The Kid-Friendly Wild Rumpus

The traffic was such one night last week that the Parent Imperfect decided to kill a little time in Jamaica Plain while waiting for Connie to finish her dance class. This seemed like a better idea than driving back to Roslindale, hanging around the the homestead for about 20 minutes and then rushing back through the traffic for the pick up. I do want to start counting how many times I pass Forest Hills in a day, in anticipation of the Big Frig that is coming soon to a theater very near us.

My instinct at such moments would always be to show up at someone’s house for an unannounced visit, but I haven’t lived in El Salvador for almost twenty years. The number two option would be to go to the Sedgewick Branch Library for a few minutes, but on this night of closed libraries I went to the odd little store called Boomerang’s. This is a wild little thrift shop that must certainly raise a great deal of $$$ for the Aids Action Committee of Massachusetts. Most people go there for used clothing or furniture, but I always find my way to one of the area’s best collections of dusty used books. 

I can always find some strange and surprising book to look at for a few minutes, and much too often I end up buying the book and adding it to the collection of dusty used books that threatens to take over our home. This allows me to deal with the sad fact that I so seldom have time to read any of them.

On this night, I sat down in my favorite beat-up seat next to General Non-Fiction and started perusing. I pawed several before my eyes settled on a thin black spine with letters in white and light green reading, “Rad Dad.” This is a book of short essays, collected from a “zine” of the same name and a blog called Daddy Dialectic. Both seem to have tailed off recently, so it’s good that the book exists to capture the experience in some way. For decades, my eyes would have flashed over such a title without giving it a second thought, but on this Wednesday, I took it from the shelf. Published in 2011 by PM Press, this was one of those used books that was in absolutely mint condition: I don’t think anyone had ever opened it before. As I always do, I looked at the front cover and then flipped to the back one.

There I found two blurbs from people I haven’t really heard of. One said:

With a diverse, smart and political collection of contributors, Rad Dad will be an instant classic among the new generation of parents whose parenting intersects with their politics.

Hmmmm… Whose parenting doesn’t intersect with their politics? Am I part of this new generation? An instant classic?

Questions aside, I found my way to an essay called “A Kid-Friendly Wild Rumpus,” by one of the editors of the collection (and the editor of the “zine”), Tomas Moniz. Like many of the authors here, Moniz, is a guy from California who is significantly younger than this parent. His essay takes us back to the moment when his commitment to his partner and their newborn led him not to join a buddy of his who was off to the protests of Redwood Summer in northern Cali. This was the moment when the realization hit him that being a real father and life partner was going to mean real changes in his free-wheeling activist lifestyle.

Sixteen years into flailing in the face of such challenges, I stayed with Moniz’s fine prose.

…But during those first few years, I secretly dreamed of the chance to once again be “able” to participate like a “true” revolutionary  The mythology of the revolutionary created a chasm between what I was “doing” and what was “important.” Someday, I consoled myself, I could return to the fray, just as soon as I got the kids to bed.

Lose the quotation marks, Don Tomas!

Moniz’s son is now nineteen, and Dad is apparently at peace with a very different contribution to changing the world than the one he had envisioned for himself, back in the day (I can’t help but wonder what the son would say). Rather than a group of people ready and able to spend a summer in the redwoods, his peer group has become the people in his child-care cooperative, or those who can laugh with him about just how hard it is to raise children with alternative values in a society that so prizes conformity. His own focus has become trying to push an idea of social change work that can be truly multi-generational…hence the “kid-friendly wild rumpus.”

Having made his point, Moniz ends with the following reflection on how he hopes to look back on parenthood as a way of life:

..And when I’m old, I want to embellish stories of my swarthy figure, like the Chicano bandits of old, only instead of the reins of a horse, I am cupping the palm of my child’s hand.

And maybe a bottle of tequila.

When the young woman came to tell me that, if I didn’t leave the store, she was going to lock me in, I stumbled to the counter and bought the book. I don’t know about the tequila, or the instant classic, but this odd little book has the attention of one shameless embellisher.

Related articles

• Beware the Wild Rumpus!! (frontstreetteens.wordpress.com)
• Let the Wild Rumpus Start! (instructables.com)
• Boston parents struggle to get children to school in wake of bus drivers’ surprise strike (boston.com)
• Becoming Minimalist: Rethinking owning too much stuff… (aussiebutterfly.com)
• Hello, I am a Thrift Store Junkie! (thewonkywalker.com)
• Local grocery chain looking at opening a store in Jamaica Plain’s Jackson Square (bizjournals.com)

14-year-old loose in Guatemala

When almost-Hurricane Irene knocked a big tree onto the neighbor’s house yesterday, it put an exclamation point near the end of an odd summer. Vince had some big plans for the summer, but those all got wiped away by the notification from the nation’s oldest public school that he would need to attend summer school if he didn’t want to repeat eighth-grade Latin. With the Parent Imperfect pressing for other options, Vince insisted that he would do summer school, and he did.

Curiously, this decision put the PI on path straight to Experienced Goods, a thrift store in Brattelboro, VT. Always on the prowl for good used books, the PI found a treasure trove here. Even Liz, who is an avid reader, but a crusader for no more books in the house, bought a few. Among the many eye0catchers, the PI  stumbled upon one called Todos Santos, by Deborah Clearman. Besides meaning “All Saints” in Spanish, the title is also the name of a well-known indigenous town in the Guatemalan highlands. Friends of the PI studied Spanish in Todos Santos in the 1990s, so he knows something of the town.

The cover blurb for Todos Santos commits the novel to telling the story of a middle-aged North American woman who decides to take her 14-year-old son–who has just chosen to flunk out of eighth grade, rather than attend summer school–to Guatemala. The trip is allegedly designed for Isaac to find himself, but we know that it is the mother who seeks to find her way out of a dead marriage and a generally meaningless life.

Does the name, Ruby Begonia, strike a familiar note? Todos Santos turned out to be less than great literature, but that didn’t keep the PI from devouring it while he and Liz camped in relentless rain at Jamiaca State Park (a delightful place, by the way).

The author captured many details of a Central America near and dear to the PI, but lost some credibility by getting silly details incorrect. If you are going to talk about Central America’s favorite pollo rostizado chain, how can you call it “Campero Pollo?” And if you want to lend the text authenticity by inserting Spanish phrases at the right moments, why does the Guatemalan waitress say,  “¿Y a tomar? to get a drink order?

That said, Clearman has definitely spent time in Todos Santos and does capture something of the feeling of that very different place. An important sub-plot surrounds the details of an attack on Japanese tourists by local indigenous people who believed that the tourists were connected to a Satanic cult out to steal the town’s babies. In 2000, such an attack did occur in Todos Santos, and Clearman manages to gain an interesting perspective on the tragedy in her story.

Isaac’s mother puts the boy in the care of her sister in the seemingly safe tourist town of Antigua Guatemala, while Mom goes off to do art and find love (or at least lust) in Todos Santos. With the aunt ridiculously asleep at the wheel, Isaac finds his way straight to an Internet café. In that den of iniquity, he hooks up with a pot-smoking teenager from New Jersey who is more than ready to show him the ropes. In the blink of an eye, the two find themselves, quite improbably, in the middle of the bar scene of the steamy Caribbean outpost of Livingston. Before he can even adjust to the humidity, Isaac is up to his neck in an adventure that brings both him and his mother to a precipice.

So much for Todos Santos. For the time being, Liz and the PI have opted for other, less dramatic but hardly more believable, precipices.

To the End of the Land

While the Parent Imperfect was in Bolivia, the police arrested a 35-year-old man in relation to the recent murders in Mattapan. Most of the victims in this case were young people, but, if this suspect turns out to be the the one who did this (how could it have been a single person?), those who talk about this as an example of youth violence out of control need to change their/our tune.

News of the election, the wars and the next murder has quickly pushed the Mattapan story off the front pages, but it will be a while before the PI lets go of it. Perhaps it affected him the way it did because another story, even deeper in The Globe, had put in his mind the question of how parents deal with violence and its consequences.

A couple of Sundays ago, The Globe “Books” section contained a review of the latest publication of an Israeli author named David Grossman. The PI has been something of a fan of this man’s writing since, as a young reporter, Grossman ventured into Palestine and started talking to people about the Occupation. The result was an important book called, The Yellow Wind. Writing in Hebrew, Grossman was, and remains, very much a part of the Jewish State, a fact which gives even more credence to his powerful critique of many policies of that state.

As he wrote, The Yellow Wind, Grossman and his wife were raising a son, Uri. Soon after the turn of the millennium, Uri faced Israel’s requirement of obligatory military service. One wonders what conversations took place between Uri and his family as the time of service approached. An increasing number of courageous young people refuse to serve in the Israeli Defense Force, but the costs of doing so are very high. For whatever set of reasons, Uri decided to perform his service in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).

The decision obviously stayed with Grossman long after his son put on his uniform. Soon after Uri entered the IDF, his father began work on a novel introducing, Ora, a middle-aged woman nearly overcome by fear for her son who is serving in the IDF. As the novel oozed out of Grossman, tensions increased to the boiling point in the Gaza Strip. Taking time out from his writing, Grossman engaged in a very public debate over Gaza strategy with the Israeli Prime Minister of the moment. The fact that his son was in the army must have lent urgency to his activity.

The wheels of fate turned. Of course, Israel launched a violent incursion into Gaza and, of course, Uri Grossman was part of it. On the last day of hostilities, as the IDF, having inflicted “sufficient” damage, was withdrawing, Uri Grossman was killed in action. Grossman’s own goodbye note to Uri, written just after his son’s falling, remains etched in the PI’s mind.

The younger Grossman was one of the last of hundreds of people killed in what could hardly have been called a “battle,” but Uri’s story has stayed with the PI. It took some time, but Grossman eventually found a way to turn back to his book. As he wrote, he dedicated even more time to public opposition to Israeli policy, even as he acknowledged that such opposition seemed increasingly futile. He finished, “To the End of the Land” in 2008, and the English translation is now available. When he finally gets his hands on it, reading this book may help put homework struggles with Vince in some kind of perspective.