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.

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 to my kids, 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?

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

Dead Indian Memorial Thanksgiving Ride

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and coarse humor.

Introduction

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and I’m not sprawled out like a beached whale.  The feast is tonight instead.  While the womenfolk prepare it, I’ll recount my gorge-free day of pure gratitude—well, okay, cycling and gratitude—which was yesterday.  But don’t worry, this won’t be a Normal Rockwell or Thomas Kincade  style preciousness-fest.  It’ll be a snarky, snooty … no it won’t.  In between.  A frigid ride described through the prism of grudging gratitude.  C’mon, it’ll be fun.  There's even some photos.

Pre-gratitude

Really, I kind of don’t see the point of Thanksgiving.  That doesn’t mean I don’t see the point of giving thanks.  I just don’t like the idea of compressing all your gratitude into one day, so that everybody is going around the table trying to outdo each other with innovative, comprehensive outpourings.  It’s like a bunch of Academy Awards speeches and meanwhile our food is getting cold.  My kids haven’t asked me to explain this holiday; perhaps they instinctively know I’d ruin everything by saying, “Well, early colonists would have starved but the Native Americans saved them, so the next year they threw a big celebration feast, and then ran the Native Americans off onto reservations, which were tracts of land that weren’t of much use until somebody had the brilliant idea of running casinos on them so the white man could exploit a lucrative gambling loophole and blame it on the Native Americans.

I prefer to thank as I go, year-round.  My wife and I make the kids do it, too.  “What are you grateful for today?” is a standard dinner table conversation starter (or killer, let’s be honest), along with “Everybody recount the most embarrassing thing you did today.”

Ride prep

The first thing I’m grateful for is that I got to ride at all.  First thing in the morning my wife started speaking to me in hushed tones.  This usually means she’s hatching a plan for a family outing and doesn’t want the kids to weigh in.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a bad person, but I don’t always want to spend my day off doing boring things with my kids.  (Okay, maybe I am a bad person.)  Now, a good hike isn’t boring, and I’d normally be up for it, but one of Ashland’s main attractions is Lithia Park, where teenagers go to smoke pot, and which has a playground for little kids and their bored parents.  I had a feeling the playground would suck us in.

I don’t mind watching my kids play on a playground.  Actually, that’s not true.  I do mind it.  For me, quality time can take a variety of forms and that’s not one of them.  I’d much rather read to my kids, or just sit next to them on the couch, each of us with a book.  I was doing this with Lindsay in the morning, all cozy and everything, and suddenly she fled to the far end of the couch.  I asked what was up.  “You committed flatulence!” she accused.  I denied it (honestly, I hadn’t done it).  I said she had done it.  “No, I know it wasn’t me because mine are very loud,” she said.  “Yours are more … solemn.”

Ah!  The insight of a child.  Suddenly I had a brainstorm about the craft of writing.  I read a Stephen King book about writing recently, and he exhorted the budding writer to avoid adverbs.  His position is that if your description is good enough, the nature of the action should be obvious. Well, what exactly about my (alleged) flatulence had struck Lindsay as solemn?  What body language had conveyed this surprising notion?  And how might this mystery inflect my own writing? 

They drove along the winding road, stereo off, taking in the full range of autumn colors.  The trees just don’t do this in San Diego.  He looked over at Claire, trying to gauge her mood.  She’d been quiet for some time:  was this a sign of irritation, or had the scenery cast a pleasant spell?  He noted a certain set of her jaw, slightly disrupting the tranquility of her face.  Was she even enjoying the drive?  Or was she distracted by a memory of her former life, when she’d lived here?  Probably he was over-thinking things, as usual.  He gave his head a tiny shake as he acknowledged, not for the first time, the inscrutability of others.  Perhaps it was enough to just enjoy the drive and not try to know everything.  Yes, perhaps this smooth, asphalt road and the brilliant hues of the leaves would have to be enough.  He farted solemnly.

Getting back to the family plan, I was relieved to learn that my wife’s idea was to head to Lithia Park, let the kids play, and then take them hiking while I did a bike ride.  For this plan I felt much gratitude.

While filling my water bottles, asked my wife, “Hey, did you ever check out that link I sent you to the Hater’s Guide to the Williams Sonoma Catalog?”  She said she hadn’t, that she hadn’t had time, but not to take it personally.  “Take it personally?” I protested.  “Why would I do that?  It’s not like I wrote the thing.”  I reflected sexistly that only a female would take such a thing personally.  I reminded her:  “I’m a guy.  I don’t take anything personally.  If you told me my breath stunk, I’d say, ‘Oh yeah?!  You should take a look in the mirror!  You probably have something really stinky lodged in one of your nostrils!”  So I guess in this realm I am glad I’m a guy, and also glad that I can pretend to be sexist without angering my wife.

(Do you think Stephen King would have minded that adverb, “sexistly”?  If so, on what grounds:  that it’s an adverb, or that it’s not even a real word?)

The next thing I was grateful for was that I managed to overcome a mechanical problem with my bike.  One of the inner tubes wouldn’t hold air due to a bad valve.  It’s touch and go.  The leak isn’t obvious unless you (well, I) apply some saliva and then check, with your (okay, my) tongue for that buzzing, bubbling sensation that indicates a leak.  Oddly, my wife didn’t seem curious about why I was French-kissing my French valve.  I finally had an “aha!” moment and put a bit of cold vulcanizing fluid on there before screwing on the valve cap, figuring when it set up it might help form a seal.  Sounds absurd but it seemed to work.  I was really proud of myself and was dying to describe the solution to my wife.  I said, “I’m trying really hard to resist describing my innovative bike repair to you.”  She replied, “Well you’re not trying hard enough.”  I’m grateful that instead of silently suffering my bike-mania, she stops me cold.  This dynamic is probably the backbone of our marriage.  (By the way, I never normally use valve caps.  I was grateful to have brought one, having thankfully noticed the flaky valve before we left home.)

The ride

We parked at Lithia Park, I checked my bike tire (still holding!), and I said goodbye to the family and headed out.  I was grateful for the ingenious helmet liner that I was trying out for the first time, that kept my head from feeling like it had been stabbed through the vents and then had ice cubes thrust into the open wounds.  I was grateful for my extra-thick leg warmers and my stretched-out old cycling shoes that accommodated thick Smartwool socks.  And I was grateful for the dry climate of this area.  Not only did that make the cold air less harsh, but the crotch of my shorts had dried out after my post-urinal drip.  I don’t know why I sometimes drip but I think every guy sometimes does.  (A sonnet I once wrote on this topic ended, “For urine flow can never really stop/ Until your undies drink the final drop.”)  You might say this is much ado about nothing—how much could have dripped, anyway?  Well, imagine the amount of moisture that might condense on a telescope lens.  Now picture the Hubble Space Telescope.

I headed for Dead Indian Memorial Road, a solid 9-mile climb up to about 5,000 feet (similar to Mount Diablo in the Bay Area).  It’s my go-to ride when I visit my mom.  The road used to be called “Dead Indian Road”—it had been called that since the olden days—but the Native Americans eventually protested.  The modern name is a compromise that I’m not sure the Native Americans should have accepted.  It’s a tricky thing.  “Dead Native American Memorial Road” is too long, and “Native American Memorial Road” suggests an entire race was wiped out.  “Dead Injun Road” has obvious problems; though it does allude to this name having been assigned long, long ago (which is perhaps slightly less offensive than if the road had been named recently), it’s far too harsh.

I didn’t feel so hot, and thus felt grateful I didn’t have to try to keep up with anyone.  I once did a group ride on this climb, on Thanksgiving Day years ago, and one sprightly novice overcooked it and ended up vomiting.  I can still picture the pool of vomit in the road.

I saw a bald eagle.  I’m not a birdwatcher (or “birder” as they call themselves) but I’ve seen some pretty awesome birds during bike rides.  This was probably the highlight.  I felt grateful that my wife and older daughter, though both self-identifying as birders, don’t wear hats with long bills like so many birders do (a subconscious, or even conscious, effort to look like birds themselves?) or throw around cool-birder terms like “mo-doe” for mourning dove or “sharpie” for sharp-shinned hawk.  And they don’t go around making bird-calls like “pwish-pwish-pwish” as if they could actually attract birds.  I felt grateful for all of this.

I gave thanks to the skies for not dumping rain or snow on me.  I even enjoyed periods of sun.  I remembered several rides up this road when I wasn’t so lucky.  One time, it started snowing hard and the wind picked up and I’d have aborted the ride except I couldn’t face the frigid descent.  So I kept climbing, just to stay warm, fully aware that I was just prolonging the eventual agony of the trip back down.  On that occasion I’d been surprised to see, off the side of the road, some cool teens hanging out.  (From my thirties on, all teens had begun to seem cool to me.)  They were trying to do flips in mid-air, which made me think of the hoods in S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders.  Was that the inspiration for these kids?  Or were they being tough-balletic, like the Jets in West Side Story?  Reflecting that West Side Story surely influenced The Outsiders, and that West Side Story was itself based on The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, I wondered if these teens’ behavior was the natural result of growing up in the shadow of Ashland’s famous Shakespearean theater.  Suddenly I realized one of the teens was looking back at me, and he gave me a dramatic thumbs-up.  I was thrilled to be noticed—validated, even—by a real teenager.  For a moment, I felt cool.  Looking back on that incident, I felt grateful all over again that occasionally I can have moments of not being a totally lame old person in the eyes of youth.  (Then it dawned on me that the kid may well have meant the gesture sarcastically.)

There was a pretty dusting of snow on the trees as I reached the higher elevations.

The view was pretty spectacular from up there.  You can see Mount Ashland in the distance (with the ski runs).

Plenty of snow up top and that made things a lot colder.  I snapped a photo to show my kids the snow (living where we do, it’s something of a novelty).  I questioned whether it was narcissistic of me to be in the photo.  I thought of photographing just the snow but it seemed like the photo would be terribly boring.  I remembered the part in Lance Armstrong’s autobiography (I suppose we should call it a novel at this point) when, demoralized by a poor showing in the spring races, Lance heads back to the states, and then does some brutal training ride in terrible weather and his entourage gets all stoked and then at the top they start to put his bike in the car and he says, “No, I’m going to ride down.”  His coach and manservant look at each other with delight, as if to say “Lance is back!”  Given that Lance obviously noted their appreciation (having documented it), and that this was a turning point in his great comeback, we can read this episode as a triumph of narcissism over self-doubt.  As regards my photo, I decided to err on the side of self-doubt and only keep the photo if I looked old and tired in it.  I felt grateful to have enough sense to look inward and worry that I’m narcissistic.  Here’s the photo.  I think I look old and tired enough.

The descent was mighty cold.  I stopped to get this shot, knowing my hands soon wouldn’t work well enough to do any more photography.

Epilogue

By the time I reached the car I was too cold even to sigh and didn’t want to be on my bike anymore.  As we drove back to my mom’s, Erin saw a truck lose a hubcap.  We tried to drive up next to the driver and signal to roll down his window.  (As Ellen DeGeneres has pointed out, the pantomime of cranking a window down by a handle doesn’t mean much anymore, but it’s impossible to pantomime pushing the window-down button.)  We stopped at a stoplight and tooted the horn, but just then the guy turned right and drove off.  A homeless guy, maybe around twenty, with a backpack and a couple of dogs and a handwritten sign, trotted over to the car, looking hopeful.  “Oh, sorry, we were trying to talk to that driver,” I said.  He went back to his dogs and we drove off.  He’d been looking for someone to take him in for Thanksgiving dinner. 

I felt grateful I wasn’t he; sheepish that I was willing to help a motorist with his lost hubcap but not a lonely kid with nowhere to go; grateful that the thing had all unfolded too quickly for me to really agonize over whether to help him out and/or discuss it with my wife; and above all grateful that we hadn’t picked him up only to tell him we weren’t having a special feast at all, and that maybe she should try for something better out on the road if it wasn’t too late.  Above all I was grateful that my life isn’t too full of terribly awkward situations—“Larry David moments,” I call them, after the TV show “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”  And finally, I was grateful that like me, my mom doesn’t have TV, and nobody was going to try to watch a football game on Thanksgiving Day.

From the Archives - Thanksgiving Tales

Introduction

I’m having a bunch of relatives here for Thanksgiving: my brother Bryan and his family, and my mom. Some years we get all four brothers together, which is obviously the best-case scenario for this holiday, but the planets didn’t line up this year. Still, it’s going to be a blast. For one thing, our kids haven’t yet heard all the Albert stories, so we have ample excuse to trot out our old standbys. I enjoy watching the storyteller wring fresh life out these tales, and I like to try to track the embellishments.

One story in particular—the Baskin Robbins Simulated Vehicular Manslaughter Incident—has been told with great relish by both Geoff and Bryan, despite the fact that neither of them actually saw it, much less participated. They insist that they were there—“I remember it like it was yesterday!”—but Max and I are certain they were not. By the way, here’s a photo of the four of us, from December 1985, which we sent around as a Christmas card:

From left to right, that's me, Max, Geoff, and Bryan. But I digress. You won’t get the Baskin Robbins Simulated Vehicular Manslaughter tale in this post, because this is actually a From The Archives deal (I don’t have time for too much writing today, my relatives being on their way here as I assemble this). I have three stories to share. Two of them are good background for anybody trying to understand half of the comments that come out of our mouths every Thanksgiving. Following those is the tale of my most memorable Thanksgiving bike ride to date.

Thanksgiving Archives Tale #1 – The Gravy Incident

[This excerpt is from an e-mail I wrote to a cousin, who had asked for some background on all the gravy-related captions in a Thanksgiving photo album I’d sent around.]

The gravy-related captions relate to a Thanksgiving dinner back in the early nineties at our then-stepmother’s house. All the brothers were there. Once my plate was full I started looking around for the gravy. It can take awhile for the gravy to make its way around the table, and I try to be patient, but of course you can’t even begin eating until you’ve properly lubricated your food. I finally realized the gravy simply wasn’t on the table, so I headed into the kitchen. “I’ll get the gravy,” I said. I looked all around in the kitchen and still couldn’t find it. It was weird. Finally I asked my stepmother, “What does the gravy vessel look like?”

She just sat there at the table, silent, looking awkward. Finally my dad cleared his throat and said, grimly, “There isn’t any gravy.” There was a long silence. You could have heard a cat’s whisker twitch. “Wow, that’s funny,” I said. “For a second there I thought you said there wasn’t any gravy!” Actually, I only thought that. (This is the kind of embellishment I might allow in an oral retelling of the story, as an acknowledged fictional touch that enhances the dramatic effect.) In fact I was literally struck dumb. My brothers and I waited silently for a long while, to give Dad the opportunity to say, “Just kidding!” and burst out laughing, but he didn’t, so finally, without a word, we all filed silently out of the room, out the front door, and far away from that terrible place.

Actually, we didn’t. Of course we wanted to, but we couldn’t. We soldiered bravely on, trying to eat a turkey dinner with no gravy, but the meal was a very dour affair after that. I mean, how could they? What were they thinking? I can’t blame my dad, as (especially back in those days) he was a creature of appetites and would happily have eaten gravy by the quart like a normal person. I guess his wife had decided gravy is bad for you. Man, what a blow. She might has well have started off the meal by telling us a close friend or relative had just been killed in a gruesome accident and right after dinner we had to go try to ID the body.

Ever since that day, it’s become a family tradition, as Thanksgiving plans are made, to try to convincingly announce that for one reason or another you’re not serving gravy this year. Of course nobody has fooled anybody else for a second, no matter how perfect the poker-face and deadpan style.

Thanksgiving Archives Tale #2 – The Near-Buffet Incident

[Whenever I host the Thanksgiving meal, my mom struggles with the question of who should carve the turkey. On the one hand, it’s my house, but on the other hand, Bryan is the firstborn son. I’m happy to let him do it, because a) he has more kids, b) he’s bigger and stronger, and c) I’m not very good at poultry carving anyway. But one thing that is never questioned is that the bird gets carved at the table. The following was an explanation to my cousin of the photo caption, “Bryan, elder statesman of our generation, did the carving. AT THE TABLE, as a man should!” Note in the photo below the glowing eyes of our banished cat, visible through the kitchen-nook window in the background. Also note that in the following tale, “the Landlo’” refers to my mom’s second husband, who had previously been her landlord, and which name stuck. Note, finally, that this photo has nothing to do with the story that follows it.]

That caption about carving the turkey at the table goes back to our first Thanksgiving dinner at the Landlo’s house, around a decade ago. We’d never met the Landlo’s kids before. They were a bit on the shy side, and I felt kind of bad for them, thrust into the din of five loud Alberts talking over each other with great relish. It was an oddly early Thanksgiving meal; the Landlo’ had wanted to have the meal at some insanely early hour, like 1 or 2, whereas our family tradition was to have it around the normal dinnertime. Our mom conceded that point (which we boys were all happy to do, because we probably had to dual-dinner that night, having accepted dueling invitations in order to prevent a battle royale between our parents over who got the kids on Thanksgiving. In fact, it’s possible that this particular meal took place on the very same day as the no-gravy travesty recounted above).

Mom was less inclined to give in on the Landlo’s other tradition, which was to carve the turkey in the kitchen long before the meal and have people parade through buffet-style like we were at a Sizzler or something. Our family had always carved the turkey at the table, but the Landlo’ wasn’t having any of it. As the Landlo’s kids and my brothers and I waited nervously around the dining room table, the argument in the kitchen became more and more heated until pretty soon Mom and the Landlo’ were yelling good and loud at each other. Finally, the Landlo’ gave in and grabbed the turkey out of the oven to bring it to the table. There was no obvious place to set it down—he was acting very impulsively—but that didn't end up being a problem because the turkey never even made it to the table. He dropped it! Right on the floor of the kitchen!

Now, Mark Twain might have done a nice job with some really artistic swearing at that point. I’d have liked to hear that. I’d like to think in the same situation I might have offered up a splendid mosaic of creative profanities. (Geoff and I fancy ourselves innovators of the form, and when we land on a particularly satisfying profane phrase we’ll even share it, like people trade recipes.) But the Landlo’s cussing fit had nothing to offer but volume and bile. It certainly could have drowned out just about anything, a jackhammer even, but actually everybody else was completely silent. The tension at the dinner table was complete. All of this seemed to last a long while, but in fact it was probably only a second or two before Stepbrother #1 leapt to his feet and yelled, “DAD!” as though his father were in great danger, like he was being dragged away by a bear or something.

As Stepbrother#1 raced into the kitchen, leaving Stepbrother #2 behind, my brothers and I completely lost it, becoming nearly hysterical with laughter. The harder we laughed, the harder we laughed. Geoff has this vein in his forehead that comes out at such times—we call it the pleasure vein—and I thought it might actually burst. The more we laughed, the more awkward it became for the stepbrothers. Poor Stepbrother #2: he was alone with us at the table had nowhere to go. His sister-in-law was there, but couldn’t support him as they themselves had only just met. We rocked in our chairs, just spazzing out with laughter.

I can’t remember anything more after that. Surely the turkey was resurrected, served, and eaten, but I have no memory of it. In the years that remained of that marriage, it was a long while before we invited back to the Landlo’s house, and never again with his kids, which was a huge relief for everybody I’m sure. Now, Mom makes a point before every Thanksgiving dinner to say, as nonchalantly as possible, “Hey, what do you think about just carving the bird beforehand, and people can help themselves?” Naturally, her chances of getting anybody to take her seriously for even a nanosecond are exactly zero.

Thanksgiving Archives Tale #3 – The Pre-Feast Bike Ride

[When my family gets together for Thanksgiving, we usually try to do a big ride on the big day, to work up a proper appetite. Here’s a photo of my brothers and me, along with Bryan’s daughter Rachel, before the ride up Dead Indian Memorial Road in Oregon that we did on Thanksgiving Day 2008. This photo has nothing to do with the story that follows it, for which I have no photos.]

[On years that my family doesn’t get together for Thanksgiving, I try to find a group ride to join. These rides are often impromptu and aren’t always easy to discover. Such was the case in 2005 when I went out with a group of local riders. This story is taken from an e-mail I sent my brothers right after it happened. I’ve edited it a bit to remove references that you wouldn’t get.]

My goal for this ride was simple: simply survive, riding with the boys, after the previous day’s grueling effort [a four-hour ride with 7,500 feet of climbing]. To my surprise, I didn’t feel completely awful as I hammered (late, as usual) to the impromptu bagel shop rendezvous. It’s a good thing my legs weren’t terrible, because of all the various Thanksgiving Day group rides, it seemed I’d stumbled on a pretty elite one. Several of them were guys I raced with at Cal in ’91, a couple of whom had later gone pro. There were a few other guys I didn’t know, but they looked plenty fit. I’d say the group totaled between fifteen and twenty guys.

It was a pretty mellow pace, until we reached the bumpy, winding downhill leading to the long, flat, straight stretch with the pedestrian crossing sign at its far end: site of the famous “Walking Man” sprint, which is always hotly contested, any day of the year, practically any time you have more than two guys in a group. When I ride this stretch of road by myself, I’m tempted to sprint anyway, just to see if I can still kick my own ass. (As sprints go, Walking Man actually suits my slow-twitch abilities pretty well, because it’s so long. My poor jump isn’t that big a problem on such a long sprint, and there’s plenty of time to get my 53x12 turning well and try to make the right tactical moves.)

At the top of the winding downhill toward the sprint, a guy on my bike club, Mike Ceely, said something about a lead-out and went to the front. I jumped on his wheel. Somebody said, “Is Freddie on?” which is kind of like saying, to a motorist who has just whizzed by you, “Easy there, Mario.” As you may have guessed, “Freddie” in this Mario context refers to Fred Rodriguez, the US Pro champion, kind of the Mario Andretti of American pro cycling. So now I was worried that somebody might expect some rider among us to be like Freddie in this sprint. Of course I couldn’t be up for a really fast sprint, given how hard I’d ridden the previous two days and my iffy sprinting skillz anyway. But Mike seemed to want to lead me out, so I let him. I (facetiously) gave him instructions to drop me off fifty meters from the line.

Ceely did a fine job for a long time, hammering away and keeping the speed well over 30 mph on the pancake-flat road. But he’d taken it up from really far out, and I knew he’d falter well before the line. He was really suffering, practically lying on the top tube to be more aero. I knew he wanted me to come by so he could finally sit up, but I was way too far from the finish to bring ‘er in, probably 350-400 meters out. So I stayed on, waiting for somebody to come up the side. Finally Ceely actually waved me past, and I knew he was blown. So I took off as fast as I could, keeping my speed as high as possible and hoping that whoever came by me jumped hard enough that he he’d open a gap behind him, so that maybe I could slip in and catch his wheel. (Of course, if the guy jumped too hard, I wouldn't be able to latch on.) I reckoned that maybe—just maybe—I could grab the guy’s wheel, whoever he was, sit on it for just long enough to recover a bit, and then try to come back around him. It’s worked before and, my back to the wall, I was just crazy enough to try it.

Well, sure enough, some guy came by, and his wheel was open, but he was absolutely flying. Getting that wheel would be about like a hitchhiker trying to climb into a car that was still traveling at highway speed. I gave it my all, but the guy was just gone. I did manage to hold on to second, at least six or eight bike lengths out of first but pretty far ahead of third. I rode up to the guy—nobody I knew—and said, “Nicely done!” He looked up and I realized, to my astonishment, that it was none other than Freddie Rodriguez! I couldn’t believe it! Suddenly, second place didn't look so bad. I’d only just lost to the fastest sprinter in America!

I’d had no idea he was in the group. I’d seen him, but he was just some guy in a Lotto jersey. When you see an American in a Lotto jersey you just assume he bought it from Trashbar or something, and it’s usually the sign of just another moneyed novice. Now it all made sense. The question “Is Freddie on?” was asked by somebody who wanted to make darn sure that Fast Freddie was in position for a sprint, because the guys wanted a show!

Man, what a cool sport. What other sport gives a guy like me the opportunity to go head-to-head with the best in the business? The last time I’d seen Freddie was at a bike race, and I asked for his autograph. Needless to say this was much, much cooler. I could be both an adoring fan (because he was Freddie and I was just Dana) but also something not totally unlike a peer, since we were on the same ride and had just contested a sprint in which, for lack of anybody better, I was the guy to beat. “Man, your teammate led out a little early,” Freddie observed. “Kind of hung you out to dry.”

Later I learned that another of my teammates, Eric Zaltas, had been on my wheel and was just about to come around me when he saw Freddie blow past at such a speed that, his hopes shattered, he just sat up. If he hadn’t, I’m sure he’d have beaten me. It’s a good thing he didn’t, because of course being beaten in a sprint by Fast Freddie is an honor that has given me a proud memory. Glorious.

Epilogue to Tale #3

This last story is one of those ones that isn’t any good unless it’s true. A fictional account of a nobody being beaten in a sprint by a star would be pretty lame, I think. Thus, I made every effort to tell it is accurately as possible in the e-mail to my brothers. If honesty wasn’t a goal, I might have suggested that I was part of two-stage lead-out that didn’t quite work out. In fact it probably was supposed to be a two-stage lead-out, with me going earlier and swinging off for Eric to come by, but if so I was ignorant of this, blindly pursuing my own ambition. In that context, the truth of the story is actually kind of embarrassing.

So imagine my shock when I was recounting this tale to another teammate a week or so after the fact and another guy, who had been there, denied not just some detail of my tale, but the very fact of the sprint itself! He said to me, incredulously, “Dude, we didn’t sprint!” I didn’t know what to say. The guy was so firm in his conviction, I started to doubt myself: could I have been completely deluded about what went down?

In fact, no. I had uploaded the ride data from that ride to my PC, and still have it. Along that stretch of road, my top speed was 37 mph, with my max heart rate at 165. (My bike computer takes data samples every 20 seconds, so in a sprint scenario chances are it won’t catch the highest speed, nor the highest heart rate, for that interval.) So, how would this ride-denier explain a speed of somewhere near 40 on a flat road? Did we have some kickass tailwind? And my heart rate: was I just really excited about the tailwind, or was I on drugs? And I distinctly remember that Freddie was out of the saddle when he came by. What, was he just stretching out his back? At 40? I’ll have to send this post to Ceely and Eric and ask if they remember the sprint. If I hear something back, perhaps I’ll attach it here, in the Comments section below.

Gratitude

I hope your own Thanksgiving plans are grand, whoever you are. Be thankful for your gravy, unless there isn’t any, in which case I suppose you can feel thankful that you’re not clogging up your arteries. If your turkey is carved at the table, be thankful for the observance of that fine tradition; if it’s cut up in the kitchen and served buffet-style, be thankful that you’re laid-back and reasonable enough to enjoy that, and don’t have to share the meal with a fascist like me.

And if you don’t have big plans at all, be thankful that you’re not participating in a bizarre celebration of ersatz gratitude for a people who, after they saved our ancestors’ lives, were driven onto reservations and subsequently turned into scavengers of human misery via casinos. And if you don’t have big plans but wish you did, keep your chin up, as other years are sure to be better. I’ve had Thanksgiving at Sizzler before; another time I made a mini-feast at my tiny apartment (chicken legs, canned cranberry sauce, powdered mashed potatoes, Stove-Top™ stuffing, gravy from a mix); and my brother once had to go by himself to McDonald’s, only to find it closed. But that’s another story.

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