The Mighty Viking

There‘s a story behind this photo. But scroll down and read the joke first, enjoy it. Then come back!

So there I was, 1969. The summer of love. While many young American men were spending time in foreign countries doing foreign things, I was stuck back home, in grade-school. All the love must have gone to Woodstock, ‘cause there wasn‘t much in Loma Linda, CA that year.

And still! I have some battle stories to tell!

See, in 1969, my dad graduated from college, and we moved off away from all the family I‘d known living in Indiana and Michigan. We moved clear out west to southern California, where my dad had been accepted to medical school.

Me? Oh, I‘d been accepted to a very prestigious and prominent class myself. Mrs. Karmy‘s second-grade classroom.

So there I was, feeing my way through a new school, a new city, all without tge aid and comfort of my great-grandparents, whom I was very close to. At that age, such things matter. I had to figure out society without them it would seem, so I went looking for ideas.

And then along came Karl.

Now, Karl was a cool human being. Not everyone thought so, I guess. He got teased a lot, like me but about different things. But well! I just couldn‘t figure out what really was wrong with him that made other kids harass him. There was something about his ability to talk through conflict, especially with humor, that resonated with me. He had his battles because of being! yaknow. Fat.

Oddly for the times I suppose, I didn‘t just “yaknow” know. A scared kid in a new town is looking for something more important than body mass in his friends. Maybe Karl didn‘t fit 2nd-grader social norms well. But he could shut down a bully by making such good fat jokes of his own as to embarass the neanderthals, and then tell one on his assailant that mocked so far above their mental powers they could only coarsely intuit how badly they‘d been owned and slink away. That was a kind of person I could hang with. Someone who could shrug off the natural bias second grade can give a misfit kid – that he isn‘t good enough for others – and to stand proud upon his own value system. I didn‘t understand all this at the time of course. Karl and I just had a good time pranking the haters for four years. Life had enough problems of its own and neither of us needed the company of the Judgmentalists. So Karl and I became tight friends, and stayed that way for the four years of our fathers‘ schooling.

Karl was hilarious.

And of us 3 – along with Jimmie, whom I‘ll tell you about someday – Karl was always the level-headed one.

It was a cool crisp October morning when, for show and tell, Karl got up and told a joke. Holy cow it was riotous. The kids laughed, the teacher laughed – we all laughed. And you know, I kept on laughing all day. That joke stayed funny with me for almost a week. You‘d think with all the analysis I gave it I‘d remember it now. But let‘s not get hung up on that.

I say almost a week, because it was exactly at the same weekly show-and-tell time-slot seven days later, when I stopped thinking it was funny.

It all went down like this: I had stood up at my turn, prepared with a joke I‘d made up that was based on the same framework as Karl‘s. But somehow, in the telling, my joke came apart like a paper-mache‘ party hat when the sprinklers come on. I started ad-libbing nonsensical punch lines. Yes! I said lines, plural. I kept trying new ones until Mrs Karmy said it was time for me to sit down. It was that catastrophic.

I was mortified.

And I stayed mortified the rest of the day. Karl himself hugged me and told me he believed in me. Well no, he didn‘t do anything of the sort, nor would he have in a thousand years of 2nd grade. But what he did do is give me half a candy bar at the end of the day as I sat, dejected, waiting for my ride home. There is no higher affirmation available from a 2nd-grade fat kid. Karl was a friend.

By the time my dad finally picked me up, I was shifting from mortification to grim resolve that I would find those ungrateful bohemians a good joke, and they would laugh, come hell or high water. I was in a fine kettle, virtually in tears over my failure, and angst at the distance yet to the horizon of my comedic future. I told my dad the whole wretched tale.

And my dad looked at me, until the silence of his attention on me got my own attention to slow down and kill the motor. When I finally stopped ranting and looked up at him, he spoke pointedly at me.

He asked, “Glenn?” I thought his tone foretold great impending wisdom.

“Yeah dad?” I moped.

“What do you find when you lift up an elephant‘s tail?”

Wait! what?

2nd-grade boys have a special reaction reserved for scandalous body jokes. They also have a special reaction for impending great wisdom, and there is a huge commute between the two.

I made it in record time.

He had my full, undivided attention. And this joke right here – this the very one that you just read – was his gift to me that day, a good joke to tell. And of course, tell it I did. I‘ve retold this joke a million times in the 50 years since that moment. It always comes with a faith that original jokes of my own don‘t have. It came from my dad, and was therefore inherently trustworthy.

You‘ll never convince me that a mere joke is a trivial gift from one to another. The right joke, the right moment, for the right reason! brings a ray of light into the deepest of darknesses – for generations. This is what sets a dad joke apart from the the rest – every one of them is lame, off-the-cuff, and usually juvenile. But well! I shouldn‘t be telling you this, but that‘s how a father bridges the gaps along the highway of growing up. The ride isn‘t any smoother, but sudden, spontaneous laughter out of the blue can propel a young boy over the highs and lows of growing up. This is what dad jokes do. They aren‘t some epic feat of manhood. They are a subtle, nuanced off-the-cuff signal to remind a wee person in the heat of the battle of growing up that someone has their back. Someone who has been through and triumphed over the taunts and barbs 2nd graders excel at.

It‘s a good joke. It‘s my dad‘s joke. He gave it to me when it was important to have something funny. Karl‘s dad probably did the same. While they probably never met, I suspect my dad and Karl‘s would get along just fine.

And now I‘m giving it to you.

I remember well the day my mother cursed me.

It was in the early 70s, as I recall.  It may have actually happened more than once, but this one moment stands out in my mind.  I was working my boyish shenanigans, on a typical day, paying no mind to anyone or anything except that which caught my attention.  And very little could catch it.  Attention-catchers in that time of my life had to be bold, and curious, and the best ones were forbidden.  It was the Way of Things.

I can‘t recall what the Thing was, but I do remember my mother, in an exasperated voice, issuing me a Vexation:

“I hope you have children just like you”

And in a rare moment of focus, my young mind was stopped short, and found itself wandering into an imaginary world where my most recent escapades were committed by those I was responsible for.  A horror struck my heart.  It tore an entry wound, wallowed around making room for itself, and set up an operations office.

But, being a boy, I walked it off and I doubt it was more than a couple hours before I was back at it again.

Fast forward a few years.  The raw material my brain received to do its work had changed.  My shenanigans were focused on different subjects.

I had found a girl.

And the next thing you know, I was sitting in a hospital nursery holding a wee child.

And I remembered my mother‘s tormented declaration.  “Surely not this innocent bundle of sweetness”, I thought to myself.  “Ha!”  And I smugly settles in and cuddled my wee child with my wife recovering nearby.

And then two more came at once.  But still, what could go wrong?  And then another came.

And then they started coming in through the door instead of the delivery room.  The odds were greatly improved, and they were growing.  My confidence in avoiding my doom dwindled by the day.

And then… on a clear day with blue sky, green grass, and a group of unnaturally muddy children, it happened.  It took me totally unaware.  I was vexed, but what came from my lips stopped me short.

“I hope you all have children just like you.”

I knew instantly what I‘d done.  My wife did too, and she short-circuited the moment by sending the horde off to the wash station for cleanup operations.  She had a plan for this.  It was rehearsed.  And her capacity for patience was greater than mine that day.

And so I did the only thing I could think of to do.  I burst out in laughter, much to the confusion and dismay of the dirty little urchins departing the scene.

Bodies were washed, clothes changed, and it wasn‘t long before I was sipping lemonade and basking in the summer sun again.  And I found myself basking as well in reflection.  In introspection, I came across that walled off chamber of horror in my heart.  And there, sitting at the service desk, was the smiling visage of my mother.  

At the time, I thought my mother had wished a curse upon me.  But in this moment, I recognized it for what it was.  She wished for me the empathy to see both childhood and parenthood for what they were, together, in the same moment.  She wished for me to see that kids will be kids, and that eventually, with the kind of love only a mother can give, they will outgrow most of their shenanigans.  She wished for me to be able to see past the trouble, and the mess, and sometimes the pain, and see instead the small person in front of me as an adult, and to understand that while the mess will be forgotten, it is the moments of love or hate that will be remembered, and that this is, as a parent, the one thing I can control.  I choose whether my children remember love, or hate.

I don‘t really recall what I did on that impish day of childhood.  I don‘t remember the consequence of whatever it was.  And for years, I remembered the entire affair not at all.  But in the waning hours of that summer day, hearing the laughter of kids getting in trouble, and my wife dealing with the minor details with the particular kind of strong grace it takes, I remembered my mother‘s words in a new way.  I remember her wishing for me to have a full life, and to understand how to be human to the fullest, to be able to see and experience the love of a mother from a man‘s point of view.  And in my wife, on that day it was projected perfectly.

I remember my mother‘s blessing.

This is a story about a dog.

Well… I think it is anyway.

It‘s been, what, oh about 4 months since Mollie the Bouvier came to live with us.  She was just turning 1 year old, but she neeeed a new home. Even during her first home visit, she seemed to feel the need to keep an eye on the boys. She plunked herself down in front of Sean, and refused to leave when the visit was over. This reaction allowed the owner, who had serious misgivings about giving her up, to let go and be at peace with it.

You‘re probably wondering what any of this has to do with the picture of Sean and a mirror…

On her first evening with us, when I put Sean in bed, she hopped up in there, too. Sean thought it was great fun. He chuckled a pleased little chuckle, and patted her in his usual way, which is well-intended but not very gentle. She took it as her duty to endure this, and it became a habit.

I suppose none of this has answered the question of why I have a picture of Sean up here in this post

In the mornings, I give Sean his meds, we listen to Raffi, and play peek-a-boo. I talk to him sometimes, other times he jabbers at me. Charlie, the old geezer Bouvier, usually sits with me on Dustan‘s bed. We do this until finally Sean drops one foot over the side of the bed – the signal that he‘s ready to start considering getting up. It is then that I turn on the shower in the adjoining bathroom, go back in and assist him with standing up and walking to the shower.

A few weeks ago, Mollie started joining us for our morning soirée. Being still puppy-ish, she doesn‘t sit still for long though. She hops up on his bed, over to me, back over to him, down the hall to check out arriving grandkids…you get the picture.

And somewhere around the same time, Sean started doing something interesting. He started greeting Mollie every chance he could. He has an odd way of saying “hello”. He lifts up his shirt to show his tummy. I have no idea why, it‘s just a thing.

So every time he‘d stand up to go to the bathroom, he‘d say “hi” to Mollie. And then try to pat her back.

And then he started greeting Charlie.

And then the fish tank.

And well… anything and anyone he could.

And then, one morning, as we came into the bathroom, he looked in the mirror, and by golly, there he was in the mirror. He started saying “hi”, except he didn‘t have a shirt on to lift, so he walked over to the mirror, and did something he and I used to do in greeting long ago- he bonked foreheads, with himself.

And he smiled.

And then he laughed, and chattered what I assume was a volley of affirmations to himself.

And just like that, he was out of the shell he had fallen into over the previous months, where poor health and pain had reduced his days to a steady march of surviving from day to day. I‘m not saying he was cured. But he – the person named Sean, who despite his limitations lives, laughs and loves in his own inimitable style – that guy was back.

So I don‘t know, is this the story of a dog doing what a good dog does, with no idea of how it affects her humans? Or is this the story of a human, doing what a good human does with a little of the right kind of outlet? Is this what humans need – not necessarily to be loved themselves, but to have someone willing to be loved?

Maybe we‘ve been thinking about this all wrong. Imagine if every child could find a companion into which to pour his or her capacity for love. Perhaps if we can practice love, we get better at it. It may sound like a dream, but is this how we get kids to stop shooting other kids?

I don‘t know if a puppy is the answer to life‘s hardest questions. Life‘s hardest questions seem to come so fast these days – seems we spend all our time anymore asking, without any time to really answer. The few answers we come up with are hurried, panicked hand-slaps at the dragons we face. Then again, maybe we allow too many questions in, ones we don‘t have to answer so badly as the simple ones like, “who can we love today?”

Note I didn‘t say, “who‘s going to love me?” That‘s a good question, something our psyche is all geared up and anxious to answer. But maybe the best way to answer it is to answer a question with a question.

“Who can I Love today?”

Oh look. There‘s a mirror. Practice makes perfect.