Went with my Dad. The gasoline-powered log splitter wouldn't crank up. I was down visiting family for the Christmas season. I helped him hook it to the trailer hitch on the pickup and then rode along.
"Hey there Earl. Doing as well as could be expected, thank you. Oh, because it's my first Christmas without my wife of 60 years. Yes it's hard. I keep thinking it will get easier but not so far."
"Sorry to hear that, Ray. I lost my own wife three 'n a half years ago and even now I hear something and think it's her in the next room. Yeah, exactly. Hurts fresh each time. So, you got anyone come by to spend Christmas with? It's not good to be by yourself all alone."
"This is my son Allan from New York, he came down and has been with me. And my daughter and her husband, and her daughter with her husband and children, they all came for Christmas, and I fixed a baked ham and tried my hand at biscuits, but I just can't get them to come out the way she could."
The proprietor and a couple of his workers and the previous customer all continued to catch up with my Dad, discussing the weather, the commercialization of Christmas, and whether their respective cable channels were going to cover the Clemson v Notre Dame bowl game and whether the suspended players would make a difference.
All this before explaining what brought us here: "I pulled and pulled on the starter cord, got the choke set and the fuel line turned on, but not so much as a cough out of it. Now, Earl, you do know if you go out there and give it a yank and it goes 'pucka pucka pucka' and starts right up, I'm gonna have to say a few words that the preacher wouldn't approve of."
I gave a nod and a wave when mentioned, but throughout the conversation I was feeling aware that I could not have done this. I don't mean I couldn't have brought in a piece of equipment and asked to have them look at it, but I would have approached them politely and they'd have politely listened to my description and jotted down a work ticket.
It's not that I'm a snob or that I'm unwilling to open up and talk. It's also not really accurate that these fellows were doing some kind of competitive "manly men" contest and actively trying to disqualify guys who don't measure up. If anything, during all the times in my life when I've entered all-male social environments like this, they WANT me to belong, they're squirmy and uncomfortable if I DON'T fit in; they would welcome me if possible, but they would be waiting expectantly for me to send the appropriate signals, the boy shorthand that somehow reassures them that I'm like them, that I'm one of them and don't think of myself as different.
Except of course that I do. There's some male expression of being knowledgable and confident and competent in a certain way, and a willingness to pretend to more of that than you actually have, an amusing pretense that usually isn't done seriously, a pretense that's sort of an in-joke where you let the other guys see through it; there's a rhythm and a meter to it, and I've never been good at it, never learned how to play. I often see myself reflected back as they tend to see me, prissy and standoffish, moderately oblivious, awkward and perhaps hostile or more often / more likely just not companionably at ease with them.
There's a lifetime history of feeling uncomfortable in groups of males, of not understanding what is being asked of me. I think it's better now because I have my own confidence and they do like confidence. But they don't find my behavioral nuances reassuring and comforting. I'm haunted by that lifetime history, too. I step into rooms like these and immediately think "Here we go again".
My Dad always engaged with me on a different channel. He's never excluded me for not being one of the boys. When he is in this kind of context himself, it always sounds to my ears like he's speaking a second language, with impressive fluency, but it's not really who he is natively either. I've found it difficult to get him to talk about fitting or not fitting in among males. When he discusses it at all, he sees in in terms of class and education, of himself the guy with the physics doctorate not being a pompous intellectual. I can't get him talking about whether he felt isolated growing up or whether diving into an intense college curriculum felt like an escape from a world he was never going to really fit into or if he actually identified with the boys and the brainy stuff was an extra, an add-on element rather than a fundamental difference that set him apart either to himself or to the other kids.
Unlike my Mom, he never read my book. I think he read some earlier writings I created back in my 20s, but he associates all that with a "bad time in my life" and I think he views the whole subject matter as an unhealthy obsession I had, or even a breakdown. (Well, to be sure, I did get detained in a psychiatric facility during the season when I first came out).
His current line on the book is that he isn't interested in reading it because it contains "profanity". I'm toying with the idea of doing a global search and replace on every occurrence of "shit" and "fuck" and any other four-letter terms and printing the results as a special Dad-edition. I dont know... this could just be a convenient excuse and it's actually the subject matter that makes him uncomfortable. Still, my mom's death last fall underlines the non-permanence of opportunity.
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