Rebel-Headed Level

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 10, Verse 1

"Happy is the man with a level-headed son;

sad the mother of a rebel."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Take a good, hard look at these two kitty cats:

 

                  Him                                                                             Her

God, how I love them.  

On the left, you have my father.  See the look of befuddlement, consternation, near-anguish on his face.  Note the creased brow, and the bank manager's placement of the fingers on the right hand pressed gently against his lip, beneath his massive, thoughtful Iraqi-Israeli nose.  Note the cell-phone-cum-calculator in his left meat-mit.  This is my father trying to figure out how his son, a man who earns a respectable salary-- the most he's ever made in his life-- can be simultaneously starving to death.  He calls it a problem.  I call it "multitasking."

Now, turn your attention to her.  There is very little that I can or need to say about this picture.  This, friends, is my mother.  This, at her most unguarded, is who she is.  If an ordinary, run-of-the-mill picture is worth a thousand words; this one is worth a tome.  I snapped it tonight at my sister's 37th birthday party.  My father was trying to light a candle that had no wick.  This is the reaction.  I'm so proud of myself for capturing this fleeting, illuminating moment that I now know what National Geographic photographers must feel like when they catch the cheetah the very instant it snaps a floppy gazelle's tender neck with its teeth.

It hasn't been an easy forty years of marriage for these two kooky funsters, but, then again, I suspect it could have been far worse.  After all, my father could have turned into a PTSD-riddled drug abuser, wife-basher, and my mother could have been more afraid of men than she is of her own shadow, my eldest sister could have turned out, um, worse?  My middle sister could have turned out, uh, worse?  And I could have... I don't know... been born without-- lungs or knees, I suppose.  And that wouldn't have been any fun.  How do you take a kid like that to the bank to make a deposit?  I used to love going to the bank with my mother.

 My marriage is seven years old-- we're practically marriage infants when compared with my parents, but we're gaining on them-- slowly, very slowly.  I wouldn't say that marriage is especially hard.  But it's no rainbow-fart either.  I'm at that stage in my life where I know mortality is creeping 'round somewhere, lying in wait to ambush my parents with a stroke or a fall or a clot, and I am also, not coincidentally, at that stage where I want to pump them for information about everything.  I want to know how they paid for college for all three of us.  Were they drug mules or were they smart investors (my money's on the former-- I guess it's good I don't have much money), how do they really feel about each other, when we're all gone and the lights are off and the house is still?  How do they really feel about (gulp) us?  Are we disappointments?  I have no doubt, in many ways, we are.  And that's kind of a hard thing to accept about yourself, but, in another respect, it's easy, because they've always encouraged me to live my life as I see fit.  

"Don't worry about pleasing us," my mother used to say to me, "who the hell are we?  We have our own problems to deal with."

And that they do.  That they do.  I won't bore you with them, even though they're not all that boring.  But, hey, this blog's for my problems, bitches-- and don't you forget it.  

My eldest sister was born in 1967.  Flaxen-hued hair and movie star sunglasses.  My favorite picture of her was snapped when she was maybe four-- stricken with a high fever and her cheeks all splotchy and her hair all stringy like hay, she was clad in a light blue nightshirt and was in the middle of racing across her bed.  A picture snapped at just the right moment-- a crazed look in her boiling eyes.  She looks wild and gentle and fun and haphazard all at once.  

The middle one bounded in like Tigger ten years later.  All curls and piss and vinegar-- a personality far bigger than the house that tried, in vain, to contain it.  She was and is still all over the place.  There's a picture of us on riding toys in my grandparent's driveway.  She's in a gray dress and I'm in a sailor's suit.  She's making me laugh, or maybe it's the other way around.  Either way, our heads are both thrown back in glee.  My grandfather's Chevy Impala is visible in front of us with its reverse lights on.  "Oh, look," I say, on the rare occasions when I'm looking at the photo album with someone from the family, "there's Zayda, about to back over two of his grandchildren."

1980 was my year.  I wore my bowl-cut and my sweatsuits for far too long-- but you knew that.  I wanted to change my name to "Moe."  I wanted to go to Catholic School so I could wear a tie and a v-neck sweater.  I wanted to grow up and marry a Korean girl as I watched the 1988 Seoul Olympics in wide-eyed fascination.  I found the page and the stage and my dick and its tricks and I emulated newscasters and Peter Sellers and I practiced my pratfalls in my room and in Borders Books & Music.  I don't know what my favorite picture of me is-- they all kind of make me sad, for one reason or another.  Maybe one of me onstage-- being somebody else.

Maybe this one, from "Pirates of Penzance."  Maybe because it's the last time I felt like I really had control, command, like I really knew what I was doing.  Maybe because you can see my wife, if you squint, lurking there in the background, backing me up.  Maybe because I really am the very model of a modern Major-General.  Maybe because this is what I was meant to do.

Maybe.      

I Know the Number

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 22, Verse 15

"A youngster's heart is filled with rebellion,

but punishment will drive it out of him."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I have to imagine that, just considering probability and my smart mouth, I was at least occasionally punished as a child.  If I was, though, I don't remember it, and it's not because I was concussed by my father's closed fist.  No, that never happened in our house.  There was awful blue carpeting on the stairs and the word "fuck" was said with greater frequency than the word "salt" or "and", but there was never any hitting.

At least, not of me.

He gave my sister a few good smacks, though, though he claims, conveniently, to not remember.  We tell these stories, laughing, in the living room.  He laughs too, which, (I guess?) is good.  There was the time where we were all placing our ice cream orders and he asked her what she wanted and she answered, "Vanilla".  He said, "What?"  And she made the mistake of uttering, "I said 'vanilla', what are you, deaf?"  That earned her a thick Israeli palm straight across her face.  Another time, he threw a full cup of water ice in her face, though I don't know what crass remark of hers prompted that frozen projectile.  Maybe I would have gotten smacked around if I had been more into cold desserts.

There was a decent amount of verbal "abuse", if you want to call it that.  Of course, I'm sure any child born to an Israeli father could claim at least the same, if not far worse.  He screamed at us as if we were privates in his regiment.  Eating our Cinnamon Toast Crunch too loudly the breakfast table on Sunday received an emphatic, "JEEE-SUS CHRIST!  ENOUGH WITH DA FACKING CRUNCHING, ALREADY!"  I never fully considered the irony until this moment of a man whose native tongue is Hebrew using "Jesus Christ" as an exclamation.  Classic.  Breaking something on the kitchen floor-- a plate or what have you-- resulted in him asking, rhetorically, I learned, "WHAT ARE YOU, FACKING KEE-DEEING ME?"  Making fun of him and his accent, we quickly learned, was enough to make the man almost completely implode.  One day he took us on an ill-fated trip to visit the Pepperidge Farm factory.  He got hopelessly lost.  He stopped by the side of the road at some movie set-looking old gas station where the pumps still said "Esso" and asked some toothless hump in a pair of overalls, "Excuse me-- how do I get to, uh-- Pappen-dridge Farm?"  The farmer cocked his head and stared at him.  My sister and I almost passed out in the back seat of the Buick from holding in our piss as we exploded in a torrent of laughter.  He turned to us with a virulence I had never seen before and screamed, "SHAT DEE FUCK UP, YOU TWO ASSHOLES!  I AM TRYING TO DO SOMETHING FACKIN' NICE FOR YOU FUCKS!"

This, of course, made us laugh harder until my neck almost burst.  He drove us home in silence and said nothing to either of us for two days.    

In spite of all this, and more, I don't ever recall being sent to my room-- I always ended up running there myself before anyone could send me there.  He yelled and screamed at me, but I don't ever remember an explicit "punishment" per say.  Once he poked me in the stomach with his index finger, I don't remember what the hell that was about.  And I remember crying and, you know, running to my room.  Fortunately, I liked my room.  I think I even liked crying in it.  I am relieved, of course, that it was just yelling.  His father used to chase him around the house and, once he caught him, he'd beat the shit out of my father with his shoe.  And you know how they made shoes back then.

My mother, of course, was a different story.  Once I did something bad-- who the hell knows what it was now-- and she told me she was disappointed in me, and I considered wearing black for a year.  Maybe it was the time that I took an axe to the basement wall-- that one's still kind of hard to explain, even now, with almost four years' experience in psych.  I told my parents, when they asked why I'd done it, that I was bored.  They came down a lot harder on my sister, who was supposed to be babysitting me but who was watching "The Hard Way" (James Woods, Michael J. Fox-- great flick) in the basement at full volume and I could have been building an atomic bomb on the sofa next to her and she'd never have known.  I don't know what her punishment was, if anything, but at least she didn't get a frozen custard or something slammed into her face.  Was I punished?  No.  Would a normal parent have taken money out of my allowance until I was 27 to pay for the damage I did to the wall?  Yes.  I guess they're not normal.

Remember how I told you earlier that I liked my room?  Well, once I called my mother a "witch" and she chased me around the house, which was quite an athletic feat for a woman like her.  I was stunned that she was up to it, and that scared me.  She almost got ahold of my arm but I broke free and I was terrified about what she was capable of doing to me if she'd caught me-- I'd never seen her like that.  I ran into my room and I slammed the door shut, and shoved my bureau up against it.

"DON'T TOUCH ME!" I screamed, "I KNOW THE NUMBER!!!!"

There was silence on the other side of the door.

"What number?" she asked breathlessly from the hallway.

"THE CHILD ABUSE HOTLINE!  I KNOW THE NUMBER!"

Truthfully, I didn't know the number.  I did, however, know the slogan "In case of child abuse: know the number" courtesy of the commercials that played endlessly during episodes of "Rescue: 911" that any child psychologist worth his salt would have known I shouldn't have been watching.  I also, not that it mattered, didn't have a phone in my bedroom.

I don't know if I'm going to punish my children.  I didn't really know what grounding was, other than ordering an airplane to land, until I was in high school, though I'd heard it said enough on "Diff'rent Strokes".  I don't know that not getting punished spoiled me, I think it just made me weird and fucked up, and I suppose that's punishment enough.  Still, all things being equal, I'm learning to be okay with it.        

Wrong, Sir, Wrong!

"What's wrong with the world?"

That's how it begins.  I mean, who wouldn't want to read on, right?

I suppose you'd like to know what's this all about, what is he doing here, what does he want from us, and why should we stop by here to visit?  Well, these are all good questions, and I want to be up front with you right from the start that I don't have very many answers.  At least, the answers that I do have aren't very good.

After two tries at anonymous blogging, I've decided to out myself.  To go public.  All natural.  Less sodium.  Full retard.  Why?  I don't know, because I'm stupid, I guess.  Because anonymity was too easy, too safe, too... fun?  Well, I'm a married man with twins, and Christ knows I shouldn't be having too much fun.  Or sodium.

Anyway, I was sitting at home one night this week picking my feet in Poughkeepsie when I had to pee.  "Bodily functions are so annoying," my wife frequently opines, and she's right.  They get in the way.  They're tiresome and routine, more so for some than others, and they interrupt moments of brilliance.  I know, I know, you're going to say that your bowel movements have inspired moments of genius, right?  You realized you just had to propose to so-and-so in mid stream, or you had that idea for invisible, razor-flavored chewing gum while you were straining for glory.  Well, you're just silly, that's what you are.

And I'm silly, too-- cuz it happened to me.  There I was, standing before the toilet when I looked up at our shelf that contains several literary offerings.  There's "What's Your Poo Telling You?" which is more reference guide than light reading, and there's a book I stole from Muhlenberg College's health center back in 2002 before I graduated called "Making Responsible Decisions About Sex", there's "Instant! Maori" and I've looked at that several times and I don't know what the fuck that's all about or how it got into our house much less our bathroom.

And then there's that other book.

Before my wife and I had kids, we used to do silly stuff together.  I don't mean stuff with Saran-Wrap and dental floss-- I mean quixotic adventures, stuff that every young couple does when they're all lost in schmoopiness and they have no clue about the cost of a tank of gas.  One day we decided to take a field trip to the Herr's Snack Factory in Nottingham, Pennsylvania, a mere 47.2 miles away from where we lived at the time.  We were the only adults on the tour not attached to any children, but that was not an experience totally unfamiliar to us.  We tagged along with the random, tow-headed, mulleted kiddies.  We saw the big machines and the ladies in hairnets and surgical-style booties, we tasted chips that probably came off the factory floor and we were unceremoniously dumped off at the gift shop where we were expected to plunk down five times the price of our admission ticket on shit we can buy at WaWa on the way home.

But the best thing that you could possibly take home with you from the Herr's Snack Factory wasn't on sale at the gift shop at all-- it was free.

Fucking.  Free.

While my (not-quite-yet) wife visited the ladies room-- see?  bathrooms feature prominently in life, I'm telling you-- I wandered around the large waiting area between the restrooms and the gift shop and there, on a bench of sorts were strewn hundreds of little pale blue books that featured the Herr's logo on the bottom of the front cover, and the words

Chips of Wisdom

in the middle.

I picked one up and leafed through it.  Scanning the pages, I saw a lot of stuff about Proverbs, quarrelsome women, and prostitutes.  An eyebrow warily raised, I put it in my pocket.

A few minutes into the drive home, I pulled the book out of my pocket and tossed it over to the passenger seat.

"Here," I said to my short haired, bespectacled companion, "this should keep us entertained along Route 1."

And it did.  We laughed.  We wept.  We learned that we shouldn't visit our neighbor too often, or we might outstay our welcome.

Well, neighbor-- you'll never be able to outstay your welcome here.  You can visit as often as you like, and I encourage you to bring your friends.  You can even bring your Friends.  I hope you Like my new blog.  I hope you learn a thing or two about neighbors and prostitutes.  For instance, did you know that, "a prostitute is a dangerous trap; those cursed of God are caught in it"?

Well, apparently, it's true.  I know because I read it in a book I got at a potato chip factory.

Jim Herr, in his introduction to "Chips of Wisdom" states that he frequently referred to the Book of Proverbs when making important decisions in life and in commerce (I guess there aren't too many "quarrelsome women" in the Herr's Snack Foods empire, probably not too many prostitutes either) and he sought to edit and compile some of his Proverbs favorites into this neatly packaged, accessible little book.  Yes, I find some of it funny, and that will be reflected in this blog, but I hope I come across as genuine when I say that the goal behind this blog is not to poke fun at Jim Herr or "Chips of Wisdom" or Proverbs or Christianity or God.  If I poke fun at anyone here, it's going to be at me, because that's sort of what I've been doing ever since I learned how well self-deprecating humor fit my skin.

I want to use the Proverbs, and Jim Herr's quest and desire for wisdom, as springboards for my own personal wrastlin' with faith, existential issues, my religion, my professional and social struggles, to make sense of my family and my life-- and, sure, to have a little fun, too.

But, not too much, remember?  Because I am a devoted husband and a father of two fifteen-month-olds and a soon-to-be-again dog owner, we're going to limit the fun to Monday and Thursday postings, and see how it goes.  I hope you like it here, and I hope you come back for more.  Otherwise, you're WRONG, SIR, WRONG!  You LOSE!  You get NOTHING!

Sorry.  Jim Herr, Willy Wonka, same thing.

"Chips of Wisdom" seeks to answer "What's wrong with the world?".  I suspect you already know, and that's good.  That means you're going to be my friend.  So hold on.

Here we go.