My kids make fun of me every chance they get.
Not that there is anything unique to that claim. Kids have been making fun of their parents for 1.8 millions years, when the first Homo erectus pre-teen grunted mockingly at his dad’s failures. Is that pile of sticks supposed to just smoke or can it cook dinner too? Does that big curve in your spear make it come back to you after you throw it? I’m not sure how such digs would translate in the language of monosyllabic huffs and thumping chests, but I’m fairly certain the kids figured it out. In fact, it’s probably from such necessity that language was invented. The fall from hero to stooge is as rapid as a skull-sized stone dropped from a cliff’s edge. There are no stops in between.
In my family, I would have been shocked were it any different. Tracey and I have been training our children in the art of self-mockery and ridicule since day one. Laughter occupies the same place in my tribe that the Big Man occupies in others. Comedy is the mortar of the bricks of our house. And what better victims of the derision than the people that are closest?
Why I find myself in the crosshairs of such chastising more than the others has as many theories as people you’d ask. But I’m sure each would revolve around the theme of my character, that I perhaps ask for it in the same way a swollen thumb does the hammer. They would probably be on the right track.
But lately, a theme is emerging. It goes something like this:
“Why do you want to go to Paris next weekend, Dad? Do they have good churches there?”
“I don’t know mom, a skate park sounds cool and all, but maybe we can find a cool museum to visit instead?”
“Oh look, Dad! An old building with a cross on top! Let’s hurry in.”
There are 100 variations on the theme. Dad loves churches and museums. And churches and museums are lame.
And so I’ve taken pause and chosen words over sleep in this thumbtack on my life’s arc to consider their truth. To hold it to the light and question myself and my arrogance. I am the last in my family who still considers myself the hero. But in this single instance, might they be right? Are churches and museums lame?
As has become cliché in the vernacular of 2018, such are first world problems. The fodder for mockery would not have been so fertile had we not moved to Europe for the year and had I not assumed the charge of choosing our family’s adventure at each new port of call. It is a vocation I have taken seriously. Call me old-fashioned, but I actually have books on the subject. The kind that take up space and have pages and pull heavy on my shoulders. They are dog-eared and weathered like this grey tangle of hairs that sprouts from my chin. Like an old goat who is deaf to the quirk of his own bleat, I raise my voice while they point and they laugh.
As such, the jabs sting. I pretend like they don’t. But their fingers have found the soft spots between my ribs.
Mind you, I have been to Europe before. What kind of father would uproot his wife and children from their found paradise on Kauai without a bit of recon? And before you answer that, please know the recon of which I speak was gathered 24 years old upon graduating from Cal. At the time, a backpack and an armful of baguettes and the same books but newer were my three greatest possessions.
On that trip, I hit them all. Notre Dame, Sisteen Chapel, El Pastor, Sagrada Familia, the Pantheon – if it was old and someone had worshipped in it, I was there. I have the photos to prove it, curled by the years and stuck together like old gum on a shoe. If I’m careful enough in peeling them from the wad, I can show you my face before the wrinkles and my spark before its jading, selfies before the term existed. It was a different era then, when you had to drop off your roll and come back in a week to see what treasures lurked within the mistakes. Funny, the metaphor for life stated so obviously yet passé.
I remember the excitement of those fat yellow envelopes. The anxious search of my fingers as they skipped past the memories of others and the thrill of discovery when I recognized my penmanship that was sloppy even then. The gummy seal that peeled with the ease of a banana, the second envelope inside, a gift within a gift. And there, captured with just the right F-stop for that particular light, my index finger and genius had captured a sepia spark that brought the past rushing back.
And between those images of yellow buildings so too was there art. I learned the word queue in 1994 while waiting patiently to get into the Louvre, the Galleria dell’Accademia, the Van Gogh Museum and the rest. I would eat peaches and talk to strangers as we buzzed outside, patient yet intoxicated by the prospect of seeing Mona Lisa’s half-smile or Michelangelo’s suspended perfection stepping out of a block of marble. The photos are there with the rest, hearts among the clubs, Vincent’s thick strokes of Sunflowers wedged between the gargoyles of Notre Dame and a very small Pope John Paul II in the distance.
At 21, Europe to me was exactly three things: churches, museums, and poorly-executed flirtations with the women of many nations. At 46, that list had narrowed to two.
And so it was early in our adventure, my guidebook thrust confidently in the air as the fearless leader led the charge. Onward, family. Let no church or museum of this land go unvisited by our clan. Here, kids, pretend you’re happy and stand together as I hold down my thumb and take 20 photos like a machine gun. I’ll check later to see if there’s one of the bunch in which nobody’s hitting or pinching the others, perhaps even a smile.
“Not another museum!”
“Can’t you go inside and mom can take us for ice cream?”
“How long do we have to stay?”
Churches and museums had become Europe’s brand of brushing teeth and eating your spinach.
And so I asked myself. What is so lame about churches? Or, said in reverse, what is so cool about museums?
And for me, the answers came easily. Churches speak toward the antiquity of humankind’s reverence, a ubiquitous understanding that something greater exists beyond the individual. Then as now, such truths are so vital as to beg us to scream them with amplified voice, to pay homage with every resource and labor of a civilization. Churches are outward expressions of an inward wisdom, that life’s miracle and mystery is infinitely vast and cannot fit in the confines of one man’s skull. Churches are structural answers to the questions that bubble up even when we don’t want to ask, the ones we struggle lifetimes to resolve. What is the point of it all? Where do we go after this life is done? How are we all connected? Why are we here?
Art is the same only stripped of the rules. Outward expressions of life’s boundless beauty, man’s imagination stroked on cloth or carved in stone. It is the miracle and magic of life once again, only this time through the filter of human creation. Art, like religion, aims to explain the mystery of life that we cannot express in words, at least not rational ones.
In short, churches and museums were my portals back to the holy, that magic lurking at life’s core that gets covered with the ennui of routine like a topsoil.
And therein I realized my mistake. Children are not interested in understanding the magic, expressing the miracle, explaining the mystery. They are swimming in it every day, splashing and choking on life’s emotions and magnificence. They are fully immersed in an ocean so raw that duality collapses and the two are the same. They are the ocean. Its tugs at their ankles. Its surges them in flight. Moments stream unattached, fully present in the unrefined truth that is known before it is understood. They need no proxy for life’s magic for they stand dripping in it.
It is we who are separated. It is we who stand dry within a bubble whose membrane keeps the soaking out and leaks in only what we choose. The miracle was too messy, so we found towels and wrote words, built spires and held brush to pallette. We stare out. We point. And then we labor with our hearts and our brains and our opposable thumbs to understand and explain.
But they, so close to source…
They, before so many unteachings…
Indeed, it is their dad who’s the fool.
Let them laugh and mock.
The church is this breakfast table. The blood of Jesus is the milk that drips down the youngest one’s chin. Churchbells echo in the middle one’s laugh. Michelangelo’s brush couldn’t touch the magical mystery of my oldest one’s eyes, the aquamarine crystals and their sunflower shards.