych patient has told me at work, "My perception is my reality".

I wish I could tell you that my terrifying moment of insecurity passed after a good night's sleep, but it hasn't. And I can't lie to you. When I first married my wife, I was petrified that I wouldn't be good enough-- not for her, for she had affirmed, by slipping that orange blossom-engraved ring onto my finger, that I was her beloved, and she was mine-- but that I wouldn't be good enough for her parents. Now I'm scared that I won't be good enough for my children.

"I guess what I am is going to have to be enough for them," was the shaky conclusion I came to last night, as my wife rubbed Hydrocortisone cream over her impossibly huge belly and its accompanying itchy stretch marks, "because I'm all they've got."

And, in the end, maybe being a sentimental man will prove to be of infinite and inestimable value to the life and heart and values and experience of a child.

Children.

Me-ness

Mrs. Apron and I went to the King of Prussia mall together on Saturday. It was the first time I had been back at the mall in years. When I was a child, when my family was bereft of things to do, we all inevitably piled into my family's Oldsmobile, or Buick, or Toyota, or Pontiac or, finally, Saab, and went to the mall. It was the Saab that my father was driving when he ran my foot over in the parking lot in front of Bloomingdales when I was fifteen. That traumatic event marked our last family trip to the mall.

Those treks were getting a bit long in the tooth by 1995 anyway.

As Mrs. Apron and I parked the car at Bloomingdales, I stared at the facade of the immense retail space and said, "That's where he ran my foot over with the car," pointing to the curb cut by the entrance, "right there." I shook my head and laughed to myself because, really, it's funny. And I instinctively reached for my wife's hand, and she took it.

When my family would go to the mall together, my sisters, my mother and father and I, we would invariably split up. My sisters would shop for girl things with my mother, and my father and I would pal around together. I would drag him all over the place, to the K. B. Toys, where my dilated pupils would hungrily gaze at all the enormous die-cast cars in 1/18th scale. It was at K. B. Toys where my father first noticed me, as a nine-year-old, standing in the aisle, bent over, rubbing my hand against the small of my back like an octogenarian with spinal stenosis.

"Mummy," he asked, his brow furrowed, "what is the matter with your back?"

"It hurts," I said simply, my brow furrowed, too.

Scoliosis. Thanks, gene pool.

I would also take my father to the Electronics Boutique, where I would show him the backs of all the computer games I wanted. I invariably chose ones that our computer did not have sufficient memory of graphics capability, (remember VGA vs SVGA, 256 color requirements?) to run correctly, or at all. And these wastes of money that would not perform on our home P.C. were invariably not returnable because, in my excitement to use them, I had torn the box to shreds till it resembled hamster bedding.

That man wasted a lot of money on me.

Looking back on our time at the mall, I can't remember one time-- not one single time that he and I were together that he made me go to Macy's with him to look at sweaters for him, or... anything for him. Those trips were all about me, to fuel my interests and my desires and my wants and my perceived needs, and I had no idea.

On Saturday, I accompanied my wife to the mall for no other reason than for her to purchase new bras at Bloomingdales, because our impending twinnage has caused her to appreciably outgrow her current bustenhalters. Okay, we also got Auntie Ann's pretzels, too, but the bra shopping was the main event. And it took an hour. And all the while I stood out among all that lacy and frill and cups and straps looking like part husband and part pervert-- which I am both-- and I texted a friend to ameliorate my feelings of awkwardness by giving voice to them in those text messages.

And it helped.

I suppose I could have gone somewhere in the mall for myself that Saturday, but I had no desire to do so, and it wasn't just my counterculture distaste for the mall.

As we exited, we passed through the men's department (or "menswear" as they used to call it on "Are You Being Served?") and I saw a handsome cardigan, stylish and conservative at the same time. Ralph Lauren. My wife and I both went to it at the same time and investigated it. I didn't look at the price tag, but I didn't have to.

"I can't have anything for myself anymore," I said, half-jokingly, "because we're having twins and my life is over."

Mrs. Apron smiled at me.

"Or, you could say that it's important for you to still have things that you like so that you don't lose your me-ness," she said.

"Right," I said, "the me-ness of penis."

I don't know what that means, I just said it because it rhymed and it's sophomoric.

My me-ness.

Antique typewriters
Old telephones
Eyeglasses
Short-sleeve dress shirts
Skinny ties
Wing-tip shoes
Monty Python
Gilbert & Sullivan
Thrift shopping
Amateur theatre
Writing
Bacon
Coffee
Chocolate
Brash humor
Sensitivity
Introspection
Brooding
Crappy TV
Cuddle time
Worrying

I don't know what parts of my me-ness I'm going to lose once these twins come-- I suppose every parent loses some, as my parents did. Some of it is willing, some of it gets lost with a fight, and I guess what ends up after being funneled and distilled and wrung out by time and diapers and sleep deprivation and sacrifice will be the essence of my me-ness.

Whether I like it, or whether I don't.