Mr. Fix Shit

In case you've been living underneath a life-size Sphinx made of foam core and cat litter, you know that we re-elected Barack Obama recently.  A bunch of different demographics came together to make that possibility a reality-- so the news media says-- and it's looking like minorities, women, and "the young" played a significant role in the President's validation.

At 32, I guess I no longer qualify as "the young".  I think membership in that particular subsection goes to 18-25 year-olds, it might even go as high as thirty-year-olds, but it definitely doesn't extend to those of us born in 1980.  I know for sure that I'm not a woman, because I just played with myself recently and I came very quickly, and we all know that only happens to men.  (Sensitive ones, especially.)  Now, the more complicated question-- am I a minority?-- gives me a slight pause, and rightfully so.  After all, my father was born in Iraq, then emigrated (read: fled) to Israel, the emigrated (read: ran away from his religion and his parents) to America, and married my mother, a half-Ukranian/half-Hungarian euro mutt.  But, ask anyone who's ever seen me dance, and then tell you without hesitation that I'm white.

White male.









White space.









White.

Am I, though?  Maybe, maybe not.  I don't know.  Guess it depends on who's seen me cut a rug at a Bar Mitzvah recently.  One thing I know for sure is that I'm a Jewish husband (and father, but let's stick with husband for right now.) and while I don't know if the number of Jewish husbands who came out in support of Obama is statistically significant, one thing I do know is that there are some stereotypes about Jewish husbands.

The one with which I'm most familiar is that "Jewish husbands don't beat their wives".  A bigoted follow-up to that is "they just hide their Macy's cards", and that was all good fun, and we all had a jolly good laugh.

I realized this weekend that there is also a stereotype about Jewish husbands relating to their inclination to engage in household repairs/improvements, but that, according to which Jewish husband you're talking to/about, the stereotype is radically different.

Take my father-in-law.  He's seventy, doddering, bewildered, hyper-intelligent, super disorganized, mechanically inclined, and attentionally defective.  Nothing makes him prouder than to install something, or create something, or refine something, or correct something around his house, or ours.  As he mentioned to me this weekend, one of the reasons he's so hell-bent on fixing things himself is that he's cheap, and no matter how much sawdust you get everywhere (EV.  ERY.  WHERE.) or how many times you have to drive to Home Depot (three in one day) because you forgot to buy something (that you already owned) it's a damn sight cheaper than picking up the phone and hiring a professional to do it for you.

Which is where this Jewish husband comes in.

Last week, our plumber installed a new kitchen faucet and repaired two toilets in our house.  Total cost: $350.  Could I have done any or all of these repairs myself?  Um, why spend energy, time, and many hot, furious tears to find out?  Are we well-off?  Absolutely not, but my wife and I are both employed, and we make enough money to know that we can call a plumber or an electrician every now and then and it's not going to give us Hoover pockets.

There are things I can do, and there are things I can't do, and there are things that I maybe could do but probably shouldn't do, and I strongly believe that, if I look at a project and my gut says "back away" then that is what I should do.  My wife's dresser drawer came off its track.  A strategically-placed screw solved the issue.  Gut said, "you can do that", so I did that.  Am I going to spend hours fucking around and potentially irreparably damaging the porcelain device that hauls away my family's feces?

Not this Jewish husband.

And not this Jewish husband's father, either.

When I was a boy, and I'm sure for a long time before I existed, my father mowed the lawn of our family home.  He trimmed all the hedges and he painted the outside and inside of the house when it needed it, he cleaned the gutters and unclogged drains and did things to the hot water boiler that I don't understand and he built a big wooden ramp for me to drive my pedal car on and he fixed and he maintained and he used his rough, careworn paws like they were tools themselves.  And one day, much much later, while we were watching out the dining room window together as Frank the gardener mowed our lawn for us, he turned to me and said,

"And I always said, 'as soon as I can afford to pay some motherfucker to do all this fuckin' sheet for me, dat's exactly what dee fuck I'm gonna do'."

I suppose, after all those years, there was nothing he felt he had to prove anymore, and it must feel pretty liberating to send a plumber a check instead of being on your hands and knees on a bathroom floor underneath a sink for five hours, if you don't have to.  My father-in-law and his son have just spent two days trying to install a clothes dryer for my mother-in-law.  They're connecting a pipe using brass wire meant to be used for a bassoon.  And, wonder of wonders: they did it, and they're happier than pigs in shit about it.  And you know-- that's fine, for them.  That's just fine.  

Sometimes I feel guilty or incompetent or like I'm not measuring up somehow to the challenge of being a homeowner, being a husband, being a father.  There are things I should be doing that I don't do, effort not being applied, energy wasted, money flying out the doors and the windows and wallets and pockets.  Then I remember bringing my father glass after glass of 7-Up as he perspired through his shirt, his bald spot glistening in the July sun and his hands bleeding as he manically tore out foot after foot after foot of hedges that lined my family's house.  He just couldn't take it anymore.  Trimming them made him physically ill, or mentally ill-- or both.  And he wasn't quite at the stage where he had embraced the idea of paying someone else to trim them for him.  He hadn't made that psychological leap yet, he wasn't ready to move from one stereotype of the Jewish husband to the other.  He was still in that mindset that it had to be all him, all the time, at every moment, doing every thing: fixing, making, doing, being, providing, surviving, maintaining and straining, all for his family, all for an ideal.  All for love.

And finally, one day, he let go.  He let go of all of that.  Not the love, of course, never that, but of the idea that it always had to be him.  He's able to exist now, in a world of handymen and plumbers and electricians and contractors and gardeners.  And I think he's happier now, and I love that.  A few months ago, we told him that we were going to finally attack the insidiously weeded over flower beds in front of our house, to make the place look less like Boo Radley's residence and more like a place that isn't the scourge of the neighborhood.  His brow furrowed with momentary concern as he asked,

"Mummy-- you're not going to do that fuckin' shit yourself, are you?"

"No," I said to him, privately smiling at the memory of him ripping out hedges with his hands in 1988, "no fucking way."      

Selective Omission

I can remember very clearly the moment in 2004 when I told my mother that my then-girlfriend was taking me on a ski weekend. She was sitting on the living room chair, her legs criss-crossed underneath her, wearing one of her trademark, after-6pm-sweatsuits made by Russell Athletic (the kind I used to wear in elementary school-- no, to elementary school) and she looked at me. She looked at me with those thin-lips and those crinkly eyes that made you feel instantly that you were no longer talking to your mother, but rather a psychoanalyist, or an assistant principal. Or Carl Jung's assistant principal. In a gray sweatsuit.

Anyway, my mother looked at me and she asked one simple question, the way my mother often does. There isn't a barage of interrogatives or pejoratives. That would be a waste of carefully cultivated and conserved breath on her part. She uses her breath quite sparingly, though her wit gets a healthy dose of exercise. She tilted her head to one side and regarded me for a moment before asking,

"Now why would you go and do that?"

Of course, I know what she meant. I mean-- I'm her son-- even back in 2004. She didn't mean, "Why are you [specifically] doing that?" She knew why I, the carbon-based form of life that is, was, and always will be her only son, was going skiing. The answer to that question would have been quite painfully obvious: I was falling in love. And anybody who's ever known anybody who's ever fallen in love will tell you that people who fall in love do all manner of moronic, insipid, and/or potentially dangerous things. So, clearly my mother's question wasn't why I was going skiing. The question was: why would anybody go skiing?

Anybody. Ever. In the world. She could not fathom it.

And, really? I get that.

Why would anybody in their right mind shove their feet into constricting, heavy, ridiculous-looking boots, shove those boots into fiberglass planks (that you're then supposed to wax, you know-- to make them faster) and then hurl yourself down a fucking snow-covered mountain in the middle of winter?

After skiing now for seven years, even I can't really explain it. I guess for me it's still about love. Ski slopes are my wife's happy place, and now that she no longer skis with her father, I want to, and I guess I'm really supposed to be the man who makes that happen. Although, now that I have new skis and new boots that don't tear large chunks of skin off my feet, I'm actually really starting to enjoy it for its own sake. (Don't tell my mother! She worries!)

As you go through life, you hear a lot of stereotypes-- some perpetrated by mass media. Some by your family and your friends. Some by the balding jackshit in the burgundy button-down shirt at work. I don't really mind stereotypes very much, because they're either true, or they're ridiculous, or because I recognize them as defense mechanisms or tools of the ignoramuses in our midst. I generally just don't pay them much mind. But one stereotype in particular really sort of gets on my wick, and that's the stereotype of the Jewish mother as The Worrier-- especially when it comes to her children. I find this stereotype annoying for several reasons:

* It implies that other mothers don't worry about their children. I kind of have a problem with that.

* It paints the picture of Jewish mothers fainting on couches and having panic attacks and fanning themselves with large brassieres whenever little Schmuelie goes out with a couple of friends for the evening.

* It creates a very uneasy feeling inside of me when I talk about my mother to people who don't really know me very well and they go, "Oh, your mother must really worry about you!"

Well, actually, yeah. She does worry about me. She worries that I'm depressed. I think, in high school, she worried that I was gay. My freshman year in college, when I was mercilessly bullied and harrassed by 3/4ths of the residents of my hall, I'm sure she was worried that I was going to commit suicide. She worried about me the first time I was prepared to become a police officer. And the second time, too, eight years later. When I was a little boy, full of neuroses and eccentricities, I'm sure I gave her plenty to worry about, as I impersonated Andy Rooney in my room alone and memorized entire episodes of "Fawlty Towers" for fun. And, every day, she worries about me entering a locked psychiatric facility that houses some of the most acute and assaultive patients in the state.

Wouldn't your mother worry about that? And wouldn't she worry about that whether she was Jewish or not? I kind of think so.

My mother doesn't worry because she's Jewish. She worries because she has chronic anxiety. Once, when I was seven or eight, she told me about a nightmare she had. She and the three of us kids were playing on the beach on summer day, and she saw some ships in the distance. By the time they got close, thousands of what she described as "naked, screaming Koreans" started jumping off the boats into the water, and then running towards the beach-head, screaming their heads off. "There were thousands of them," my mother told me, "running and screaming towards us, and I scooped all three of you up and I ran."

Now, I don't know what you think-- but I don't think that's the dream of some Jewish mother worry-wart stereotype; that's the dream of someone who's scared to take a piss lest Jaws sinks his teeth into her ass.

"We don't need to tell your mother that I bonked my head on the ski-slope today," Mrs. Apron said to me on the way home from the Poconos last night. "All we need to tell her is that you did really well and are making fabulous progress."

"No shit," I said, "it'll be like the news from Russia-- selective omission. We'll just conveniently forget to tell her, also, about the guy we saw lying in a snowdrift waiting for EMS who was shouting about his broken arm, and we don't need to tell her about parents who send their five-year-olds down black diamond slopes, and we don't need to tell her that we ski around people who are probably inebriated by one o'clock in the afternoon either."

"Ah, news by selective omission-- it's really better that way," my wife said confidently.

"Fuckin' aye."

My Friend the Farmer

Being a blogger, I tend to spend a lot of time talking about myself.

And I guess that's okay, however, sometimes it's nice to spread the wealth around a little bit. With that in mind, I thought I would spend some time today talking about my friend, Sara.

Well, I guess I'll talk a little bit about me, too.

Mrs. Apron and I just got back from a weekend in rural Vermont where we visited Sara in the rustic, half-finished home she is building with her longtime boyfriend. By "half-finished" I mean, "they just put on a bathroom door for us a couple hours prior to our arrival." That arrival was 11:58pm on Friday night, after getting in the car at 5:19pm.

Last year, we spent 5 days at Sara's over Christmas, which none of us celebrate. Sara's boyfriend does, though, and it was fun eating a Christmas goose for the first, and probably the last time ever. This visit was prompted by the fact that Sara was starring in a community theatre production. Though we drove the longest, we were by no means the only nutjobs who schlepped 330 miles to see a play produced in a converted barn. Two of her friends from college came over, the one from upstate drove 2.5 hours and the one from New York drove 5 hours. Sara's parents came up, too, but they don't really count because her mom flew, and because they're her parents.

Sara's being in a play, as you can speculate from the vast distances people covered in order that they might see it, is an event itself. This was her first onstage appearance since 1997. She and I acted in shows together in high school, and we were quite close. Sara, under the moniker of Margaret Hyland in a totally inappropriate play for high schoolers called The Rope Dancers, was, in fact, my first kiss-- and I was hers. She was also my first slap-- I clocked her across the face pretty goddamn hard during that show. This was before we were fully introduced to stage combat.

This, by the way, is what happens when high school students are allowed to direct themselves.

A side-note about The Rope Dancers: I've said that this play was inappropriate for high-schoolers. We, as high-schoolers, didn't know it, though. The play concerned the plight of an Irish Catholic immigrant couple, James & Margaret Hyland, who moved to New York City at the turn-of-the-century. Their daughter, Lizzie, was conceived whilst James was drunk and had already fucked a prostitute earlier that evening, came home (to quote Margaret "still wet with the whore"), and had forced himself on his wife. Lizzie was born with a sixth finger on one of her hands, which Margaret believed was a punishment from God. During the course of the play, Margaret tries to hang herself, James smashes her across the face, Margaret lies down on the floor and spreads her legs, Margaret shoves Lizzie's sixth finger into her own mouth, a Jewish doctor cuts the offending digit off, and Lizzie dies.

Now you know why high schools do Our Town.

I always thought Sara was a shockingly talented actress, and not just for the insane shit she did with/to me in The Rope Dancers. Her talent was a ferocious kind, it was passionate and intense, never waning or compromising. But Sara had other interests. Primarily: shit and the animals who made it.

Back in high school, Sara always smelled like shit. Her car smelled like shit. So did her hair and her clothes and her aura. When she wasn't at home or on stage, she was shoveling copious amounts of horse shit at the farm where she rode, volunteered and later worked. She went to Cornell and became an Ag major, which is a polite name for people who enjoy shoveling and smelling like shit. She voiced her unremitting desire to, upon graduation, become a farmer-- much to the chagrin of her affluent and highly conservative Jewish parents.

They didn't take it well.

In spite of their objections, that's exactly what she did. Today, this Jewish girl from suburban Philadelphia sells fresh eggs, yogurt, yogurt cheese, raw milk, and grass-fed beef to drive-by customers. Sometimes, she even sells pork. And, yes, she still gets to shovel shit-- thanks to her twenty-odd cows.

A small, white painted sign that's as unassuming as she is reading, "Fresh Eggs and Milk for Sale" is just about the only advertising she can bring herself to do. Not much of a businesswoman, we witnessed her tell prospective customers that they could "get raw milk closer to where you live from another vendor." And so falls another stereotype about Jews.

As I stood next to Sara's father, watching her drive a tractor that was stabbing a load of hay with an enormous spear, I watched him smile, and it made me smile, too. I think he's still probably more or less a little shell-shocked at what has happened to his daughter, but this is a natural thing-- a thing that was bound to happen. Her on a tractor driving through a field of mud and shit is certainly no less natural than her pretending to be an Irish Catholic woman with a disordered brain. The Sara on the tractor isn't pretending, not for you, or me, or anybody. And I think her father is finally coming around to the idea that this is not a phase or an act. This is his daughter, who always, and who will always smell like shit. And like it.

By the way, the play we drove all that way to see was wonderful-- and she was heads above her castmates. Even though she probably should be a little rusty.