It Takes a Worried Man (8 page)

Kirsten is supposed to start her second round of chemo on my birthday, but it ends up being postponed from Monday to Thursday. My birthday is pretty uneventful, except that Kirsten makes me a yummy tray of brownies. I let it slip to my advisees that it’s my birthday, and my advisees are all mad that I didn’t tell them sooner. I tell them it’s because, you know, I am the adult, and a lot of other advisors make a big deal of their advisees’ birthdays, but I don’t, and it would feel weird to me to have them make a big deal of my birthday. And it does feel a little weird, the next day, when they bring in chips and soda and a giant sheet cake decorated with “Happy Birthday Mr. Halpin,” but I am really touched. It is one more example of people’s tremendous kindness. It is especially nice because the ringleader is this girl who, I kid you not, got suspended 14 times last year but managed to have the highest GPA in the school, and you may recall what Kirsten said to me about how I like smart troublemakers best. I spent at least an hour in meetings for each suspension in addition to numerous other meetings with her and/or her teachers, and it was hard work, but I always felt like she was worth it, and this year she has become this model citizen. So this is probably the nicest thing that happens to me on my birthday.

And I think, well, a lot of my advisees have some tough stuff going on in their lives and they’d probably like for the advisory to make a big deal over their birthday too, and I’m kind of a selfish shit for never arranging it. Oh well.

Kirsten has chemo on Thursday, and on Friday we head down to her parents’ house for Birthday Fest 2000. Basically, Kirsten’s uncle, aunt, brother, grandfather and husband all have November birthdays, and so last summer Kirsten’s dad got the idea to get everybody together for a big fiesta, and it was supposed to be in Florida where Kirsten’s grandfather lives, but then Kirsten got diagnosed, so now it’s in Massachusetts instead.

We get there and Kirsten almost immediately goes for a nap which lasts a couple of hours. I somehow find myself alone in the living room with Kirsten’s uncle, who’s a republican, and her grandfather, who’s…well, you know, fascist is a term that is really overused, but I do think it applies here, and he’s also like eighty-five, so he can say whatever outrageous thing comes into his mind without fear that you’ll tell him to shut up.

Kirsten is snoozing, and the topic of the election comes up, and Kirsten’s uncle says some predictably Republican things, which are annoying, but, ok, and her grandfather says something incoherent about Palm Beach and “Old Lieberstein, or whatever his name is….I guess Gore wanted the New York people….” and Kirsten’s uncle, who is a Republican but not, as far as I can tell, a bigot, tries to steer this in a more acceptable direction by saying, “Yeah, I guess Gore wanted to appeal to the northeast or something,” but Gramps parries with, “Yeah! Northeast Israel!” and I get up and have to leave the room.

I find something to occupy myself, and this is a very nice thing her parents have done–I even got a customized souvenir hat for the occasion–but I am sort of on the outside looking in, because I’m not a blood relative and know Kirsten’s aunts and uncles only about as well as you can know people you’ve met three times at various weddings, and also because all I want for my birthday is a healthy wife, and I can’t have that, so I feel grumpy and not at all festive.

And I have to doff my souvenir cap to the whole family, because Kirsten was sort of dreading this, and even told me that my role during this whole event was to keep her from snapping at people, but they handle it perfectly. They acknowledge that she’s bald, and Gramps even teases her about it, but they don’t fawn, and nobody clutches either of us by the arm, looks meaningfully at us and says, “so how
are
you,” or anything like that. We’re just at a party, and yes it’s a party that’s been moved a thousand miles just so we can be there, but we are not the stars, and that is wonderful.

Which is not to say that I have any fun. After a few hours, The Slide Show starts. Now, I have sat through The Slide Show a few times in the past, and the first time it was entertaining, because I hadn’t seen all these pictures of Kirsten as a kid, and it is always fun to see how awful people looked in the 70′s, and it’s funny when Kirsten’s dad embarrasses her mom with that picture of her bending over, and the second time it was mildly amusing, and this time…well, I am grumpy already, and there are twelve carousels of slides to get through. Twelve.

After the first four, I head off to take a nap, and I am just about almost asleep when Rowen comes out to the couch, climbs up and begins to jump up and down on my rib cage. I bark something at her and she runs back to The Slide Show crying, she is crushed, and though my reaction is not really inappropriate to having somebody unexpectedly stomp on you when you are half asleep, I made my daughter cry, and I feel like a total asshole.  We eventually make up and end up playing while The Slide Show goes on, and we take a cake break and then head home before they’ve even gotten to carousel eleven.

I talk to my mom a lot. I always have. I love my mom, and I even like her, which seems like a relatively rare gift, but she still gets on my nerves sometimes in that mom way. And I am perfectly willing to admit that this is at least half my fault. You know how it is–your friend could say something to you, and you’d react like, “wow, that’s great advice–my friend is so wise,” but if your mom said the exact same words, you’d react like, “Jeez, mom! Shut up! Let me live my own life!”

So when my mom ventures into the spiritual, I get kind of annoyed. In our initial conversations after the diagnosis, she says that she hopes I’m not mad at God. Now, to be honest, except for the Keith Richards thing, I am really not mad at God, but I kind of feel like I should defend that position once my mom stakes out the opposite one. So we have a short talk about this, and she can tell I’m getting annoyed, so she backs off, but not before telling me that she hopes I don’t think I’m cursed or something, but that shit just happens. Now, I do find it pretty hard to square the idea of a just and loving God with a lot of the horrible suffering that goes on in the world, much of it worse than mine, but I decide to let it lie.

It doesn’t come up again until weeks later, when she asks how I’m feeling, and I say sad, and she says, “well, you must be feeling a lot of anger,” and I say I’m really not, and she says, “Well, I mean the unfairness of it all must be making you angry,” and I say “No, I’m really not angry, I’m just sad,” and I think but don’t say, “Jeez! three weeks ago you didn’t want me to be angry, and now you want me to be angry! What the hell!”

And I have told her the truth. I am really not angry at all. I think maybe I get to skip this stage. When your dad falls over dead for no reason when you are nine years old, that strips you of your feeling of invulnerability pretty quickly. I remember when my dad died thinking that this kind of thing didn’t happen to me, but I got over that pretty quickly. So I think most people feel invulnerable to tragedy until their first tragedy strikes, and then they get angry. I’ve already had my first tragedy, so this time around I had no illusions that I was in some way protected from this kind of thing. In fact, I am so keenly aware that tragedy doesn’t have any special reason to avoid me that I spent a lot of time when I was happy waiting for the other shoe to drop. When Rowen was born healthy, and we were in love, and I finally landed a job at a small school in the city, and then we made a bucketload of money selling a condo above a lunatic, I felt uneasy. It seemed like it was all too good to be true. And, as it turns out, I was right.

So I am not outraged, I am not shocked, I am not surprised. I’m just kind of sad and resigned. Here we go again.

The worst part about being a teacher is not the kids. The kids are the best part, the whole reason why I love to get up and go to work early in the morning. Anybody who feels that the kids are the worst part of being a teacher probably should stop being a teacher.

No, the worst part of being a teacher is the grown-ups. In many other places I worked, it was many of my colleagues, but I am lucky now to work in a place where my colleagues are not a huge pain in the ass, and even the ones I disagree with a lot I respect for their commitment to their work.

But today for our faculty meeting we have a presentation by some education consultant, and these things are always horrible. I try very hard to keep an open mind, but I have been to enough of these things to know that they always suck: either you have someone reading incredibly boring shit off of overheads, or you break into small groups and talk about something pointless and write the results on big pieces of paper that you then post on the wall and discuss.

I also have to say that I have a prejudice against education consultants. They are all former teachers who couldn’t hack it for one reason or another and decided that their failure to make a career of teaching, along with the MBA or other degree they subsequently earned, gave them the expertise to go around the country charging huge fees to tell teachers what to do. I guess it’s nice work if you can get it, but to me it ranks below pornographer on the list of honest occupations that contribute something valuable to society. Which of course means that like pornographers, education consultants make much more money than teachers.

So I have to admit that I walk into this presentation feeling a little grumpy, but I try to keep an open mind, because you can usually get at least one valuable thing out of even the most stultifying presentation, but this one sucks from the start. What the guy basically sugests, after saying that our youth need to be developed, and that this means they all do calculus in the twelfth grade, (I have never taken calculus, and am therefore, I guess, undeveloped and not truly free. Or something.) with his jargon-laden PowerPoint slides, is that the existence of excellent teachers proves that everyone who’s not an excellent teacher could be if they just used his process.

After saying that his presentation is interactive, the consultant gets really defensive when we challenge anything he says, and he cuts us off and is generally disrespectful, and after one of my colleagues suggests that sometimes kids who can learn come into the classroom with a lot of baggage for whatever reason and that we need to figure out how to help them with that stuff too, he gets all huffy and says he is not going to spend his time talking about how this can’t be done, and that he doesn’t believe everyone in this room really believes in the kids, and that the people who complain the most are often the people who are struggling the most, while the people who still have that spark are sitting silent. I happen to know that the people who are sitting silent are actually passing notes about how much this presentation sucks, but I have been one of the people speaking up the most, so his point to me is clear, so I get up at this point and walk out of the presentation and find myself fairly shaking with rage.

I go sit in the nurse’s office and vent about some guy who doesn’t teach coming in here and questioning my commitment to my career because I didn’t swallow all of his bullshit. Would I always have been this angry about something like this? Probably, but in the past I probably would have kept sitting there. Am I courageous, or just a crank? Within about two minutes of venting, the nurse asks me how Kirsten is doing, and I find myself crying. So it’s all related somehow. Am I quicker to anger because of this? Am I quicker to walk out on something stupid because the seriousness of what’s happening to Kirsten has given me a “what the fuck” attitude about other stuff? I don’t know. All I know is that I am sad and that maybe I was lying when I told my mom I wasn’t angry.

I have been working on this theory that your punishment for making fun of someone is that, sooner or later, you become them. I know this doesn’t square with what I’ve said earlier about God only intervening in the world through people, but it seems like a pretty ironclad law of the universe.

Here is a partial list of people I have made fun of and subsequently become:

Dorky alumni who walk around your college campus buying crisp new sweatshirts for their toddlers.

People who like country music.

People who like punk rock.

People who revere Prince.

Adults who own video game systems. (This one is particularly egregious–Kirsten’s brother camped out at Wal-Mart to buy a PlayStation2, so we naturally made fun of him, and like a week later I was asking if he would give me his old PlayStation.)

People who talk on cellphones walking down the street or standing on the subway platform. Yep. I’ve done both.

Parents who talk incessantly about their cute kids.

Vegetarians.

Churchgoers.

The list could go on, but I guess you get the idea. Basically the only group of people I have made fun of on a consistent basis and have yet to become are Deadheads/Phish heads. So by the time you read this I will probably be in Vermont, dorky Ecuadoran hat on head, unkempt beard down to mid-chest, stoned out of my mind and thinking it’s cool that I paid thirty bucks to watch some guy play a vacuum cleaner.

The thing is, I don’t remember ever making fun of cancer patients or their spouses. Go figure.

As I previously mentioned, I was able to overcome Kirsten’s resistance to having video games in the house with a lot of pathetic pleading and with the serendipitous fact of her brother suddenly having an obsolete PlayStation on his hands.

What I basically said was that, you know, this was a very stressful time for me, and when she is feeling crappy and goes to bed at 8 o’clock, I have two hours to kill, during which time I could, theoretically, read, but I don’t seem to have the patience right now, and anyway I read a lot for work, or I can watch TV, and TV right now totally sucks….Well, okay, it has probably always totally sucked, but my tolerance for it right now is very low. Of course I still love
The Simpsons
, I like watching football on Sunday, and I would watch the Celtics if I thought they were not on the road to suckitude again, but that appears unlikely.

One of the reasons I lobby so hard for the video games is that I grew up with them, and they feel like comfort food for my brain. I was one of those kids who used to spend rolls of quarters on Space Invaders, Galaxian, and lesser-known classics like Red Baron, which is about the only game I was ever really good at. Even in college I used to sneak away to the arcade from time to time for a game of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or play the ancient Dig Dug game that was in the basement of our dorm. So right now when things are really shitty, maybe I am regressing. Or maybe I have only been pretending to be over video games for the last ten years. Probably it’s both.

So she caves, and we have her brother and sister-in-law over for dinner, and they give me the PlayStation and we hook it up after Rowen goes to bed (two things I have promised: no playing while Rowen is awake, which I am sure will be violated before this whole thing is over, and no shooting games, which I am pretty sure will not be violated, even though shooting games are really fun. I am enough of an old man and have taken enough of Thich Nhat Hanh to heart to be somewhat disturbed about casting myself in the role of someone essentially on a killing spree). They give me a racing game, because I said I couldn’t really handle anything brainy right now where I have to, you know, find the seven keys to unlock the wizard’s sock drawer or whatever.

The game is hard and really fun, and every night for the next three nights I sit there patiently racing that Audi TT which is a car I do sort of lust for in real life, and never getting a better result than second, but anyway it is a blast, even if it is kind of antisocial, and I have now actually started reading a book that I like and I feel kind of guilty about spending all my time racing, and I have also been working on writing this and feeling guilty about racing instead.

But the thing is, it doesn’t seem to work much as a stress-buster. I play until bedtime and am totally wired. I fall asleep but wake up a lot with visions of races playing in my head, and I sleep fitfully and feel like shit the next day. And I can’t wait to play again. I am guessing this must be sort of how crack addicts feel.

Anyway, surprise surprise, but while I will certainly get a lot of enjoyment out of this machine (thank you Andrew), it isn’t the solution. It isn’t going to get me through this. Owning stuff, even really cool stuff, isn’t going to get me through this. I wonder what will.