Our Father Who Art in Accord, NY

My kids are far away — one in South Carolina, one in California, with me in New York — and they’re solidly adult, each on the verge of 40 (twins, yes, gal and guy), so my sense of being their father is mostly nostalgic these days. I’m off the hook: They’re doing more than okay, in a time when doing more than okay, if you’re under 45, is a real achievement. 

My part in that achievement? I asked them, last Fathers Day, to tell me about three things I did well as a father. Their responses were similar: that I brought them quite a bit of fun, that I encouraged them to pursue their interests and not worry too much about the other stuff, and that I paid attention enough to really know them without making them too uncomfortable.

For me, parenting was an act of surrender. I still remember this one moment when my toddler son was being really annoying, and I really wanted just to leave him alone in the playroom and go write a novel. Then I recalled my own father, how he always distanced himself from us with his aloof intellectuality and his depressiveness, and I counseled myself: You can break that curse here and now. Resist being a family man and you’ll make yourself and everyone else miserable. Surrender to it and you’ll have a great time! 

Then and there I gave up the idea of controlling my life, and I had the most fun imaginable for the next sixteen years. Then they went to college.

These days my sense of fatherhood seems to be triggered by all young people. On the plane home from our camping trip in Utah and Wyoming, Susan and I were seated next to a 20-year-old woman who was reading a book (!) and was about to join the crew of a sailing ship headed from New York to Nova Scotia. An adventurer! We had lots to tell her about Nova Scotia, and about our own hitchhiking adventures half a century ago, and our lives as artists — she was much more interested than our kids have ever been! — and we ended up basically inviting her to come live with us any time. She won’t, of course, but who knows, maybe we’ll hear from her someday . . .

We’ve also been sharing our house, whenever we go away, with cat sitters and tropical fish-feeders who come to us through Trusted Housesitters, and who have turned out so far to be young artists bravely seeking to get their footing in this difficult world. I feel very fatherly towards them, too, and wish I had a foundation to give them grants. Here’s a haunting song that one of them released last week while she was caring for our cat. It’s called “Aliens,” and it’s well worth your clicking and listening. Steven Spielberg should’ve heard it before he made “Disclosure Day.” 

I mean no disrespect to Spielberg. His film is entertaining enough and is very much on “our side.” It opens, ironically enough, with an appalling cage fight, and it includes a stirring little speech about how empathy is key to the next phase of human evolution. If I were 14 years old, I’d consider it a profound film, but at 74, I found it to be a cinematic comic book.

I do like an occasional cinematic comic book.

But as the song “Aliens” says, “No one’s coming to save us/not before we ef it all up.” Ef it all up, indeed. Right now I’m feeling like a totally outraged daddy to all those women who’ve been raped by Andrew Tate and his brother (see the current issue of the New Yorker, with Vance and Rubio cage-fighting on the cover), and by the entire generation of women who seem so pitifully vulnerable to the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and his many imitators. I’m also feeling like the where-did-I-go-wrong daddy to all those young men who actually attended Trump’s 80th birthday cage fight and are thrilled by the hyper-masculine gender performance of Pete Hegseth and his ilk. Once upon a time — my time — such performance was seen as sheer jackassery. Now it’s the spear tip of the new fascism.

Did you watch the Knicks scrambling to defeat the Spurs over and over again last week? You should’ve, it was fabulous and we all need to learn how to be American. But to what degree? The circus atmosphere of the pre-game shows appalled me — the fireworks and flashing lights and bellowing emcees and prancing cheerleaders, the constant spectacle (and the stupidly patriotic Jeep commercials), all of which gave proof through the night that our country is a nation of orphans who are being carefully cultivated to prefer bloodletting and loud noise to sorrow and reckoning.

O to be a ReFounding Father, helping to awaken America to its democratic ideals and to calm its savagery. Ha! Foolish man. Even my own kids are 1,000 and 3,000 miles away, respectively.