It’s winter now. That was fast. Seems like last week, it was still Autumn around here. And I don’t just mean because it was Thanksgiving back on last Thursday. No, there were still colored leaves on trees. Then, this morning, it was 21 out, and all the leaves were gone. Just bare trees, and cold winds.
My mother used to always buy me blue Oxford Cloth Button Down shirts growing up. I hated the shirt style. It seemed too formal for a kid to wear, and if you did have one on and went to school, the other kids would make fun of you – call you a nerd. Though I always had one in my closet, just in case when I need to wear a tie. When I was in college, and hated doing laundry, I started wearing the Oxford shirts again, and on some level, it felt comfortable this time around. I am sure it had everything to do with no one calling me a nerd. I kept Oxfords in the rotation when I started working professionally, as they looked smart with a tie, but also not too formal, like I wasn’t trying to dress up. Now, it’s what I want to be in all the time. Not sure what that says about me.
Sometimes I just want a box-mix yellow cake with chocolate icing for desert. I know that yellow cake doesn’t really have a unique flavor – I think it’s vanilla, right? But right now, I really want to have that lite, spongy sheet pan of a cake. And the icing as well. That cream cheese icing with coco powder. Nothing special, or ground breaking, just solid great tasting icing that isn’t too sweet, and with a slight hint of biter chocolate. That cake feels like the best comfort food I could have right now. Maybe ice cream would be more comforting, but it’s too cold for that. No, I want right out of the over yellow cake.
I need to learn this and stop being surprised when it happens…
The kid got sick over the weekend, and it through everything off.
We aren’t mad at the kid for getting sick, because getting is sick is what kids do about half of the time. No, we were both amazed and taken aback by how much the kid’s illness destroyed out mental wellbeing.
Let me explain…
We had a fun, but busy weekend planned. We were going to get our Halloween pumpkin, and complete other Fall errands. The kid was going on a sleepover with a friend, and there was her soccer match on Sunday. Then we had shoe shopping planned, well you get the idea… Lots of stuff.
But for the past few days, the kid had been saying that she wasn’t feeling right, and she did have a stuffy nose. Anyway, since she was going to a sleepover, and being around a bunch of kid for soccer, I thought, just to eliminate any questions, that we’d pop in to the local minor emergency clinic to check her out. And that’s when we found out that she was actually, really sick, and contagious for the next 24 hour before the antibiotics kicked in.
In one sense, I felt a little good that I was a responsible parent and took my kid in, and got her the care that she needed.
But what me and the wife also felt was that our entire weekend, if not life, had just spun outta control, and NOW we were over whelmed with everything that we had to take care of. We even felt a little paralyzed, unable to get up off the couch to take care of anything other than our kid. We were both surprised at how fast this feeling of helplessness came over us. In all honesty, we have dealt with much much worse things and situations, and handled it with a smile and a good sense of humor. This was a pretty minor issue… but our reaction was completely deflated and defeated.
By Sunday, we had snapped out of it and righted the ship. Things are all better, but we’re back on track. Yet, even this morning, we were still bewildered by our reaction from Saturday.
Well… like 80% done, as I still have to paint the ceiling, but that’s for next weekend, and that’s easy.
So… We’re done!
It took a little time, as I did start this whole project right before the kid went away to camp. I did that to kill time, and also try to teach her a life skill; how to paint a wall. I mean, at some point she will live someplace that she’ll want to make her own, and though painting isn’t a difficult skill to learn, I would like her to have in her head that this is something she can do.
Anyway… digressing here…
The point is that we took our time, but the wife and I painted the livingroom. Not only that, we cleaned everything out. Really got into all the nooks and crannies of the apartment and cleaned. And then the wife had an idea to sand and paint out TV stand, which turned out great. (She has a little more to go on it, but it looks great. Might share a picture of it when it’s done.) But the best part of all of this is that at the end of Sunday night, we were tired, but not exhausted, and we had the self-satisfied feeling of accomplishing something important.
The last time we painted the livingroom was right before the kid was born. I guess it was called the “Nesting Phase,” but either way, it was fun to get the apartment ready for the kid. Even the wife’s sister came in town to help us get the whole place ready. It’s a fun memory.
This time around, it felt like we were putting the last few years behind us. There are still ghosts of Covid around our home. This we hung on the walls, or furniture we tried to repurposed to make working from home functional, or home school at least viable. Books came off the shelves and were cleaned, and a new sense of order and comfort began to take root. It was renewing our commitment to make this little Harlem apartment our home for the next decade or more.
It was just a little paint. Just a little time. Some sweat and listening to my wife’s playlists.
(The short story “Hi Daddy” by Matthew Klam appeared in the October 14th, 2024 issue of The New Yorker.)
Photograph by Ryan Lowry for The New Yorker
As I get older, I have this dualistic thought in my head when I think of my parents; How much I am like them, and how much I am not like them. This dualism can cause great joy, and unbelievable anxiety in me. I also know as a middle-aged man, that the more things change, the more they stay the same. With Matthew Klam’s story “Hi Daddy,” a well-intended but uneven work, he attempts to address these issues.
Here’s my way to simple synopsis: Middle aged man says goodbye to his teenage daughter as she goes off to Europe for the summer before she starts college, and then he visits his elderly parents, realizing that he is more like his father than he wants to admit.
Emotionally, I dug this story, and identified strongly with the narrator. There was an honesty in the narrator, that sometimes got very close to self-pity and whining, but Klam was able to pull it back in time. The narrator, in his family, has the role of primary care giver, as his wife has the job that earns the majority of their living. This role has left the narrator feeling taken for granted and left out, though his wife does point out that he is the cause of this situation, as he can be emotionally unavailable, especially to their daughter. Part of his issue stems from having trouble dealing with his daughter leaving home, and the changes that it will bring. When he visits his parents, his father has fallen and has dementia. The dementia means the father no longer recognizes the son, and the fall means that the once stoic and distant father has become feeble and dependent. Again, the theme of change, and the act of dealing with change, gives the story a weight here, and the narrator’s inability to know how to deal with these situations and emotions has a melancholic honesty to it.
Yet, I had issues with this story, and they were all technical storytelling issues. When I finished the piece, I was left feeling unsatisfied, and that was due to none of the story threads felt wrapped up. Many emotional tangents are cast about in this story, but they don’t come back or lead to a resolution. The narrator says that he doesn’t like his parents, but the issues are with his father, so why is the mother put in the same bucket with the father? When the narrator realizes that he is becoming like his father, will that influence future actions of the narrator?
That last one was the kicker for me, for that was the driver for the unsatisfying feeling the story created in me.
If this is a normal “Hero’s Journey” story, then the narrator’s realization that he is like his father would then influence an action in the climax of the story, therefore allowing the hero to defeat the obstacle and view the world in a different way. The best that I can tell, the hero’s obstacle is himself, the climax has to do with the horse getting free (horse also metaphor for father/son,) yet the narrator’s actions in dealing with the horse are not influenced by his realization. If this is a normal “Rising Action, Climax, Resolution” story, then I’m not sure what to make out of the last two sections as a resolution; the thoughts the narrator has about his daughter’s choice in boyfriends and her actions towards them, and final section which is a “Dead Chick in the Basket*” cliché. That left me to believe that this whole exercise was just a meditation on the narrator dealing with a rough two days, and the narrator is the same person at the start of the story as he is at the end of the story. And if that is true, the narrator doesn’t change, then why are we being told this story?
I will say this, “Hi Daddy” has some very fine points, and some crisp, honesty imagery and writing. Matthew Klam is writing about a character who is flawed, which is just ripe for storytelling. And it almost gets there. He just didn’t stick the landing.
* “Dead Chick in the Basket” refers to a writing device where the final paragraph of a short story contains new information about a character which is meant to make the reader view the actions, statements, or feelings of that character in a different light. The first known use of this device was in J.D. Salinger’s short story “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.”
I sure did. I went to the gym. I had this thought in my head that I wanted to add a fourth day of gymming to my life. (I have decided that “gymming” is a word, and that it is spelled with two m’s.) I don’t know what came over me last night, but as I was going to bed, I said to myself, I can go to the gym on Tuesday, and now work out four days a week.
See, at least since 2022, I have been going to the gym three days a week, Wednesday thru Friday. The thought here was that Monday and Tuesday were dedicated to doing all of the stay at home dad stuff. Not that there weren’t other stay at home dad stuff things to do during the rest of the week, but Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were my days to work on my stuff – writing, art, time with the kid, and those were my gym days, too. On the whole, it’s been working fine.
But of late, I have started to think that I could and should be doing more. I could be writing more, working on more projects, doing more around the house, more work on our family’s finances. And that just led me to think that I could do another day at the gym. I would find an extra hour, somewhere, and wedge in some treadmill time.
There is a very important fact here, you need to remember – I hate working out. I equate the gym to eating your vegetables as a kid – you don’t like it, but you know you need to do it. That’s the gym for me. My doctor told me that as I get older I need to do at least 30 minutes of cardio workouts, three times a week. So, I have been doing that. Eating my vegetables and staying in the good graces of the doctor and the wife. Don’t get me wrong, I want to be healthy, and have as much time with my wife, kid, friends and family as possible. If I could do that without the gym, I would, you know.
So, for this thought of adding a gym day, to do extra gymming, seemed surprising to me. And I was surprised that I was open to this idea. That I woke up this morning thinking that it was still a good idea. That I put on the running gear and headed out to the gym, got on the treadmill, and was surprised at how fast the time flew.
I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but I might be making a positive change here.
