a votive
The Sad Dads of the National
This caught my eye while scrolling emails Friday afternoon into evening, and I stopped, clicked on, and read Petrusich's essay that'll be in next week's print edition of The New Yorker. Her opening paragraph triggered my own deepest ruefulness about life; and though essays in The Atlantic and in The New Yorker tend to go long, it was interesting and she held my attention right through to the end. Here's the picture she used, and her opening paragraph.
Last fall, the National débuted a new piece of merchandise: a black zippered sweatshirt featuring the words “sad dads” in block letters. The band — which formed in 1999, in Brooklyn — was lampooning its reputation as a font of midlife ennui, the sort of rudderless melancholy that takes hold when a person realizes that the dusty hallmarks of American happiness (marriage, children, a job in an office) aren’t a guarantee against despair. For more than two decades, this has been the National’s grist: not the major devastations but the strange little ache that feels like a precondition to being human. No amount of Transcendental Meditation, Pilates, turmeric, rose quartz, direct sunlight, jogging, oat milk, sleep hygiene, or psychoanalysis can fully alleviate that ambient sadness. Part of it is surely existential—our lives are temporary and inscrutable; death is compulsory and forever—but another part feels more quotidian and incremental, the slow accumulation of ordinary losses. Maybe there’s a person you once loved but lost touch with. A friend who moved to a new town. An apple tree that stood outside your bedroom window, levelled to make way for broadband cable. An old dog. A former colleague. We are always losing, or leaving, or being left, in ways both minor and vast. “The grief it gets me, the weird goodbyes,” Matt Berninger, the band’s vocalist, sings on “Weird Goodbyes,” a recent song featuring Justin Vernon, of Bon Iver. Berninger steels himself to confront the next loss: “Memorize the bathwater, memorize the air / There’ll come a time I’ll wanna know I was here.”
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Petrusich uses the word ennui, which fits better than my word ruefulness. Or melancholy. It's come along with me my whole way, back as far as when I first paused for self-reflection. Maybe as a child sent to sit in a corner for a while to think about what I had said or done. Something like a pet hearing "Bad Dog!" for the first Time but certainly not the last Time, and coming all the rest of the way with the sense that, having been told so by people I loved who knew me, it was so.
Petrusich's opener offers many poignant examples to trigger the mind. Not the big things, but what she calls "the strange little aches." The day I was surprised and a little ache to realize that what I'd thought was an enjoyable friendship had been one-sided. Words I'd like to say, or feelings I'd like to express to several someones but the chance will never come because, as Petrusich puts it, life is temporary and "death is compulsory and forever." Moments when something was said to me that changed everything. Questions that pop into my mind and realizing that it's too late forever to ask my mother - - there's "history" there, knowledge, that died with her last breath and cannot be retrieved from the crematory with the dust and ashes. At this age, you are obliquely, ongoingly aware that everything is climaxing somehow and it's beyond your control.
So, am I owned by "regrets"? Not at all, by no means, though there must be regrets in most every life. There are words I cannot say, there are people to whom I cannot apologize. There are things that I cannot do, and there are things that I cannot undo. As Petrusich says, it's little things.
All the cedar trees are gone from The Old Place that for long years I thought of as "Cedar Hill." Those ancient light pink azaleas with the slightest sweet fragrance, they're gone; as a boy I helped plant them, as a middle aged man going into old age, I helped keep them nourished, watered, going. I can't ask my sister these family history questions. A few years ago, I rejoiced when my brother relocated from Louisiana to Pensacola, but now it's not distance, it's age; he's closer now, but would that he had moved next door. I have helped people, but I have hurt people, and people have hurt me. Things cannot be undone, words cannot be unspoken. Someone wrote that "A child is someone who moves through your life on their way to becoming their own person," and sure enough they all did exactly that.
It's not longings by any means, it's the little things that slipped by, most of which only I was aware of and that in all the world only matter to me. Memories stuck in the brain. Words spoken to me. Dreams that didn't come true though maybe better things did. Something about Robert Frost's roads diverging in a yellow wood. Out over the water, a dock that's no longer there. A white empress camellia that my mother grafted and that surprised me with magnificent blooms every fall into winter for many decades, is gone. After all the years, driving away and leaving a daughter at college. A little stretch of white beach. A moment in a car. A telephone number and an address. A sidewalk around the block, where I learned to skate. The birthday of someone long dead. A grandson moving far away. A face in my mind. The memory of a day, date, hour, moment. An enormous gardenia bush that filled my world with white blossoms and wonderful fragrance, there's a garage there now. An old family home that's - - a Publix store and parking lot are there now. An afternoon, an evening, a night, a weekend. Petrusich's phrase, "the slow accumulation of ordinary losses."
Because it's all so subtly transient, things gone that made us who we were, and life what it was at the Time, maybe just for a little while. And it's not just me, wishing you long years, your Time will come.
A verse in a lifelong favorite hymn,
I bind unto myself today
the virtues of the starlit heav’n,
the glorious sun’s life-giving ray,
the whiteness of the moon at even,
the flashing of the lightning free,
the whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth, the deep salt sea
around the old eternal rocks.
But nothing is what it seems, surely not life itself. Plato's cave and the fire and shadows, eh? In an incomprehensibly vast Universe we are specks on a speck, dust and to dust shall we return. And the old rocks are not eternal at all.
What CAN I do then? Even after she had no idea who I was, I used to visit my aged grandmother in her nursing home, on the chaos theory possibility that an act of lovingkindness in the 1980s might, like a tossed rock spreading ripples in a pond, prompt a similar act of lovingkindness half a century later for someone whom I love as dearly as my grandmother once loved me.
I can light a candle, a votive.
T