Our Weekend
We arrived Friday near dinner time and took Matthew to Bookbinders, a well known Philadelphia restaurant that had been closed for three and half years, renovated and reopened about two years ago. It’s an uber-expensive restaurant (What can I say, we were giddy to see our boy.) with people to greet you, to take your order, to pour your water, to assist you in the bathroom, and to stand around and look pretty. Even the owner walks about and introduces himself.
One more thing about the bathrooms. Diane tells me there were three hair care products lined up on the sink, but the attendant, after appraising Diane’s Do, offered her a fourth. And, after Matthew’s description (“Dad, they looked like closets, not stalls”), I figured one Miller paying to pee was enough so I elected to hold it until we got back to the hotel.
Saturday we woke Matt at noon, had breakfast at the Student Union, and then traipsed off to the Meso-American exhibit at the University of Penn. Last night we had dinner at the uber-inexpensive (Giddy had worn off.) Draught Horse, near Temple, where we grilled (intended) Matt about about his current life compared to his old life. Interestingly for me, he said it wasn’t as different as he expected.
“I still go to classes and I still study.” he said.
“But you pick and choose as you please. And when you’re done studying you can do whatever you want.”
“Dad, I went from unstructured to unstructured.”
(As a father my biggest regret is that I wasn’t able to be more of what I consider a father to be. I didn’t hand down the beatings, but I definitely didn’t deal with my father’s hand’s off approach. I didn’t even recognize it as an issue until I was about done being a parent.)
“You’re right. How about getting away, out from under all our stuff. I figured that would be such a relief.”
“Out from under what?”
“HO, Jimmy, Patti. All that.”
“Partly, but I’m still working on that. I miss Acton and my friends. I miss your shower, I miss my own bed.”
Either a typo or too cryptic. “Unstructured” would imply you HAD a hand’s off approach (as would no beatings, but that’s more of a pun). So what do you “consider a father to be”? What do you mean by “I didn’t deal with …” That could be “I didn’t approach it that way” or “I never dealt with what my father was like and so …”
Back to the bathroom … I assume there was no indication of a charge; nothing so gauche as a coin operated door — how did each of you know how much to pay (tip)? Is tip amount in the men’s room different from the women’s room? And did Diane accept the hair care product?
Was the food any good, at least?
And finally, did you find out during the grilling whether they smoke in the showers?
Comment by Jennifer — October 29, 2006 @ 10:49 am
No coin operated anything. Just a guy who lives in a bathroom and expects to be compensated for it. If you think about it, can there ever be enough compensation?
Diane did not. It made her nervous.
The food was delicious. My Market Fish was flounder broiled with capers, Matt had perfectly cooked filet mignon, and Diane, her fall back favorite – scallops.
Matthew has always told me what he’s going to do rather than vice versa. I admire my brother-in-law’s intense involvement with his kids. I think structure means safety.
I think the conflict is that when your primary relationship with your father is through his belt then the absence is experienced as relief rather than panic.
Time for another story from you.
Comment by michael — October 29, 2006 @ 11:05 am
“Out from under what?” Tells it all. But lots of (loving) structure doesn’t always mean you get what you’d like from your offspring. (There’s a story there to be told some day, after my kids die).
Comment by rakkity — October 29, 2006 @ 11:23 am
The problem is, my life pretty much revolves around my teaching and there’d be no such thing as anonymous enough for me to tell stories about that. And older stuff I barely recall.
I’m with rak on the loving structure thing, without personal experience in either extreme. Think about how you got to a place where Matt chooses to tell you what he’s going to do. Some parents don’t get that. I think parenting is NOT like a mathematical function — i.e. not: if your function is such-and-such, you will get such-and-such a result. Or maybe it’s just that the function is not only non-linear but has multiple discontinuities — and there are infinite possible inputs (offspring personalities).
Comment by Jennifer — October 29, 2006 @ 11:51 am
I suppose it wouldn’t “work” at some level to acknowledge missing a person who’s seated opposite you. I, for one, take it on faith you were the fifth in the list.
And faith is a great deal of parenting (I suppose, being unqualified to really comment). You aren’t trusting when you’re attempting to control, and such faith begets faith.
Comment by el Kib — October 30, 2006 @ 8:49 am
As any parent knows, teenagers are guided in strange, unpredictable directions by their peers and the environment. So the pre-teenage years, as important as they are, give only limited control over the directions teenagers will go. Certainly, the results of parenting are not at all a “function” so much as a chaotic Monte-Carlo walk through multi-dimensional parameter space.
Comment by rakkity — October 30, 2006 @ 12:55 pm
Your questioning of Matt raise more questions–drawn from the ones my dad used to ask:
What classes are you liking most, and what are you learning?
What clubs have you investigated and are considering joining?
Any new perspectives on growing up in Acton emerging from living in this larger world?
And for you, I think there’s a story lurking under “what I coinsider a father to be”.
Comment by smiling Dan — October 31, 2006 @ 9:29 am