Lefty Parent

A few months ago, I heard my 23-year-old son Eric say that he used to lie regularly in his early teens (including at times to his parents), but that in recent years he had made the decision to stop and be more genuine in his interactions with people. That caught my attention, and since it was too much to go into at the time, and Eric had too much on his plate (with his struggling new business) to write about it himself, I asked him if maybe I could interview him on the subject. He agreed, and last Sunday I finally did that interview.

In the raw interview my questions and his answers are kind of rambling at times. I have tightened them up here for brevity. continue reading »

I was one of the few male students at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo Michigan to choose to take “Status of Women” as one of my general studies classes. “You’re taking that?” was the reaction of most of my male student peers, but I must say there were at least a few other brave young men who attended as well. One of the key themes in the assigned reading was the idea of patriarchy as a social organizing principle and a key context for assessing the status of women in our society and others around the world. I was already familiar with the concept, from frequent “lectures” over my teenage years from my “Feminist Aunts”, particularly my mom’s dear friend Mary Jane (with her penchant for making up provocative words to humorously encapsulate topics where needed), who described the commoditization and male control of women’s sexuality and reproductive function as “patriarchal pimperialism”.

So based on this pedigree, and with enough ego still to try and show my professor and fellow students that I was no shrinking male violet in the world of “women’s studies” and feminism, I decided that for my final class project I would take on this concept of patriarchy and how it impacted me in my own life. Rather than write an essay, I decided on the outside-the-box approach of doing a comic strip, drawn with my own style of minimalist stick figures, and titled “Captain Patriarch and the Forces of Male Justice”. (Incidentally, I showed it later to my “Feminist Aunt” Mary Jane and she hooted with laughter, her eyes twinkled, and she indicated that her young apprentice had done well.) continue reading »

Best known for coining the phrase “global village” and arguing that the properties of media itself are more significant in changing our lives than the content it presents, Marshall McLuhan’s first major book, The Mechanical Bride (1951), was a fascinating look at American culture seen through its popular culture, particularly advertisements and comic strips. I first read the book at age seventeen, but his approach to looking at contemporary popular culture as folklore or mythology, has stuck with me all my life, and a tool I have taught to my kids to help them better understand the context of the world they are living in. I find in our own times, that the glitzy color magazine ads and the highly produced TV commercials are particularly interesting in revealing a cultural context in which we live. continue reading »

My senior year in high school (1971-1972) I was a wannabe radical, enjoying the intoxicating stories of my high school history teacher (an avowed communist) about the group that plotted and killed the Czar in 1881, the Russian revolution of 1905 and its failure to seize power, and the Bolsheviks who thirteen years later successfully did so, leading to my own flirting with the ideas of anarchism, entombed in old dusty volumes housed in the sub-basement of the University of Michigan graduate library.

Throughout my childhood and youth, whatever compelling story I heard, read, saw in the movies or saw on television, I wanted to emulate, and became a source of play and fantasy. Now 16 and a senior in high school (I skipped kindergarten if you’re doing the math), I was enthralled by the story my “Modern Russian History” teacher was telling us. He was a larger than life figure, an “out” Trotskyite and a heck of storyteller, and I imagine only in a really liberal university town like Ann Arbor could he unabashedly do his thing and flaunt his card-carrying credentials. continue reading »

When I was a kid growing up in my low-crime, friendly, moderately sized hometown of Ann Arbor, my main means of transport as a youth was by bicycle, and it was the main vehicle of my liberty, starting at about age eleven or twelve, to go where and when I wanted. For my kids, growing up in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles (perhaps America’s most traditional and iconic suburb), in a greater urban area with millions of people and the local news just often enough with stories to freak parents out, they were not given that liberty, and depended on their parents to be their chauffeurs. Or at least until that wondrous future day when they could get their own driver’s license and be able to drive a car themselves. continue reading »

There are moments in life when you recognize the passage from youth to adulthood. Sometimes those moments are obvious community rituals, like a coming of age ceremony. Other times it is a more private or impromptu moment when a parent or other adult acknowledges that you have joined the club, and no longer attract that extra scrutiny and judgment of your behavior that is applied (rightly or wrongly) to youth. I participated in no formal coming of age ritual in my own youth, but I certainly remember informal moments when it is clear that you have transitioned from being treated as a dependent to being treated more as a peer. continue reading »

It’s funny sometimes the things that motivate you. Like many teenagers so shaky as to their own self-esteem and therefore so easily embarrassed when they are with a parent in public, my discomfort with my mom’s breakdown in a hotel in Brussels during our 1970 trip to Europe inspired me to step up and assert the ability to lead my family when necessary. It was a milestone in my relationship with my mom and her transition from iconic parental authority figure to fellow human being and more of a peer. I was perfectly capable of asserting my own personal authority when the situation called for it.

It would be five years later (see “The Five AM Conversation”) when I would realize that the transition of our relationship was complete and that she would no longer set the context and tone of my life or be a necessary “star” in my personal cosmos (though she would continue to be dear to me and an asset in my life). continue reading »

So much of America’s strengths and weaknesses, and what differentiates us from even our closest friends and allies in Western Europe, is our culture’s embrace (or at least our Anglo-Saxon “ruling tribe’s” embrace) of Calvinism, morphed to some degree as the “Protestant” or “Puritan Ethic.” This ideology, developed by John Calvin in the 16th century during the Protestant Reformation, threads its way through the enlightenment and industrial revolution in Europe, and rode the boats of the Puritans to the “new world”, and continues today to be deeply woven into religious and secular thought and institutions in America. continue reading »

After years of dementia, with barely anything left of who she was except a glint in her eyes of recognition when she saw me, and the ability to somehow still swing a tennis racket, my mom ended this incarnation, to relief and sadness on my part. Reflecting on the entirety of her 83 years of life, particularly the first half of it, I am struck by how she managed to use her imagination to make up for a lack of resources and “be effective” challenging conventional wisdom, including aspects of the liberal progressivism of the university town where she spent the best years of her adulthood.

My partner Sally and I were in a hotel in Denver where Sally was attending a conference and I was just enjoying a long weekend away from Los Angeles. I was woken up by a call after midnight from the emergency room at Presbyterian Memorial Hospital in Van Nuys. The nurse on the phone said that my mom had been admitted, in a coma, after collapsing at her assisted-living residence, and that the doctor needed instructions on whether to try and take the measures to keep her alive. continue reading »

My mom had always been an activist and forever relished a “good fight” for the things she believed in, but found herself, at age 76 after moving out to Los Angeles to live with us, diagnosed with dementia and a final seven-year struggle with the gradual loss of memories and the general unraveling of her once great mind. My mom was a fighter to the end, but with the continuing loss of her faculties, that fight got more and more quixotic and convoluted, and difficult for those of us around her. For me experiencing this with her, every day I grieved the loss of one more piece of the bigger-than-life person she had been.

As I indicated in another vignette (The “D” Word), a few years after my dad’s death in 1984, my mom was diagnosed with an atrial fibrillation that was causing her heart to not pump blood properly. For years it was treatable, but finally not, and the oxygen flow to her brain became permanently compromised, leading to the dementia. To my mom and the intellectual powerhouse she had once been, her diagnosis carried with it such profound fear that she could only deal with it by denial. When I tried to discuss the issue further on the way home from the doctor’s, my mom glared at me and told me candidly that she could not deal with the thought of “losing her mind” and so she did not want to talk about it again. continue reading »