Author: DAN FUCHS

The Danger in the Poet Game

~ DAN FUCHS ~ Leave a comment 
I've lost track of my mistakes,/like birds they fly around/and darken half of my skies./
To all of those I've hurt -/I pray you'll forgive me./I to you will freely do the same./
so many things I didn't see,/with my eyes turned inside,/playing the poet game.

— Greg Brown

Riding my bike this morning, I heard these words in my headphones, as I have many, many times before. For some reason, they hit me harder this morning than they have in the past. Maybe it’s because of a recent post, in which I transcribed a poem by my mother, who definitely taught me “the poet game.”

This year has been full of introspection for me, with these daily blogposts and journal entries. I tell myself that I do it in the name of being more present in this life, so that I can be a better person/husband/father/brother/friend.

But what if, as Greg Brown suggests in his song, by looking inward I’m missing something? I appreciate the words of caution. It would be ironic – not to mention terribly sad — if, in the very act of trying not to miss out on my life, I missed it completely.

Alien Adventures in Space

~ DAN FUCHS ~ Leave a comment

The definite highlight of the day yesterday was when J and I drove down to the Zach Scott Theatre to see our boys on stage in the culminating production of their week in summer theatre camp. They staged it in their lovely black box theatre. The set decorations, depicting a rocket ship in space, were done by the students, as the theme of the showcase for both Jackson’s and Diego’s age groups was “Alien Adventures in Space.” (Very appropriate, now that I think of it, on the day of the final launch of the Space Shuttle.)

Jackson’s group was first, and Jackson portrayed a tiger. He was “in costume,” wearing a pair of orange and black vertical striped pants and a tail. It was fascinating (and nerve-racking, of course) to watch him on stage. As his parents, J and I were a nail-biting mess.

I say he was fascinating to watch because our little extrovert, our little attention-seeking missile became a shrinking violet before my very eyes. He appeared to be super-aware of all the eyes that were on him – you could see it on his face. Any “lines” he was supposed to have went out the window, including the key moment when the aliens ask him if he eats meat. I’m guessing he was supposed to say yes, which would have scared them away. Instead he said no, and the adult actress playing the lead alien said, “You’re a vegetarian tiger?” She then threw a plastic “steak” on the floor, and Jackson rolled his eyes and went to get it, as the aliens ran off.

Diego’s play was more involved, and we had worked to get him “off book,” with his lines memorized for the last couple of days. If I was nervous for Jackson, I was doubly so for Diego, our shy guy.

As the story – about the Cat in the Hat taking a trip to the planet of Thing 1 and Thing 2 – moved along toward Diego’s first cue, I saw him step downstage to the teacher and ask for his script. She sent him back to his spot, and he tripped over his first line a bit, before one of his fellow space animals (Diego was something called a “gatoraffe”) bailed him out.

After getting through that first line, he delivered the rest of them loudly and clearly. Our “shy guy” did a nice job, both remembering his lines and delivering them convincingly and with feeling.

The whole thing was pretty impressive, considering it was done in four and a half days. Most importantly, when I asked them, both boys said they enjoyed the experience and would do it again.

Getting to a Point of Wellness

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I had my first acupuncture treatment yesterday with the woman J has been seeing. Austin Family Acupuncture is only a quick 5 minute drive from where I work, so I was able to run over for a long lunch hour.

The acupuncturist, Naae, (pronounced “Nigh”) is knowledgeable and has a calm and calming presence. She put me at ease immediately, which made it easy for me to answer her questions about the state of my mind and body.

I tried acupuncture for the first time as part of my treatment for my lower back. This would have been some time in the mid-1990’s. I can’t remember if I did only one session or more, but I do recall having the sense that it didn’t do much of anything.

This time, I am doing it more as a way to treat this sinus condition – not in lieu of, but in addition to, traditional “Western” treatment. And this time, unlike the last, I felt relief almost immediately. The needles she placed on my face opened up my sinuses. My daily headache faded away, and I fell asleep.

I will see her again on Monday afternoon at 4 to follow up and get another treatment, before going in for surgery on the sinuses on Thursday.

She did also tell me something else that will be helpful: By going out and riding my bike without eating anything first, I’ve been defeating the purpose of trying to lose weight. Apparently, because I’m going out with lowered blood sugar, my body is pumping enzymes that become sugar and then bubbling FAT. From now on, I plan to eat a banana before going out on the bike.

The Other Grandfather

~ DAN FUCHS ~ 4 Comments

I’ve already written about my father’s father, Bill Fuchs, in a previous post. My mother’s father was a man named Herman Thomas Runyan, who was born on April 6, 1897 and died in 1986, while I was away at college. He had spent the final few years of his life living with us in our house, before moving to a rest home in his final days.

Herman was a bit of a mystery to me. I didn’t see much of him growing up, as he was down in Little Rock, Arkansas, which, on the few occasions I did visit, felt completely foreign to me. I remember two little girls cornering me in a supermarket there, one of them saying to the other, “It’s him. It’s Jack Tripper from Three’s Company.”

“Uh, I’m twelve,” I answered.

“Yeah, twelve,” my brother, ten at the time, added.

“Oh my gosh,” one of the girls giggled. “I just think y’all have the cutest li’l accent!”

Herman has a special place in my life, because he is the subject of the only short story I’ve managed to publish thus far, The Watch, which chronicles his days with us at our home in Purchase, as his health deteriorated. They printed it in the Winter, 1985 edition of the SU literary magazine at that time, The Review. It’s not a bad story, I have to say. I just re-read it for the first time in years, and it holds up fairly well. It’s really about a young person having to face up to the aging process, and with the fact that everyone he loves, and he himself, will die one day.

He was my mother’s subject, as well, not only in a high school pencil sketch (above) but in a lovely poem, which is actually a nice companion piece to my short story, called Tea Parties:

The man who used to throw me in the air,

and make me laugh, and shiver with excitement,

I now give baths to.

Every other day: we plan them carefully.

We exercise much more thought

than we ever did

for the tea parties of my childhood.

When he was thirty-five, I was five.

We sliced the apples very thin

and laid them on soda crackers.

Our tea was milk,

and afterwards we often took a walk

in the sweet-and-bad smelling Chicago dusk,

under the rumbling El.

But he can hardly walk now.

He’s 87.

So weak, so frail.

Should “we” lower him into the tub,

or put him in it seated on a stool?

He lets me decide.

Look at all the diamonds,

I used to say.

(The mica in the sidewalk

on which the moon shone

as we walked hand in hand.)

I gently wash his face.

Briskly soap his back, arms, chest, legs.

Attend to each misshapen toe,

then hand the cloth to him

for the remaining parts.

When I was young,

The veins and muscles of his arms entranced me.

He was so strong and wonderful!

The money-earner who, one special payday,

brought me roller skates.

He’s so thin now.

Naked.

Rising slowly, carefully,

from his beloved bath.

A rosy victim of a holocaust.

Those magic summer days!

Squealing little girls with blue lips

splashing ‘round him in Lake Michigan.

How gallantly he shepherded us

back and forth on the trolley.

I help him dress. We reminisce.

“Do you remember our tea parties?”

he asks.

“Oh, yes, I do,” I answer,

“and all the rest.”

Looking back, I wish I’d made more of my time with him – gotten to know him a bit better. Back then, in my early twenties, I was so very self involved; I didn’t see what a wealth of knowledge, and interesting stories I had with me in that little TV room in Purchase, New York.

I do know, from reading our family genealogy, Tracking the Descendants of Isaac Barefoot Runyan by Marie Runyan Wright, (Gateway Press, Baltimore, 1980), that Herman served in the U.S. Navy during World War I, in the Medical Corps aboard the U.S.S. Wyoming.

I also remember him as an exceedingly sweet man who, in his later years, would become effusively emotional at the drop of a hat. When my friends would come over and say hello to him at our house, he must have experienced their greeting as a gesture of kindness, because he would invariably cry.

I have a photograph of him somewhere, in his Navy whites, handsome as all get-out, with a confident look on his young face. He had his whole life ahead of him.

I miss him, just as I miss all the other Runyans and Fuchses who have left. To say that I’ll see them again someday sounds too clichéd, and I’m not certain I believe it. What feels more accurate to me, if no less clichéd, is that they live on in me, and in my children.

I’m starting to understand that our ancestors are always with us.

Back in My Day

~ DAN FUCHS ~ 2 Comments

Recently, I was driving the boys somewhere, and the topic of video games came up. I imagine it was probably because they were making a play for a new one.

When they realized I wasn’t going to buy them a game, Diego was silent for a while. Then, out of the blue, he asked, “Daddy, what was your favorite Wii game when you were my age?”

“We didn’t have Wii back then,” I answered, feeling immediately old. I explained that the only video game, as such, was a game called “Pong,” in which you hit a ball back and forth with an opponent, until somebody missed.

Both boys were silent, as they tried to wrap their minds around this. They were quiet for so long, I considered using this as a strategy in the future: Whenever they get too loud, and I want quiet, I can just reminisce about my childhood.

“And that was a Wii game?” Diego asked.

“No, there was no Wii. It was an Atari game.”

“Atari.”

I was getting nowhere. “We didn’t have a lot of the stuff you have now,” I said. I could almost feel my grey beard growing as I spoke.

“What else?” Jackson asked.

“Color TV. We had a black and white TV when I was a little boy. It was a big deal when we got our first color TV.”

“Black and WHITE?” Diego asked incredulously, scrunching up his face, as if the notion were offensive to him somehow.

Again, they were quiet for a time, and I thought, “Hey, this really works.”

Jackson broke the silence.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, son?”

“Did you have roads?”

Beach Memories and Swimming Pool Dreams

~ DAN FUCHS ~ Leave a comment

We spent the Fourth of July quietly at home. Like my father before me, this is my preferred way to be. For reasons I may or may not choose to discuss in a future post, the fireworks that were banned this year, due to dangerous drought conditions, were not missed by me one bit.

The night before, I had grilled some burgers and sausage that J picked up at Central Market, so we did plenty of good, old, American-style eating this holiday weekend – probably too much. Yesterday I took the boys to the Shadowglen pool for a good three hours, while J stayed at home relaxing for a bit, before preparing us a delicious dinner of stewed turkey thighs in a peach sauce, with an amazing corn, cilantro, mango, jicama salad. Good summer fare.

While she cooked, we made the best of our pool time. We saw a girl standing on her father’s shoulders, balancing, so of course we had to follow suit. This was great fun for the lads, as I became a human diving platform for them. They took turns standing up, balancing and then diving off my shoulders, doing front and back flips (and more than a few belly and back flops) into the water.

As always, my time with my sons brought back wonderful memories from my own childhood, of playing with my younger brother and my father in various pools and ocean beaches.

The two pools I can remember us visiting are Rocky Ledge, in the hills of North White Plains, in the Quarry Heights section, and the Greenburg Town pool. Both were places where my brother and I could run around pretty safely. Our father wasn’t normally with us there; my mother would take us and then find a shady spot where she would invariably open a book, light up a smoke and relax.

The kind of father-son time I enjoy with Diego and Jackson came, back then, in the form of beach vacations. My parents met on a beach – Water Island Beach on Fire Island, to be exact –, and would periodically return to the Atlantic, their offspring, and dog, in tow. My brother and I spent long days body surfing and otherwise frolicking in those waves and on those beaches.

One of my regrets about where we live is that we’re so far from the Atlantic beaches of my youth. We’ll get back there someday, and man will it be fun for these boys. And for me, it will be nothing less than a beautiful reconnection to my past.

Do It Your Damn Self, Dora!: When Did Our Culture Get So Interactive?

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Okay, this one snuck up on me and has now been bothering me for a number of years. Television has become more “interactive” recently. I guess it’s probably in response to complaints about a more sedentary, passive viewing public, or the rising rate of obesity in children. I understand all that, but I get annoyed and defensive every time Dora or Diego or Handy Manny or whoever the hero is asks for the viewer’s help with the task at hand.

Those of you familiar with modern-day cartoons know what I’m talking about. It’s the moment when Dora looks into the camera with her big, vacant, shark-like eyes and says, “Will YOU help us find the snowy mountain?”

At first, I would nudge my son, saying, “Come on. Say yes. Tell Dora you’ll help her.” Even as a baby Diego would look at me quizzically, before complying and answering that he would help Dora, much to my, and my wife’s, giggling delight.

Eventually, however, the practice has worn on me. Maybe it is more educational, and everything, but I find myself thinking, “Come on, Dora, if you want to take your mangy monkey to the top of the snowy mountain so badly, just do it. Why do you need my help? I didn’t tell you to go to the snowy mountain, or anywhere else, for that matter.”

Back in my day, it was all about Bugs Bunny. My brother and I watched him religiously, and as recently as last month, we recited one of his more famous interactions verbatim. I’ve got a few key BB scenes committed to memory, and I’m not sure I would if he’d been asking me for help all the time. Imagine it – Bugs Bunny looking at you, chomping on his carrot, and saying, “Say, uh, Doc. How’d you like to help me pull a fast one on Daffy?” That wasn’t Bugs’s style. Instead, we watched carefully to see what he would do to outwit his opponents – even when we’d seen the episode so many times, we could recite it by heart.

It doesn’t stop at children’s television, either. I used to be able to watch the news, for example, without being asked to text in my opinion in a real-time poll. Of course, the texting in of responses makes a profit for someone, though I’m not sure who. Now it’s out of control. Walter Cronkite never asked me to call in and tell him whether I agreed with what he was saying or not. He was the authority, damn it. Why would he want to know what I had to say about anything?

Okay, so I suppose if I “presume positive intent,” as is my tendency, I could accept the fact that maybe they’re trying to make television a more active, democratic experience by bringing the viewer into the program in these different ways. Maybe I’m just an endangered species about to go extinct – I’m a Couch Potatosaurus.

Still, though, I have to say it again: Bugs never asked me to figure out his problems for him, and yet he always saw his way out of them. He also happened to be hilarious in a way that Dora and her cousin just aren’t.

My Poor Baby (Redux)

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The saga of Stasha, our broken down old lady of a Toyota Corolla, continues. She’s been in the transmission shop since Monday, and I’ve been going back and forth with a mechanic named John and his faceless, nameless “general manager” about what it was going to take to get my baby back. I didn’t like the estimate he came up with, because it was around the same amount as the car would be worth to sell, so I told him to put the transmission back together and I would tow it out. Well, good ole “Buy American” John started explaining how impossible that would be.

“I could put the parts in a box, but you won’t be able to pull the car. You’ll need to put it on a flatbed rig, and even boxing it up you’re looking at a charge of about one thousand….etc, etc.”

I called my friend who was an attorney in a previous incarnation in the hopes he might have dealt with something like this, and also to bring out the hard-ass New Yorker response in him, so that I could, subsequently bring it out in myself. In the end, he didn’t know much about the legality, but he did manage to get me good and fired up.

Which, in Dan terms, amounted to a carefully scripted bottom line. Because John had come back with a lower “wholesale” price, I smelled an opportunity to negotiate. “Here’s what it comes down to for me, John: I want you to rebuild my transmission, so that it is in the exact same condition it was when the car was brought to you. I don’t intend to pay for anything other than the labor, at the rate you’ve already quoted me. Or….”

(I paused for effect, and I could tell by his silence that he was right there with me, ready to bargain.)

“…. I could pay you $X to do the job, because that’s really all I can pay.”

“I’ll speak to the general manager – he’s right here but he’s on the phone. I’ll call you back.”

Long story short, John accepted the price, nearly half of his original quote. I’m proud of standing my ground, and the experience has been informative – I’ll need to learn more about the next car I buy.

When You Read This Blog: A Letter to My Sons

~ DAN FUCHS ~ Leave a comment

Dear Jackson and Diego:

Someday your mother will sit you down with all these random writings, some of them about you, some of them not, and you’ll be asked to read them, think about them, and decide what they mean to you. It’s only fair then that I should provide the following disclaimer as a tool that may (or may not) aid you in your attempts to make sense of my intentions:

First, and most importantly, let me tell you both that I love you more than I ever thought I’d be able to love anything or anyone (which is saying a lot, because your grandfather, my dad, did give me — as I’ve mentioned repeatedly in these posts — a tremendous capacity to love). You have always meant, and will always mean, the world to me. I hope you know that by now.

As you will learn for yourselves, however, being a father is no joke. It’s really, really hard. As a dad, you constantly question yourself: Am I doing this right? Am I being fair? Am I being the model of the kind of person I’d like my children to be?

My hope is that in spite of all we’ve surely been through together by the time you’re reading this, you’re able to think of these times we’ve shared fondly, much in the way I think of my own father, even as I’m writing this, more than eleven years after his passing. I hope my parenting has helped you along the way up to this point, and I hope I’ve given you enough of everything you need.

As for the “navel gazing” in general, (the stuff that’s not about you) let me tell you a story. One day, back when I was in college, I was hanging out with Mignon and her then-boyfriend. I was on a navel-gazing roll. “Did you ever wonder why…this?” “Have you ever stopped to wonder why…that?”

Finally, Mignon’s boyfriend interrupted me, and said, “Jeez, Dan. Do ever wonder who wonders about all that? Let’s just eat some pizza.”

So my message to you is this: Don’t stop wondering about things, even if people tell you to shut up. Wondering is what takes life from being bearable to being an adventure. Don’t settle for bearable.

I don’t want to keep you too long from whatever it is you’re doing that makes you feel strong and passionate about your lives. I’m sure it’s amazing stuff, because you’re both amazing young men.

I love you, and don’t forget I’m with you always.

Dad