Why Is Gratitude So Difficult?

Introduction

Right off the bat, I get that the title of this post probably annoys you. I’m surprised you’re even here, honestly. Something about having our capacity for gratitude challenged is just off-putting. You may well ask, who am I to position myself as some kind of authority on this?

Who am I?

I’ll freely acknowledge that in terms of managing to feel grateful, I’ve got it pretty easy, being a homeowner in the Bay Area. Worldwide, the median annual income (adjusted for local buying power) is about $5,000-$6,000 a year; something like 93-95% of the population lacks a college degree; about 26% lack safe drinking water. Compared to so many, I’ve had a very charmed life, and what suffering I do experience (e.g., via cycling) is voluntarily self-inflected, which seems the height of privilege. That said, in my  experience gratitude doesn’t always track along with good fortune, and even in my relatively upscale community I don’t have to look far to find people who are anxious or uptight.

[Art by Copilot, to try it out.] 

An example

Here is my poster child for the capacity to be tetchy or ill at ease despite advantageous circumstances. Many years ago, I won an award at work that came with a cash bonus. One of my colleagues, though he seemed happy for me, confided that his wife was pretty upset, feeling like he should have won the award. On what grounds she supposed this, being entirely absent from our workplace, I have no idea. Nevertheless, I wanted to make things right, and invited my colleague and his wife to join my wife and me at Chez Panisse, one of the fanciest restaurants in the Bay Area, on me. My colleague reciprocated by bringing a really nice bottle of wine. As the waiter fussed over the bottle, and employed a strange decanter designed to optimize it somehow, and during the long process of letting the wine breathe etc., it looked like a truly splendid evening was unfolding … but my friend’s wife was getting increasingly agitated. The problem was, she admitted, she was worried about the wine. But she didn’t really elaborate. What was this worry? Worried she wouldn’t like it? Worried that it wouldn’t live up to everyone’s expectations? Worried that everyone would like it but her? Whether she feared the wine might reflect badly on her and her husband, or threaten her epicurean cred, or she just hated to be disappointed, or some combination of these and/or something else entirely, I have no idea. But the magnificent wine had practically become a curse.

So what?

This post explores why it’s hard to focus on the positive in our lives. It turns out there are several tangible reasons that we don’t, supported by science and psychology. I’ll describe these, and then explore what we might do about it.

Reason  #1: negativity bias

If our view of the world tends to be less than rosy at times, we can somewhat blame human nature, or to be more specific, the way our species has evolved. In the essay “Negativity bias,” in the great essay collection This Idea Is Brilliant, the columnist Michael Shermer investigates how the negative packs a bigger punch. Here are a few of his examples: negative stimuli command more attention than positive; pain feels worse than no pain feels good; there are more ways to fail than succeed. He provides this theory:

Why is negativity stronger than positivity? Evolution. In the environment of our evolutionary ancestry, there was an asymmetry of payoffs in which the fitness cost of overreacting to a threat was less than the fitness cost of underreacting, so we err on the side of overreaction to negative events. The world was more dangerous in our evolutionary past, so it paid to be risk-averse and highly sensitive to threats, and if things were good, then taking a gamble to improve them a little was not seen as worth the risk.

Obviously, biological evolution cannot keep up with societal progress. Most of us don’t live among warring tribes anymore (bickering political parties, sure, but nobody is sacking our village). It’s up to us to challenge our negative impulses, and to remind ourselves how much progress has been made and how different modern life is than the human experience over the last 300,000 years. But it doesn’t appear we’re very good at transcending our evolutionary instincts.

Reason #2: relative deprivation

Our feelings of satisfaction and happiness don’t really depend on our absolute situation—that is, whether we have basic needs met like food, shelter, and safety. As everyone knows, we evaluate ourselves and our lives based on how we’re doing compared to our neighbor. In general we don’t have to look very far to see people in our communities with nicer stuff, and coworkers who outrank us. The temptation to feel relatively deprived is always with us, and it can be hard to get over it. In the essay “Relative Deprivation” (also in This Idea Is Brilliant), Kurt Gray, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at UNC-Chapel Hill, explains this tendency:

The yearning for relative status seems irrational, but it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. We evolved in small groups where relative status determined everything, including how much you could eat and whether you could procreate. Although most Americans can now eat and procreate adequately, we haven’t lost that gnawing sensitivity to status. If anything, our relative status is now more important. Because our basic needs are met, we have a hard time determining whether we’re doing well, so we judge ourselves based on our place in the hierarchy.

Let’s put together these two human tendencies: negativity and relativity. If we have a biological reflex to judge ourselves vs. our neighbors, that’s bad enough—but because of our negativity bias, we focus on the endless array of seemingly higher status people instead of those beneath us, and moreover instead of appreciating how well we do live and how much we’ve achieved in our own right. To put it more succinctly, we’re negative to begin with and will never lack for ways to feel inferior.

Reason #3: emotion contagion

Once again, I’ll cite an essay in This Idea Is Brilliant. (This book contains 205 brief essays, most of them concerned with scientific concepts pertaining to our daily experience.) June Gruber, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at CU Boulder, in “Emotion Contagion,” explains, “Emotions are contagious. They are rapidly, frequently, and even at times automatically transmitted from one person to the next.” She cites Charles Darwin, who pointed out that this contagion is “fundamental to the survival of humans and nonhumans alike in transmitting vital information among group members,” and points out that it’s “in the service of critical processes such as empathy, social connection, and relationship maintenance between close partners.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is, when emotion contagion hops geographies and goes virtual, it is not necessarily in the service of communities anymore, and becomes a less precise social tool. Gruber goes on to say:

Faulty emotion-contagion processes have been linked to affective disturbances. With the rapid proliferation of online social networks as a main forum for emotion expression, we know, too, that emotion contagion can occur without direct interaction between people or when nonverbal emotional cues in the face and body are altogether absent.

What emotions, in our modern smartphone-addled society, would you say are the most likely to spread? I would say envy, pride, and outrage would be in my top five. Sure, some goodwill is shared as well, but remember: we humans have a negativity bias, and a tendency to compare ourselves unfavorably to others … a perfect recipe for feeling bad online. Meanwhile, the algorithms that determine what to show us are geared toward the feelings that are most likely to trigger forwards, comments, etc., so they’re not making any effort to keep things light or positive. Our reactions train the algorithm, and in time it begins to train us, in a cycle of perpetual irritation that doesn’t strike me as conducive to gratitude. Emotion contagion seems to be morphing from a largely healthy community-building trait to a way for tech companies to monetize some of our more annoying tendencies.

I guess I should acknowledge that it’s not just social media at fault here. It’s how we choose to use the Internet, and how we ourselves decide what’s important enough to share. I base this on a cursory examination of my most polemic albertnet posts and which of these have the most page views. Since I don’t imagine all that many people find my posts via Google, most of the traction my posts get is through being forwarded. Here are my top three positive and negative opinion pieces, and the number of page views they’ve notched. Notice how it’s the more negative ones that get forwarded the most:

Positive:

• Election Result: It Will Be OK - 265
• Has Any Good Come From the COVID-19 Pandemic? - 201
• 10 Reasons to Cut Barbie Some Slack - 643

Negative:

• Velominati’s “The Rules” – Brilliance or BS? - 4,145
• The Problem With Soccer - 3,890
• The Case Against Margolis & Liebowitz - 2,088

(Happily, albertnet is not primarily a platform for serious polemics. None of the above is among my top ten posts. Only the first two negative ones are in the top fifteen. None of the others is in the top thirty.)

To make matters worse…

Okay, perhaps you, gentle reader, are not some status-seeking, insecure person who wastes a lot of time on social media and frets over not getting enough likes and comments. You’re the sort of person who looks beyond himself or herself, and worries more about the state of the world and your fellow human. Perhaps you’ve grown frustrated by this essay and how ungenerous my opinion of you seems to be. Well, congratulations: you’re probably in the most difficult position of all.

How’s that? It’s because you may feel a responsibility to educate yourself about what’s going on in the world, and to try to make a difference. And that means you read a lot of news. Unfortunately, the news is not good. I almost wrote “the news right now is not good” but actually, it’s never been good. If it were good, it wouldn’t be news. “EVERYTHING’S JUST PEACHY” read no headline ever.

We don’t even get the headline “MANY THINGS ARE IMPROVING.” That’s the opposite of news, even if it happens to be true. In his excellent book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Hans Rosling, a cofounder of Doctors Without Borders, points out that journalism doesn’t exist to document steady progress. It highlights the negative, exacerbating the pessimistic tendencies I’ve already discussed. Consider this observation by Rosling:

       In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only ten ended in fatal accidents. Of course, those were the ones the journalists wrote about: 0.000025 percent of the total. Safe flights are not newsworthy. Imagine:
       “Flight BAO016 from Sydney arrived in Singapore Changi airport without any problems. And that was today’s news.”
       2016 was the second safest year in aviation history. That is not newsworthy either.

I’ve already blogged about our responsibility to defend ourselves from the onslaught of bad news, bitter perspectives, doomscrolling, etc. Now I’d like to address the growing habit of grousing to our friends and family about all that’s wrong with the world. I suppose that we feel as though we’re doing this to be responsible citizens, to show that we care, and to get the word out that we should all be doing something about these problems. But what, as mere citizens, can we do? Let’s be honest with ourselves: is our grousing always (or even usually) in the service of some specific call to action? I doubt it. I think it’s generally a result of—wait for it—1) our negativity bias, and 2) our desire to elevate our relative status by showcasing our excellent knowledge of the issues.

What is to be done?

To address the central question of this post—why gratitude is so difficult—I think we can find a way forward by having more compassion for ourselves in this realm. If you sometimes struggle to feel grateful, it’s not you—it’s us. We’re hardwired for negativity, and for making comparisons with others that often leave us feeling inadequate; meanwhile, modern vectors for emotion contagion exacerbate the problem.  Beyond compassion, let’s consider how to combat this situation and specifically address these three factors.

For this I’ll turn to yet another essayist: Richard Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff … And It’s All Small Stuff. My favorite among his 100 micro-essays is titled “Think of What You Have Instead of What You Want,” and offers this advice:

In over a dozen years as a stress consultant, one of the most pervasive and destructive mental tendencies I’ve seen is that of focusing on what we want instead of what we have. It doesn’t seem to make any difference how much we have; we just keep expanding our list of desires, which guarantees we will remain dissatisfied.

At first blush this seems to be about material possessions, and thus about showing off with, say, a flashy new car to enhance our status. But it’s more than that, because a lot of what we want is for the world to be better, for people to be better, for more social justice, and all kinds of other things that we can never have or at least never bring about. So satisfaction seems impossible if we continue to focus on what we want. Being dissatisfied, we lack gratitude.

So what’s the secret to shifting our focus? As I see it, the critical component of wanting is the human capacity for counterfactuals, which is to say we are very good at imagining a set of circumstances that is different from reality. I mean, sure, my cat can do this, in imagining a full food bowl instead of an empty one, and thus hassles me at mealtime, but this assessment is as unsophisticated as operant conditioning. She feels hunger and knows there’s a way to satisfy it. But she doesn’t dwell on this want; once her belly is full, she’s happy as a clam and goes off to wash and nap. Suffice to say she is not preoccupied with anxious thoughts (have you ever known a cat with insomnia)? But we humans take counterfactuals much further, such that we are constantly—almost as a reflex—measuring the delta between how things are vs. how we think they ought to be.

This continuous assessment  generally does us no good, of course, because it’s informed by our negativity bias and our persistent dread of relative deprivation, and is exacerbated by how enamored our tech-driven society is with data and all the ways it can describe things: how many thumbs-ups, thumbs-downs, likes, re-posts, rankings, ratings, views, impressions, etc. The urge to measure ourselves, our lives, our personas, and our society against some hypothetical perfect version has never been stronger.

Consider dating. You used to meet a single person somewhere somehow, have a reaction to him or her (the real person, not a curated version), and might decide to get to know him or her better, gradually, via a series of dates … a non-targeted exploration. Following this path, you might be surprised to realize you could actually be attracted to a dog person who likes to play cards and eat barbecue, even if you’re a vegan cat person who reads novels. All this is to say, people used to focus on the actual person—i.e., how things are. Online dating, on the other hand, trains people to swiftly evaluate and usually reject an endless stream of candidates based on their profiles—creating a focus on counterfactuals, always imagining a (hypothetically) superior prospect. I suspect (though I’ve never dated online, having met my wife years before the Internet) that online dating is a good example of modern society taking us in the wrong direction—as if evolution hadn’t already caused enough trouble.

To wrap up, I’m proposing that, following Carlson’s “small stuff” advice about focusing on what we have, not what we want, we fight this growing impulse to compare the actual with the ideal. As negatively biased, socially insecure people susceptible to emotion contagion from every corner, we must protect ourselves from the assessment impulse. We need to recognize that negativity is a bias that no longer protects us; that social comparison is bound to cause hard feelings; that a thousand ways to measure something doesn’t always amount to a single good reason do so. So taste the wine with your tongue, not your discernment, and see if you can’t just enjoy it.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXII

Introduction

This is the twenty-second installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, and Volume XXI is here. The different volumes are unrelated, except by blood. By which I mean I figure in all of them. I’m sorry about that … it’s just the way it goes, this being my blog, as opposed to, say, yours. If you haven’t read the previous installments, don’t worry—you’ll be no more lost than anybody. If you do decide to go back and review them, you may do so in forward or reverse alphabetical order, length order, by weight, by number of comments, or according to which ones just “speak to you.” Of course, you’ll have to read them all before you can make this determination. Best of luck to you.

What are albertnet Bits & Bobs posts? They’re posts that comprise a mishmash of randomly assorted literary tidbits from old letters, emails, graffiti, and other modes of written communication I fell into in my callow youth. (Was I callow, in my youth? Well, I was callous but not sallow. Not that “callow” has anything to do with either word. Nor were these all written when I was young … but once you type “callow” it’s almost impossible not to follow it up with “youth.” Hmm. You know what? I think this introduction has gone on long enough.)

December 22, 2009

I love your anecdotes about cheesy bike race prizes. I cannot believe you received a box of powdered rug cleaner after hammering your ass off on the bike. And a peanut butter grinder? Who grinds his own peanut butter? Life is too short.

[Concerning the above: I always like to include a picture at the top of my posts, so that mobile viewers will see a thumbnail. But I don’t have an old photo of my teammate’s peanut butter grinder. Since I’m always curious about the latest AI, I tried out a new picture-generating app, Whisk, to see how it would do. My initial prompt was just “bicycle racer using a hand-cranked peanut butter grinder,” and Whisk chose to portray a woman, perhaps because it supposes women are more pleasing to the eye (which in my opinion is correct). I think Whisk did okay, after I told it to put “EBVC” on the jersey, to get rid of the vaguely unsettling non-word “PAKTY” it had oddly chosen. Note, however, that the crank doesn’t look right and for some reason she’s wearing only one glove.]

Myself, I don’t think I’ve ever won anything so useless, but a few items are worth noting. For example, after my first year at UC Santa Barbara, I spent the summer in Boulder and won a water purifier in a criterium. I was really stoked at first, because the tap water in Santa Barbara (well, Isla Vista) tasted like a swimming pool and I was looking forward to being a hero to my roommates by showing up with a purifier in September. But the catch was, the prize wasn’t a water purifier free and clear; it was three months of the use of the water purifier and then I had to give it back! The water in Boulder was really, really good (legend was it came directly from the Arapahoe glacier) so purifying it that summer was really gilding the lily.

Another time, in a Mini Zinger criterium the organizers offered a prime on the second-to-last lap. But I didn’t hear them announce it as a prime—I just heard the bell. And they’d moved the lap cards inside the fencing because they thought racers were getting too close to them,  so I’d lost track of what lap we were on. I thought it was bell lap (since you’re not supposed to have a prime on the penultimate lap), and gave it everything the next time around. I took the prime handily and, thinking I’d finally beaten my arch-rival Pete [on the last stage of a nine-day stage race], I did some really theatrical victory salutes. I think it was a combo fireballs-to-heaven, rock-concert-fist-pump, and Mike-Tyson-speed-bag. Then Pete said, “Dude, we have a lap to go.” I was absolutely mortified. Worse yet, when I went to pick up my prime—a twelve-pack of Hansen’s soda—the dickhead race director told me, “Sorry, we’re all out.” I was livid. So I went and found my friend D—, who was not only 6’4” and over 200 pounds but liked to dress—and could act—like a thug in those days. I brought him over and asked the race director to repeat what he’d said about being out of Hansen’s, which he did. “That’s okay,” D— said, grabbing a stack of Wendy’s gift certificates that were sitting on the table. “We’ll just take a whole slew of these.” So Wendy’s was our go-to for the rest of the summer.

July 19, 2010

[On the topic of “chaingate,” an incident in a Tour de France stage in which pro bike racer Alberto Contador attacked his rival, Andy Schleck, at the moment Schleck’s chain fell off—a move that many saw as unsportsmanlike.] At least Contador did issue an apology, which is kind of nice, though he couldn’t help polluting it by accusing Schleck of taking advantage of him on the cobblestone stage. His apology also included this odd statement: “I dislike what has happened today, is something wrong with me?” That’s in translation, of course; he might have actually said “I dislike Brussels sprouts; it’s just how I was raised.”

August 21, 2010

Here is my ride report for the Mt. Hamilton Suffer-fest today. (Since I don’t race, this is the closest I can come to a race report.)

For breakfast I had a PBJ and a banana. The peanut butter was, due to a freak shopping accident, sodium-free. Lack of salt makes peanut butter inedible, of course, so I salted it. But you can’t just salt unsalted products and expect a good result. That’s a lot like trying to explain a joke. But I had to try. To make matters worse, it was early and my NoDoz hadn’t kicked in yet, so I accidentally over-salted the peanut butter. Adding insult to injury, the jelly was actually the dregs of a jar of cherry preserves, and was basically syrup. The effect was an over-salty cough-syrupy sandwich which I enjoyed not at all.

During the ride I drank six 20-ounce bottles of energy drink and ate one Powerbar, two gels (one 1x-caffeine, one 2x), and approximately one Hostess crème-filled cupcake (I offered a couple of guys bites which in aggregate amounted to most of the second cupcake in the two-pack). I had half of a NoDoz in Livermore; Kromerica took the other half and immediately felt so good he decided to ride home via Morgan Territory. (He’s so fit now, we may need to do an intervention, tying him to a La-Z-Boy armchair and equipping him with an X-Box and a case of Doritos.) Riding back without Steve was like having an engine car removed from our train.

The signature moment of the ride was on the shallow descent following the Hamilton summit, when the pace was unconscionably high and I was clinging to the back of the group for dear life. It was windy, so I knew if I got dropped I would suddenly be in a different postal zone from the others, and they’d have to wait, and it would take forever to fish my ego out of the ditch and get my sorry ass dragged home. That descent was like being put in the ring with a prizefighter and being told, “If you don’t last all twelve rounds, you will be shot in the head upon leaving the ring.” I was miserable: everything hurt. My legs hurt, my ass hurt, my hands hurt, my feet hurt, and my back hurt. I felt significantly better after our 7-Eleven stop in Livermore.

When I got home I had a very large and dense piece of E—’s homemade refrigerator cake, which is either the lasagne of cakes or the Pabst Blue Ribbon of cakes, or both. It’s layers of graham crackers, chocolate pudding, and sliced bananas, left overnight in the fridge so the graham crackers dissolve. Highly tasty, notwithstanding the amount of sweet crap I’d already ingested during the ride. Then I had a leftover pork cutlet expertly prepared in the French style with cream, lamb stock, and vermouth, followed by two pan-fried tortilla pizzas (spaghetti sauce, mountain-of-melted-mozzarella, Portobello mushrooms, scallions, sliced salami). I regret that I am stuck home with the kids and cannot face Joey Chestnut in a taco battle (per Andres’ e-mail from earlier). I’m sure I could take Joey, whether it’s a speed or quantity competition, unless he’s some sort of freak. I am still hungry and may partake of a carnitas burrito from Talavera later, pending spousal approval, or might try Celia’s Mexican restaurant, which I’ve eyeballed a few times but never tried. Anybody have any input on that?

As a sad footnote to my ride, I was hammering home (thirty minutes past my furlough!) and coming down my street, about thirty seconds from home, I passed some MAMIL on a fancy-pants cawbun fibuh Trek. Astonishingly, as I approached him, he started veering quite suddenly to the left, across my path. I yelled and he just kept coming. I yelled twice more before he heard me and corrected his line (we were way in the left lane at this point), just before he’d have crashed me. The complete imbecile was plugged into an iPod, and had made his bizarre left sweep without bothering to look over his shoulder. If he had actually crashed me, I’d have beaten him to death in the street, or strangled him with his headphone cord. As it was, I seriously considered beating him to death anyway, just on principle, but as I said, I was already late getting home. The brainless shitweasel probably has no idea how close he came to losing his life today. I take some solace in the fact that, riding as cluelessly as he does, it’s only a matter of time before he will be run over. I hope his death doesn’t trouble the conscience of whatever driver ends up taking him out.

In summary, Mount Hamilton was a truly glorious ride. Many thanks to MC Roadmaster for setting it up.

December 1, 2011

[An email, sent a few days after my surgery for a broken femur]

FROM: Dana Albert
TO: East Bay Velo Club
DATE: December 1, 2011 5:14 PM
SUBJECT: From Dana – I am home!

All,

I haven’t read everyone’s e-mails yet but I’m looking forward to it. Hurts to type--road rash on fingers. After some radical PT (peeing standing up, with walker) I’m exhausted so lifting my neck is causing me to sweat. But I’m HOME. Thanks to all for your well-wishes, calls, visits, and other kinds of excellence. More later ... maybe much later.

Dana\\

P>s> I have a cat on me.

August 29, 2012

[Another email]

FROM: Dana Albert
TO: East Bay Velo Club
DATE: August 29, 2012, 9:54 PM
SUBJECT: Lance Armstrong caught huffing ether

Now that I have your attention: 

Friday will be my very last day working out at the Albany Physical Therapy gym. I’ve been going there 2-3 times a week pretty much all year. It’s in a gross little strip mall off San Pablo Ave between Solano and Marin Ave. This place has become a significant part of my life history. I once watched a manicurist walk out of her shop, remove her surgical mask, puke all over the sidewalk, and then head back in to work. There’s a Happy Donuts where my family once went back before I could ride or drive and they had to shuttle my crippled ass around all the time.

Though I’ll continue PT at home, I thought I should celebrate finishing my gym era. But how? Well, there’s a Round Table Pizza in that little mall, and though it’s a pretty grim place, I do remember regretting that the one time I got take-out from there, when my daughters were tiny, I left half a pizza in a box on the roof of the car and it flew off and erupted on contact with the street. My regret was only partially based on A—’s bawling; also, it was good enough pizza to lament having lost. Plus, during my exercises one day last week I saw a cop go in there, and twenty minutes later he still hadn’t come out dragging a perp; i.e., he was eating there. I don’t know why I put much stock in cops’ restaurant choices, but I think it bodes reasonably well. And as someone who loves all pizza, even the Totino’s frozen pizza with the fake cheese, I found the smell beguiling every time I rode by.

So what I’m getting at is, if anybody feels like joining me at Round Table at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, please let me know. They have a lunch buffet for $6.99. I reckon once we suffer through the dried-out ‘za that’s been sweating under the heat lamps, they’ll have to start making stuff fresh and it might not be more than half bad. I’m not going to do an eVite or try to publish a guest list or anything. (If nobody responds, I’ll probably skip it because if there’s anything more depressing than eating a buffet at a Round Table in a dingy strip mall with friends, it’s doing it alone.)

I hope I haven’t oversold this. I’m trying to defend against accusations of bait-and-switch.

[Postscript: several friends offered to join me, but only if I changed the venue to Little Star. Foodies to the core! I held fast to my original plan and thus ended up eating the buffet solo. After I ate all the preexisting pizzas, the cook let me order whatever I wanted for my next three pies. It was great.]

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Old Yarn - The Day I Learned Bicycle Gear Shifting

Introduction

Here is the fifth “old yarn” on albertnet (following in the footsteps of “The Cinelli Jumpsuit,” “Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge,” “The Enemy Coach,” and most recently “The Brash Newb”). This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item, except I’ve never before written it down.

Trigger warning: this post is long. It is a rambling tale that doesn’t skimp on any details. And no, it won’t teach you this weird little secret your doctor doesn’t want you to know. It won’t give you the social currency you’d get from talking with colleagues about the last episode of America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Season 2.* So if you’re cool with bike lore of no particular interest to your social network, then read on. But if you’re impatient and/or won’t read anything you can’t summarize in a tweet (I refuse to say “X”), go somewhere else.

(*As much as it sounds like I made up this TV show, I didn’t. It’s the fifth most popular show on Netflix right now. The center cannot hold.)

Learning to shift – late summer 1978

As I mentioned last week, one of the cooler things my dad ever did was to buy my brothers and me 10-speed bikes long before any other kids had them. In fact, these were the first bikes we ever owned. This yarn is about the day—in fact, the very moment—I learned how to shift gears. If that sounds really boring, don’t worry: I’m here to entertain, not to edify. This post describes, among other things, three bike crashes and one near-death experience. (Why isn’t this post mainly about the near-death experience? Because that didn’t change my life. It just put it briefly in jeopardy.) (Full disclosure—if I can be permitted to directly follow a parenthetical with another parenthetical—this post doesn’t feature any really gory crashes. For that, click here or here.)

The peculiar thing about getting this ten-speed for my ninth birthday was that my dad forbade me to touch the gear-shift levers. I asked why my bike even had them if I wasn’t supposed to touch them. “Don’t worry about that,” was all he said in reply. This was pretty typical of my dad. He didn’t really like dialogue. He absolutely loved a good monologue, so long as he was delivering it and on a topic of his choosing (for example, the design of an interferometer he was building), but had little patience for pushback or even pointed questions, which could seem like insubordination. So I just kept my mouth shut and, in the ensuing days and weeks, even months, rode the bike around in first gear all the time. Yes, I was that well-behaved and craven.

I don’t know exactly why my dad prohibited gear shifting, but it’s not hard to guess. His opinion of his four sons wasn’t exactly rosy. It’s probably Geoff and Bryan’s fault. They’re twins and the oldest. Family lore (passed down from our mom) has it that our dad originally had high hopes for his kids, figuring we’d all be the genius offspring he richly deserved, but these hopes were dashed early. When the twins were still babies, he caught them trying—and failing—to throw all their blocks out of their crib. They weren’t clever enough to align the blocks properly to fit through the slats. These dumb babies were just banging the blocks against the slats, perpendicular to them. Disgusted, Dad brought our mom over to witness this atrocious stupidity. Did she wonder if jettisoning the blocks was even the goal of these babies, vs. enjoying the chock-chock-chock sound they were making? Or was she tempted to explain to her husband about realistic infant development milestones? Apparently not. It seems nobody ever corrected my dad, and from that day forward he had to live with the sad “truth” that his kids just weren’t up to snuff. (Other family lore has it that he said to me once, “You’re not very bright, are you.” It’s tempting to dismiss this anecdote except there were five witnesses. Could we all be wrong? Well, actually, yeah, but not necessarily.)

Where bicycles were concerned, our dad was particularly pessimistic about our capabilities. As described here, all three of my brothers and I distinctly recall our dad’s reaction when Max (who’d drawn the short straw) asked if we could register for the Red Zinger Mini Classic bike race. “You boys are too stupid to race bicycles,” he declared. “You’d get yourselves killed.”

So why did he even buy us cool ten-speeds, if he had such a low opinion of our cycling prospects? I put this question to my brother Max. His reply was along the lines of, “Typical one-speed kid’s bikes disgusted Dad. No son of his would ride anything so vulgar. We had to be on proper ten-speeds whether we deserved them or not.”

Now, I realize I should be careful not to drag my brothers too far into my own story as regards the gear-shifting prohibition. I don’t specifically recall them being included in this, so I asked Bryan about it. “I think we were allowed to shift,” he said. “We probably ruined that for you with our own screw-ups.” He proceeded to recall how he tried to fix one of the brakes on his bike. He loosened the cable-fixing bolt, perhaps for diagnostic purposes, and pulled the cable out. Back then the cable would feed through a very narrow cylindrical aperture before being bolted down. Since this is the same dumb kid who as a baby couldn’t even throw a block out of his crib, you won’t be surprised to learn what happened next: he couldn’t get the cable back in. In fact, when he tried, the individual steel strands broke free from one another, fraying hopelessly. Bryan broke down in despair, convinced that he’d entirely wrecked his bike. Not only would he not have it to ride anymore, but he’d be in big trouble with Dad.

If getting in trouble for bike problems strikes you as preposterous, you obviously never met our dad. He was so devoted to his career, any extra parenting demands that pulled him away from his work during an evening or weekend was like a crisis. Nothing, it seemed, peeved him more than extra child-rearing tasks. We would actually be in trouble for getting a flat tire on our bikes. This was construed as an act of moral turpitude, like we were trying to throw our dad’s world into a tailspin by running over something sharp. It’s like nothing was an accident … every mishap was an act of treachery. All this being said, there was a positive side to our dad’s oppressive reign, which is that we learned how to fix our bikes ourselves, so that our “crimes” could be kept secret.

But of course, this frayed cable incident occurred long before Bryan developed any proficiency as a mechanic. At the time he bemoaned his plight to our babysitter, H—, who took pity on the boy and intervened, calling our dad at work to soften the blow. The upshot was that Dad didn’t get angry with Bryan (or at least kept it to himself), but he also didn’t get around to fixing the bike for what felt to Bryan like a year. Needless to say, until the bike was fixed, Bryan was forbidden to ride it. Our bikes always had to have two working brakes.

I told this story to my younger daughter, who incredulously asked, “Why wasn’t Uncle Bryan allowed to ride with just one brake? One is plenty!” Now, before you decide that her attitude marks me as an incompetent parent, let me just say I keep a pretty close eye on the family fleet and proactively make any repairs necessary. The only time my daughter has ridden with only one brake is when she was off at college and burned through a set of brake pads on her Breezer while I wasn’t looking. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true because she sometimes borrows my mid-‘60s Triumph 3-speed, whose coaster brake occasionally fails for reasons I cannot fathom (much less fix). But that’s pretty rare. In general I am a stickler for bicycles having two working brakes.

(Here is a drawing, by my daughter, of her Breezer. It’s not pertinent to the story, but when your kid pays such a loving tribute to her bicycle, you kind of want to share it.)

Now, being committed to truth in these pages, I must disclose something: my dad’s strict rules notwithstanding, I myself became quite reckless about the two-brake rule, a mere three or four years after having so obediently followed the no-shifting protocol. Perhaps something about an over-strict parent encourages a wholesale abandonment of that parent’s policies. I was around twelve when I bought a 3-speed bike, a basic Sears model, used. Yes, Sears made bicycles. Don’t believe the Google AI Summary on this. In fact, here is a photo of a Sears bike that is the spitting image of the one I had.

Just as in the photo above, my Sears had two handbrakes (and I don’t know what this says about its age as compared to my Triumph). The rear brake stopped working (probably a broken cable) and I don’t think I even considered fixing it. By this point I knew how, but it just didn’t seem important when I still had a perfectly good front brake. (I also didn’t bother replacing the broken gear cable connecting the Speed Switch shifter to the Sturmey-Archer internal 3-speed hub, so this bike was always in third gear, which was the highest. For this reason its nickname was the Third Speed. Why do I mention the brand of hub? Well, so I could include some eye candy here.)

Uh, where was I? Oh, yeah, so, I didn’t bother to fix that rear brake. Nor did I consider riding more carefully. Quite the opposite, in fact. Exhibit A: my bike ride to Mr. Tomato’s Pizza to meet some friends. Mr. Tomato’s was at the bottom of the gently down-sloping parking lot of the Basemar shopping center. It had a huge picture window, and from a distance I recognized my friends sitting right in front of it. I decided to give them a good scare, and started sprinting toward them as fast as I could. My plan was to slam on the brakes (er, brake) just in time to keep from crashing through the window. Two things failed to occur to me. One was the possibility of a pedestrian walking along the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. There was an overhang above this sidewalk, supported at intervals by big pillars that could easily obscure a shopper from view. The other thing I didn’t consider was the possibility of my one brake suddenly failing. This is what actually happened. Just as I hammered the brake, the cable snapped. There was absolutely no way to stop and I was less than ten feet from that giant window, carrying great speed.

It seemed as though all was lost, but just before impact I spied one of the pillars, which fortunately had a round cross-section and a smooth finish. I wrapped that pillar in a bear hug to at least keep myself from crashing through the window. Amazingly, as my momentum spun me and my bike around the pillar, the bike ended up pointed along the sidewalk at the moment it escaped my legs. It went shooting off forward, straight down that sidewalk, still at great speed.

So wonderful is the design of a bicycle, it can travel a great distance with no rider, as my brothers and I had learned to our delight earlier that summer. Not wanting to damage our ten-speeds, we’d conjured up a beach cruiser whose sole purpose was rider-less travel. (Its Ashtabula one-piece crankset assembly had fallen out so we couldn’t pedal it around anyway.) That bike was called Ghost Rider, or Ghostie for short, and we spent many an afternoon getting it up to speed, one guy riding it and several others pushing, and when we couldn’t get it going any faster, the rider would jump off the back and send the bike flying down the street. It could go for several hundred feet before either tipping over or drifting into a parked car. Well, in front of Mr. Tomato’s my 3-speed surely set a new record, since its speed was at least double that of a kid running. It was amazing to behold it flying down the sidewalk along the storefronts. Fortunately it was a slow business day for that mall, with no foot traffic. Equally astonishing was that I was completely unscathed other than perhaps slight damage to my hands and arms, similar to rope burn. My friends regarded me through the window with complete bewilderment, slack-jawed and disbelieving. I guess the point of this story is that my dad’s lack of faith in my intelligence wasn’t entirely unwarranted.

Of course my dad never know about my near-death experience at Mr. Tomato’s, or indeed of most of the crashes my brothers and I had. But the very first days of owning our bicycles were not promising. The problem was, we suddenly had this new hardware but lacked the know-how to use it. As weird as this may seem, our dad made zero effort to teach us how to ride, and in fact I am deeply puzzled as to how he even expected us to learn before being presented with these sophisticated ten-speeds. Did he just think people are born knowing how to ride a bike?

Which brings me to how my brother Max and I did learn, or at least were given one lesson apiece, on how to ride. No parents were involved, of course. Max went first. It had come to pass that Geoff and Bryan realized Max lacked this important skill, and talked their friend R— into loaning out his bike for the lesson. It was a typical kid’s bike in that it was a one-speed with high-rise handlebars and a banana seat. (We had a whole saying around this, that we would chant in mockery of these inferior bikes: “High-rise handlebar with a roll bar, banana seat, small wheel in front, big wheel in back, cool-dual frame, rusty old chain, with a slick, streamers from the grips and flower pedals.” I fact-checked this with Bryan and he remembered like half of it, and I added a couple details, and Max knew the rest. “Cool-dual frame” probably pertained to the two extra top-tubes of the Schwinn Sting-Ray, a popular model in those days. A “slick,” as Max eloquently put it, is “a rear tire with no tread for monster skids.” “Flower pedals” refers to “dust caps on the pedals that looked like daisies.”)

Actually, R—’s bike was somewhat unique in that it was an official licensed Boy Scout bike. But that’s neither here nor there. The more important detail is the single instruction that Geoff and Bryan gave to Max as they put him on the bike at the top of Howard Place, a long downhill: “Whatever you do, don’t turn!” Max and I remember it like it was yesterday. So ridiculous. I mean, what was the guy supposed to do? They didn’t tell him how to brake. They just figured that his future would work itself out somehow, after he’d built up all that speed! They set him off, gave him a good push. Now, I just did some research with Google Maps, and this street ran about 450 feet at an average grade of 5.5%. With help from ChatGPT (because I’m lazy, not because I needed it) I just calculated that by the time Max crossed Ithaca Drive (which Howard Place T’s into), he had to have been going at least 20 mph. He dutifully followed the instruction not to turn, so it’s a good thing there was to traffic on Ithaca to run him over. Instead he crashed over a curb, with so much velocity the bike kept going, and then hit a low fence that stopped him so he tipped over into the grass, remarkably unhurt. He leapt to his feet, delighted, and cried, “I can ride a bike, I can ride a bike!”

Alas, that was Max’s only lesson before receiving his ten-speed, months later, on his birthday. I guess he just assumed his skill was still there. He jumped on the bike and managed to pedal it not only to the end of our street, Hillsdale Way, but to negotiate the right-hand turn onto Howard Place (the same street I mentioned earlier), which is a cul-de-sac. He rode to the top, managed to turn the bike around, and then came barreling back down. In trying to make the left-hand turn back on to Hillsdale, with my dad and my brothers and me watching, he clipped a pedal and crashed. He got up, winced at his road rash, and checked over the bike. A big divot of foam rubber had been ripped out of the brand-new saddle. Regarding this, he thought to himself (as he related to me yesterday), “Well, I guess now this bike is really mine.”

Did I do any better? Alas, no. My lesson was a year or so later. Perhaps having been spooked a bit by Max’s disastrous first effort, Geoff and Bryan didn’t start me down Howard Place. Instead, they put me on my friend P—’s bike, another lowly one-speed, at the top of a steep driveway facing Hillsdale. They gave me a big push and I flew down the driveway, absolutely frozen in terror, went straight across the street, and crashed into the curb on the other side. I hadn’t built up nearly as much speed as Max had, so the curb stopped the front wheel cold and I flipped over the bars. I didn’t quite clear the sidewalk and landed roughly on it, but was no more hurt than on any other day, what with all the various skirmishes kids faced during that era of free-reign bullying. But I can’t say I’d learned any biking technique at all.

So when, about six months and zero follow-up lessons later, I got the Fuji Junior, I really didn’t know how to ride. But there was no way I could just stand there and look at the bike, with my dad seeming so expectant (apparently notwithstanding Max’s fiery wreck on his bike’s maiden voyage). So I just winged it, riding down the sidewalk, pedaling furiously because the one thing my brothers had managed to get across was that speed was the key to balance. I made it about two houses down before veering off course, heading straight for a mailbox. I managed not to run into it, but raked my back across it rather painfully. Somehow I kept the bike upright, and I guess by that point I had the hang of it. But this first ride on the Fuji Junior couldn’t have impressed my dad, and may have reminded him of Max’s similar misadventure, and this is perhaps why my dad decided to declare my bike’s shifters off-limits. Maybe he felt I had my hands full just learning how to steer the bike. Fortunately, I did figure out the brakes.

Well, once my fear abated, I fell madly in love with the bike. As I’ve mentioned before in these pages (in the notes to my “Corn Cob” poem), my Fuji had Suntour shifters and derailleurs, which I noticed when with great delectation I examined every last feature of the bike. Suntour seemed like a really cool word. I didn’t grasp at the time that it was brand of component; I thought Suntour was a sub-brand of the bike, as though Fuji was the make and Junior was the model and Suntour was the sub-model, like they do with cars now (e.g., Subaru Outback Expert Sport-Trac, L.L. Bean Edition). I remember riding up and down the block joyously singing “Sun-TOO-or BYE-sick-UL!”

One day when the bike was still new, I rode all morning, from my house up to the end of Howard Place and back down, then all the way down Hillsdale and back up, then back up Howard and back, over and over again, whistling the whole while because I was so happy. I happened to notice Mr. S—, who lived on the corner of Hillsdale and Howard, looking at me funny. He was out working in his yard and every time I went by he glared at me. What was his problem? I just shrugged it off. Well, later that day, another neighbor, Mr. D—, confronted me, asking if I’d vandalized Mr. S—’s house and yard. I was like “WHAT?!” It happens that Mr. S— had described at length to Mr. D— how I’d vandalized his place, and then rubbed it in by riding by again and again, whistling merrily to showcase my Schadenfreude as I watched him clean it up. I was mortified at this totally false accusation, and declared my innocence to Mr. D—. He advised that I’d simply have to go over there and knock on Mr. S—’s door and explain that I wasn’t the vandal. This I did, despite being a very shy kid, and I was so upset I was crying throughout my denial speech. My river of tears, it seemed, was mistaken for remorse and contrition by Mr. S—, who clearly didn’t believe my story of riding by again and again just because I liked to ride. At least my blubbery speech mollified him sufficiently that he didn’t see fit to involve my parents. This was a big break, because my parents never seemed to believe in my innocence, either. My mom once made me go apologize to yet another neighbor for being part of a cruel pack of kids that relentlessly teased her dog, even though I told my mom over and over that I wasn’t involved. Can you imagine how soul-crushing it is to apologize for an act of animal cruelty you are entirely innocent of?

Okay, time to move on. It was the toward the end of the summer when, on a day I now see as momentous, Max taught me how to shift my bike’s gears. We’d pedaled up Table Mesa Drive and were about to descend Vassar Drive, which is a 5.5% grade. Max, surely tired of waiting for me as I coasted down such hills (first gear being way too low to be of use), pointed at my stem-mounted shifters and told me, “Grab those two levers and push them all the way forward.”

Now, you probably think we’ve finally reached the crux of this story, after so very many diversions, and will now get to the really important, life-changing bit, and that’s almost true, but first I need to pause yet again to explain about these shifters. If you’re old enough to have used old-school stem- or down-tube-mounted shift levers, and remember how they worked, you may have raised an eyebrow just now when reading about Max’s instruction to push both levers forward. On almost any ten-speed-type bike, pushing the right lever forward would put the chain on the smallest cog in back (making for a higher gear, exactly as intended), but pushing the left lever forward would put the chain on the smaller chainring up front (making for a lower gear, at odds with the rest of the shift). You’d also wonder why, since I always rode in my bike’s lowest gear, both levers would have been down at the moment Max issued his instruction. On almost any bike, this would have meant my chain was on the big chainring, corresponding to the higher gear range. The only way you might have thought, “Oh yeah, of course, this makes sense” is if you’re the kind of bizarrely knowledgeable bike maven who would recall that the Suntour derailleur line-up of 1978 included the Spirt model, which worked backwards from most other derailleurs. As it happened, Max’s instructions were perfectly accurate for putting my bike in its highest gear.

And this begs the question: if my front derailleur (and thus left shifter) were essentially backwards from most others, how is it that Max’s instructions were correct? Wouldn’t he have assumed my bike worked the same as his? When I started this post, that question wouldn’t stop nagging at me. Now, if you’re wondering if I’m just remembering it wrong, think again … after all, this was a life-changing moment, forever seared into my memory. The highly specific action gave me, even before the gear shift actually took effect, a very powerful feeling. I knew that these gears were the key to somehow going faster, though I didn’t have any idea how (because when you think about it, the behavior of a bike’s gearing only makes sense after the fact, when you know empirically how gearing works; before that, the notion of differently sized cogs and chainrings affecting a bike’s speed is highly, highly abstract). The idea that I was somehow about to unleash great speed was tantalizing, and to achieve this by taking one hand, applying it to two levers, and pushing them both all the way forward in one go … it’s like pushing the throttle control forward on a fighter plane, or, better yet, remember the opening scene in “Risky Business,” when Tom Cruise’s character pushes all the levers on his dad’s stereo’s graphic equalizer all the way up, so he can totally rock out? It was just like that.

Determined to get to the bottom of this mystery, I had to find out if it was possible the front derailleurs on my brothers’ bikes, meaning Simplex derailleurs (these being Motobécane Nomades), might have also been backwards. This could have been a convention, after all, because this arrangement just makes sense. You have one consistent rule—pushing lever forward = higher gear—instead of the conflicting rule of pulling the left lever down = higher gear while pushing the right lever forward = higher gear. This conflicting behavior stymies cycling newcomers. On my wife’s road bike, I actually put “H” and “L” stickers on the down tube near the shifters to show which way to move them. It’s one of the more confusing things about pre-pushbutton shifting.

I couldn’t reach my brothers right away so I consulted ChatGPT. It assured me that, in fact, Simplex derailleurs were also backwards (vs. more modern shifters), just like the Suntour Spirt. GPT confidently declared, “The circa 1975 Simplex shift lever was pushed forward (toward the front wheel) to move the chain to the big ring. As a result, the lever would end up in a vertical or forward-leaning position when in the big ring.” Had it stopped there, I might have been fooled by a classic AI hallucination. But GPT went on to say, “This action corresponded to pushing the shift lever forward (since the shift lever pulls cable as it rotates forward).” Of course this is wrong. The shift lever pulls cable when you pull it down. So I asked it to furnish photos and diagrams. It provided a photo of a mid-‘80s Shimano Dura-Ace front derailleur (useless); a drawing of a Simplex rear derailleur (also useless); a photo looking from the left at a ‘90s-era triple crankset (ditto); and a photo of a bottom bracket with chainwheels in the background (noticing any trend here, i.e., useless?). Then it described these visual aids in exhaustive, needless, and useless detail.

I pointed out its error, challenging the notion that pushing a shift lever forward would ever tension the cable, whereupon GPT completely backpedaled (pun intended, couldn’t resist) and recanted everything it had said earlier, saying, “You nailed it!” and providing a totally new answer to my original question: “No, Simplex front derailleurs (like the Prestige models used on Motobécanes in the mid-1970s) were not reverse-spring designs like the SunTour Spirt.”

But wait, I’m not done. Disgusted by ChatGPT’s blithe ineptitude, I asked it to furnish a diagram and a photo to illustrate its revised explanation of Simplex’s shifting. Look what it came up with:

Can you believe that? For all its detailed description (running over 1,600 words in all), ChatGPT apparently had no concept of the cable actuation. Look at the arrow pointing from the “Cable” label … it has no head, goes nowhere! No cable is shown! And look at the arrow showing the motion of the lever: it’s 90 degrees off of the actual motion. And since when is the lever mounted directly to the derailleur? Where would the cable even be?

Actually, in fairness, I know of at least one front derailleur that was actuated by a handle instead of a cable. It was on an ancient Schwinn Collegiate that I bought from a police auction. The rear derailleur had a normal shifter and cable setup, but that front derailleur had a handle. At least it did, for a while, until my pant leg caught it one day during hard pedaling and ripped it clean off the bike. But this wasn’t a Simplex derailleur; I’m pretty sure it was a Huret (though it was labeled “Schwinn Approved” in keeping with the fiction that this was an all-American bike). That derailleur looked something like this:

Getting back to ChatGPT, its drawing wasn’t even the worst of its crimes. Look at this fake photo it generated of what it imagined that Simplex front shifting system looked like:

I thought for a second this was an actual photo of some bizarre ill-fated real-life setup, but look at the ersatz brand stamped into the shift lever, in a nonexistent alphabet. The entire rendering is just grotesque. In fact, for me, and I suppose anyone else who has great familiarity with bicycle components, this mock photo is deep into uncanny valley territory, to the extent it’s almost nauseating. Also note how the derailleur cage doesn’t clear the chainring teeth. Artificial intelligence my ass!

Suffice to say, Simplex derailleurs of that era weren’t backwards and nothing can explain Max’s spot-on instructions. When I asked him he simply admitted, “I don’t have an answer for you. Geoff and Bryan probably made the observation so it must have been common knowledge. I know I didn’t discover that on my own.” Bryan theorized that Max had taken my bike out for a few joy rides and discovered it that way; Max could neither confirm nor deny this. The perfect accuracy of his instruction shall have to remain a mystery.

But oh, when I pushed those levers forward, and that bike went from first to tenth gear … it was breathtaking. I mashed the pedals with everything I had, working hard to get on top of that 52x14 top gear, until I was just flying down Vassar. I’d had no idea just how effective pedaling in “the big meat” (as a bike’s highest gear is known by racers) could be. It’s like if you had what you thought was a Fred Flintstone car, propelled by your feet paddling the ground, and then one day you discovered that this car had an engine. What a game-changer. It was like I went from patsy to made man in the span of a minute.

Not only did this sudden knowledge change my cycling, but it forever changed how I regarded my dad’s authority. Not only would I use all my gears from that day forward, but I’d have this secret I’d be keeping from him. It was impossible for me to revert to the lowly, gutless, quaking obeyer of rules; I was like, fuck that guy! He kept this gearing magic from me! He kept me down! I felt like Toecutter in Mad Max: “The bronze, they keep you from being proud.”

As it turned out, I never did get in trouble for defying my dad. An absentminded fellow, he evidently forgot he’d ever issued that prohibition. Or who knows, maybe on some level he wanted me to take some initiative. But most likely he’d intended to one day teach me all about shifting, but just forgot. Maybe he’d have thought a little harder about this if he’d had any inkling that his silly rule, coupled with Max’s intervention, would turn me into a lifelong rebel…

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Father’s Day Reflections

Introduction

Look, I know this post is a little late, Father’s Day having been last Sunday. On that day I had to (well, chose to) provide (quasi-) live coverage of a bike race. But isn’t a week later a better time anyway, now that all the fanfare is over, to reflect on being and/or having and/or having had a dad?

I lost my father in 2017. What a strange way we have of saying this, like it was somehow my fault. “How did you lose him?” one might ask. “Is a grown man that hard to keep track of?!” Perhaps I should say the world lost him, and/or he lost the world. Anyway, one upshot of this is that the holiday doesn’t really require anything of me anymore, which is nice. I always struggled with what to write on my Father’s Day card to my dad, as you shall see … which always brings me to this question: have I made it difficult for my kids to write this card?

This post is a reflection on these and other matters, and is perhaps a bit less lighthearted than my past Father’s Day posts (here, here, here, here, and here).

Trigger warning

Before I begin, I suppose I should warn you that what you’re about to read is not particularly self-deprecating. If you feel that you are a bad father, or are married to one, you might find this post distasteful. If it bothers you to read about how somebody has his act together (or thinks he does), to the point that you basically hate me, you can balance out your experience by reading more self-critical essays here, here, and/or (especially) here.

I say all this because I am not writing today in a hangdog or confessional tone. In this post I will not try to channel my inner Erma Bombeck by poking fun at my haplessness and foibles in a way that is relatable to any audience. I take parenting very seriously, and I am tired of reading essays from irresponsible types who think parenting is about their “personal journey” rather than about their kid(s). For example, I’ve read several testimonials from parents about how being cooped up with their kids during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place taught them how much they’d neglected their kids previously. “I was always at work and didn’t realize what I was missing out on,” this or that dippy father says. “Now I’ve gotten to know my kids better and you know what? I kinda like the little rascals! So now I’m making more time for them.” So what? You were a lame dad and you learned something? Big whoop. I’d rather get my wisdom from somebody who was a good parent all along and didn’t blithely botch the job until a crisis like the pandemic made him pull his head out.

The email to my brothers

The genesis of this post was the below email I wrote to my brothers many years ago. I’ll let it speak for itself.

From: Dana
Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2009 10:54 AM
To: Geoff; Bryan
Cc: E—
Subject: Father’s Day

Gentlemen,

Since you’re both fathers, and Father’s Day is upon us, I thought I’d share some of my feelings on this occasion. Actually, this e-mail is mainly procrastination, as I sat down this morning to write something in a Father’s Day card and get it in the mail on time, and I’ve got serious writer’s block. It may strike you as odd that I could get writer’s block over such a simple matter as a card, when I generally have what is arguably one of the worst cases of logorrhea on record, but I’ve always found the short card to be a bigger challenge than a 2,000-word blog post. Here are some of my mental rough drafts, crumpled up and thrown into my mental trash bin:

• Happy Father’s Day to the best dad ever!!!! ⇐ False, sentimental, likely to be taken as sarcastic … I mean, this is our dad we’re talking about, and even he isn’t so clueless as to believe I’d call him the “best dad ever”
• Happy Father’s Day! ⇐ Too simple, likely to be taken as perfunctory
• Happy Father’s Day! I hope you like the card. I thought of you when I saw the car on the front. I hope the car picture doesn’t dredge up ill feelings based on the fact that I bought a Volvo, the very car you warned me against buying, based on the murderously, scandalously expensive official Volvo replacement parts that they force you to buy. I didn’t ignore your lecture, either time, about the friend who took his Volvo to a mechanic to have the rear-view mirror replaced, only to find that the car rejected the used replacement like a bad organ because its computer chip did a VIN lookup and it didn’t match, and the new mirror was $600 (or was it $800?). I want you to know that although I listened to that story and committed it to memory, I then went right out and bought a Volvo anyway, because it looks cool and I want to be the envy of the neighbors, even at the expense of our planet since my car gets vastly inferior gas mileage to your car [a Scion XB that we call “The Toaster” because it looks like one]. Also, your VIN lookup story failed the sanity test … I think you might be mistaking your own wild-ass theory for reality. ⇐ Too long, too bitter, too judgmental, too likely to engender ill will
• Happy Father’s Day! I hope you like the card. I thought of you when I saw the car on the front. Of course this car is a convertible, which isn’t safe, but I couldn’t bother myself to search harder for a card with a safe car (or a toaster) on the front, or to make my own card. No, I just selected the first thing that basically slotted in to the “more or less germane” category, if only in the most perfunctory way. ⇐ Too subtle
• Happy Father’s Day! You were always there for me, Dad … except on those occasions (roughly 12 hours a day, seven days a week) when you weren’t actually there, for me or anybody else, because you were working, except when you actually were at home but were inexplicably lying on your back taking a nap on the floor of the living room and then getting really angry at your sons for making too much noise and waking you up, as though four boys together in a room can possibly be quiet. ⇐ Too accurate
• Happy Father’s Day! I really appreciate your parenting, and I want you to know that I forgive you for the spankings, especially the ones that Mom commissioned (“Wait ‘til your faaaaaather gets home!”), and I appreciate the grim stoicism you displayed when dispatching your spanking duties, even though it sometimes seemed like all you came home for was to spank us and eat dinner before going back to work. I know that your intentions—to produce respectful, obedient children—were good (even if I’m personally opposed to corporal punishment). ⇐ Too political
• Happy Father’s Day! I’m sorry my brothers and I let you down. I’m especially sorry for my own failure, given that I’d given you false hope with some early scholastic promise before choosing a wussy major like English, and I know it must have been humiliating for you to admit to your old Navy/grad-school buddy that I chose English instead of Engineering, and I winced inwardly, not just for myself, when I ran into that Navy/grad-school-buddy at the UPS shipping facility back in ‘90 and he said, “You’re at Cal, then? Good man. Though your dad told me how disappointed he was that you chose English.” ⇐ Insincere, because in reality I’m totally unapologetic about my choice, preferring to see Dad’s disappointment as a failing in him, not us
• Happy Father’s Day! Thank you so much for getting that HP-85 computer and letting us kids use it. My early use of that machine really wired me for the Information Age, and I largely credit your prescience for my gainful employment today. ⇐ Too weirdly specific

So yeah, it’s a difficult task, writing that card. I’ll get to it somehow, though, and I think it’ll even be on time, and I’ll probably even give him a call on Sunday, though talking to him on the phone is a bit nerve-racking, at least at first, until we settle into our respective roles of lecturer and audience. Then it’s a simple matter of saying “uh-huh” and “oh, interesting” from time to time until he runs out of steam and we can more or less gracefully exit the call. As you well know.

Am I too harsh?

Of course with my brothers I can be extra critical of my father, because they know exactly what I’m talking about (even if they’re more likely to cut him some slack). I certainly wouldn’t have shared the above email with, say, the people who attended my dad’s memorial; instead I wrote a speech designed to better balance the laudatory with the honest, to fondly commemorate my dad while still acknowledging the trickier areas of our relationship. But that audience consisted of people who liked the guy enough to attend his memorial … it would be unseemly to stand up at that lectern and bag on him.

Does that make it okay to share the above email here, to a (possibly) wider audience? Well, I doubt my dad’s friends read albertnet (after all, he didn’t). And of course it’s too late to offend him. I think in the service of understanding a couple of fundamental questions—what makes a good parent, and what makes a parent bad?—I’m calling it in bounds.

Don’t we all make mistakes?

There are so many ways to screw up as a parent. Nobody can get it right all the time, and of course all of us parents are learning on the job. It would be nice if we could learn from our mistakes on our firstborn and get it right after that (and it is the case that I’m less screwed up than my three older brothers), but what works on one kid might not work on another (and yes, I was joking in that previous parenthetical, seeing if you’re still awake). Parents learn as they go … or fail to learn.

So what makes the difference between a dad who screws up from time to time but whose kid takes it in stride, and a parent whose kid can’t think of what to write in a Father’s Day card? There are probably a thousand good answers to this, but I’ll focus on a couple. One: how hard does the dad actually try? Two: how much rapport is available to work through disappointments together?

I’ll take an example from my own parenting to explore this. To be of any use, this needs to be a bad memory, of a time when I really screwed up and felt really bad … a low moment for me as a father. (Ah, now I’ve got your attention!) So here’s the story. My older daughter A— was on the high school mountain bike team; I was a coach. We were doing the Sunday team ride on Mount Tam, and she was having breathing problems. Like many cyclists (including myself), she suffered from exercise-induced bronchospasm (EIB), an asthma-like condition that can occur during intense exercise, especially in dusty conditions. On top of this, her bike had a catastrophic mechanical problem (I think the chain got really badly jammed), which I struggled to fix. The group had left us far behind, and I bloodied my hand during the repair, and when we went to catch up my daughter’s breathing was so bad, she could barely pedal her bike. Her wheezing was so loud it seemed to me she was exaggerating it. I blew my top and was yelling at her,  as if she wasn’t having a crappy enough time already. I stopped short of accusing her of playing up her breathing trouble, but I’m sure my exasperation came through in my tone and my volume. (I fact-checked this story with A— yesterday, and she recalls that she’d forgotten her inhaler that day, which was part of what drove my fury. I hadn’t remembered that, but we both agree this was a very bad episode in any case.)

Where our memory diverges is around my apology. I recall apologizing later that day, and again when we learned, months later, that she actually had Vocal Cord Dysfunction (VCD), an evil twin to EIB, which actually involves louder wheezing because it’s the vocal cords blocking the airway. A— does not recall the apologies, and this makes me wince. It reminds me that, as much the lack of an apology can exacerbate one’s pain, the apology itself does not, of course, undo the bad behavior. And yet A—, even without an apology, forgives me for the episode, saying that it “doesn’t make me add an asterisk when I say you’re a good father.”

So how come I struggle to forgive my own father? Why do I look back on his parenting with such a shudder? Why did I always have trouble coming up with anything nice to say in my Father’s Day cards? When I sift through my memories in search of answers, few episodes stand out and I’ll share a couple here.

Exhibit A. When my dad bought me my first bike—a 10-speed (for which choice I have to hand it to my dad, it changed my life)—I read the owner’s manual, which emphasized the importance if the free 30-day tune-up. I mentioned this to my dad, and asked if he could take me and my bike to the shop to get this done. He walked over to the bike, lifted the front wheel, gave it a spin, and declared that the brake pads were on upside-down, and that the person who built the bike (and by extension, apparently, the whole shop) was incompetent, and that we’d be better off not letting them near the bike.

This argument had a couple of problems. First, it didn’t make sense even to my 9-year-old brain that my dad would identify a problem with the bike without fixing it. Second, it wasn’t that long before I knew that his statement about the brake pads was simply false. My dad lied about the brake pads because he was just too lazy (or as he surely thought of it, too busy) to bring the bike to the shop, and didn’t want to get into some annoying dialogue about it. My interpretation of this behavior is that he either a) didn’t have much respect for honesty as a value that should always be upheld; b) was too stingy in his estimation of my intelligence to realize I’d know he was lying; and/or c) underestimated my ability to remember any of this and thus realize later that he'd lied. And then, a year or two after this, he lied again! I’d noticed my bike’s wheels seemed wobbly and asked my dad if my axle nuts were loose or something. He gave the wheel a spin and then said to my brother, “Geoffrey, can you check the axle nuts on Dana’s bike and make sure they’re tight?” Of course my dad knew damn well it wasn’t the axle nuts; he just didn’t want to have to work on my bike. Geoff knew this too and said, “It’s not your axle nuts. Your wheels are out of true. It’s a spoke tension thing.” He seemed as disgusted as I was. Again, my dad had just figured out the quickest way to exit the conversation, even if that meant flat-out lying to me.

To reiterate: two things differentiate my poor parenting example and my dad’s. One is how hard he was trying (or wasn’t), and the second is how much rapport existed to support any effort toward resolution. In the case of my transgression (the outburst during the mountain bike ride), at least after the fact I could discuss my behavior with my daughter. Even if her memory is the correct one and I didn’t apologize, we’ve talked about this (and other episodes) several times over the years, and we’ve talked in general about how she feels about me as a dad. I’ve invited both my daughters to give me a report card from time to time. They know I take parenting seriously and can handle criticism. So when I talk about trying one’s best, I don’t just mean endeavoring to always do the right thing, but to be willing to admit it when you fall short, and do the work necessary to understand and (at least try to) correct the behavior going forward.

In contrast, I couldn’t call my dad out on his misbehavior, for two reasons. One, for me to confront him about his dishonesty would be a serious accusation, which he wouldn’t have handled well based on his ego and his failure to hold himself accountable. Second, my dad wasn’t actually interested in having rapport with his sons, at least when we were kids. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the kind of loosey-goosey over-modern type who thinks parents and their children should be pals, without any concept of parental authority, but I think the family hierarchy fulfilled some lack in my dad in ways that weren’t healthy . He enjoyed having his sons be in awe of him, of his great brain, of his height, his power, his aloofness … I think he didn’t even mind that we were afraid of him—sufficiently so to never dream of criticizing him. Thus there was no rapport.

The third thing

Oops, did I say there were two main factors determining whether moments of bad parenting can be assuaged? There’s also a third measure of parenting that is hugely important: consistency. I suppose I have always appreciated this on some level, but it was brought into sharp focus by—of all things—a monologue in a TV show. My daughter A— turned me on to it, in fact; I suspect the episode in question recalled to her some of the dialogue we’ve had about parenting. The episode (s05e06) is called “Free Churro,” and if you have Netflix you can watch it yourself (and you should, if you are, have, or have had a parent). You can read the full script here.

Here’s the setup. BoJack, a horse, is giving a eulogy for his mother, and—far from being organized enough to write anything in advance—he’s just winging it, and rather tastelessly. (The show is a comedy, after all.) Bojack contemplates aloud:

All I know about being good I learned from TV. And in TV, flawed characters are constantly showing people they care with these surprising grand gestures. And I think that part of me still believes that’s what love is. But in real life, the big gesture isn’t enough. You need to be consistent, you need to be dependably good. You can’t just screw everything up, and then take a boat out into the ocean to save your best friend, or solve a mystery, and fly to Kansas. You need to do it every day, which is so hard.

Part of why this speaks to me is that this contrast between grand gestures and day-to-day stuff helps me understand why the happiest memories of my parents don’t simply wipe out my disappointments. Did my dad ever do anything great? Yeah, of course! For example, as I described in my own speech at his memorial, he showed up with his car to provide support when I biked up Mount Evans (the highest paved road in North America), first with my new bride and then, 22 years later, with my daughter A—. Also, as I mentioned above, my dad bought my brothers and me dashing ten-speed bikes when all our friends were on clunkier one-speeds, and he let us learn to program on his HP-85 computer, years before anyone had an IBM PC. He built a sled for my oldest brothers for their Boy Scout Klondike Derby, and calculated the perfect parabolic shape for our other brother’s solar hot dog cooker, and once did a 360 in the snow in his VW bus with the entire carpool on board. All very cool stuff … but he wasn’t interested in the day-to-day business of just  being in our lives, and being interested. He didn’t see me in the school play (though I had the lead role); he didn’t come to my high school graduation (saying “I have to work that day” even though it was on a Saturday weeks in the future), and didn’t even attend my college graduation, though this was from his own Alma Mater that he’d wanted all four of his sons to attend. (Details on that last example are here and never mind the “fiction” label; that was applied before my dad had passed away).

And this is the crux, I think: kids can tell when their parents are or aren’t truly committed. This commitment shows in the willingness to pay attention, to be involved, to attend the middle school band concert even though it is essentially the opposite of music. The sense that you, the child, are not only not the point but are in fact a distraction—an obstruction, even—can be devastating. This is poignantly depicted, coincidentally, in that same “Free Churro” episode of “Bojack Horseman.” At the beginning of the episode, before the eulogy scene, there’s a flashback of Bojack being picked up from school, hours late, by his father, who complains about having to do this errand:

I was on a good run with my novel. I had this really interesting sentence that kept going for pages and pages, and I thought about how rare it is to really get in the groove like that. How, most days, I can’t concentrate because my idiot child is blasting the television, and it suddenly dawned on me; hot cock on a rock, [your mom] never even picked up the little noise and snot factory [i.e, Bojack]! … You know Sunday is my writing day. Sundays are the one day that are just for me and my craft, and still, you and the black hole that birthed you conspire to ruin it for me. What am I supposed to do now? Just go back to writing? I’m out of the zone now, the whole day’s shot! All because of you and that brittle wisp of a woman you made the mistake of making your mother.

Obviously there is massive hyperbole going on here (again, the show  is a comedy), but the point really hit home for me. I felt like that noise and snot factory, too. Even when, as a teenager, I got into some really cool stuff (e.g., bike racing; writing, illustrating, and typing a Russian picture book; composing urination-themed poetry), my dad wasn’t aware or interested … his work was more important. And that, above all else, is what makes writing out that Father’s Day card such a difficult exercise, and one that I so little miss.

Am I any better?

To finish this essay on a less unpleasant note, and to make the case that in fact I do try harder and have worked hard to be consistent and approachable and reliable for my kids, I will offer you the bluh-bluh-bluh story. I will start by saying that I always loved reading to my kids, from the very beginning (and still sometimes today, when they’re around). That said, parenting is incredibly tiring, especially when kids are young, and often this read-aloud could be a struggle. (It was even harder coming up with a totally original bedtime story every night, that needed to have fully realized characters and the traditional story arc—exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution—before my kids would be satisfied, but that’s another story … see here.)

At times it was impossible to stay awake while reading, and as sleep overtook me strange words would come out of my mouth, that had nothing to do with the book, and then (as I described in a journal I kept for my daughter), these words would decay into gibberish. These sounds often came out as something like “bluh-bluh-bluh,” and my daughter’s shorthand when scolding me for this would be, “No bluh-bluh-bluh-ing!” My favorite such memory is when I fell so deeply asleep I didn’t even know where I was, and I awoke to the bizarre sight of my daughter’s face inches from mine, and her fingers actually prying my eyes open to wake me up so I could read some more. These were not kids accustomed to being denied.

Further albertnet reading on this topic:

• Father’s Day
• What Are Fathers For?
• A Father's Day Poem
• World’s Second-Best Dad!
• Father’s Day Focus: Are Parents Interchangeable?

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