Part Three:

The New Man. What’s Up with That?

 

ML: To rewind just a little bit as far as this "reading stuff" is concerned, I’ve only just started to figure out this stuff really recently with my Father. My Father always used to read a lot when I was growing up and I used to notice that he used to love to go to the library and I’d always go to the library with him and he would just disappear into the stacks. I would walk by him and he would be very deeply into a book. So I thought "Wow. Dad’s deep into books. It must be a cool thing. I’m going to be deep into books, too." So I got deep into books.

And my sister and I, my sister who is two years older than I, we were basically raised by my Grandmother who came across from England to live with us. Both of my parents worked 40 hour weeks, and when they came home there was dinner to be made, everything had to be done, and Dad would just read. So there was an emotional aloofness, a separation there. Probably precipitated quite a bit with the fact that they are English trying to fit into American society, although not knowing exactly how to socialize with them. And so as a result all of their friends for the most part were, and still are quite a bit, their close friends, other Brits primarily. Which can get to be somewhat of a cul-de-sac if you’re in another culture.

CS: It limits one’s social interaction.

ML: Pretty much.

LS: It clearly defines social acceptance.

ML: And I had to bear the brunt of that because at school I was the one who was always picked on because I wasn’t doing things that were strictly accepted as being "American" and so there was an ostracization level that I was dealing with which I didn’t realize until years later: I would just bury myself in books.

CS: That’s what you were supposed to do because that’s what your Dad did.

ML: Exactly. And so now that I’m at the age where I can see how everything has fallen into place, there’s still the chasm there. I’ve had to work at developing all of my social skills. In fact, I remember thinking to myself after I left high school, just as I was going to start college: "Well, I’ve only had a couple of friends my whole life. Good friends, however just two or three. Now I want more friends. I’m going to learn how to be social. And it took years for me to learn this stuff. I remember my whole first year of college. Friday nights. Saturday nights. Sitting in my room, waiting for someone to knock on my door.

CS: And no one knocked.

ML: Actually they did. There were a couple of girls I knew who came around this one night and they knocked and I didn’t know what to do. And they knocked harder and I thought, "Run silent, run deep," so they started to bang. They somehow knew I was in there. so they went around to the other side of the suite and came in and I thought "Oh, God, now what?" It was that bad, it was really, really bad. So, finally people started to draw me out and I thought "What am I afraid of? I don’t know why I am afraid of this. I can’t consciously understand why I am afraid of this." It took a long time for me to understand that there is nothing to socializing. However, my folks had been so inept at it that--

LS: You overcame your Father’s fear.

ML: My father just told me a few months ago that there were four times in his life that he’s been screwed over, which implies that it will never, ever happen again. "There is a mote between me and everyone else." Which is a real tangible thing that I’ve noticed, even more since he’s told me. As a result I’ve completely overcompensated.

CS: It’s a fear of having that mote, so you’ve gone in the other direction.

ML: Yeah, if anything I have too MANY friends.

LS: Which takes a lot of dedication and time. I’ve got three friends. I have a friend, I have no idea where this man is, but, if he called tomorrow and said "I need this, can you be on a plane to wherever," I’m on the plane. And there’s no question about it. He may have a question, but there’s no question in my mind. With these three guys we’ve all invested a lot of time, and I’m more skeptical now of those friends than I was twenty years ago. It takes a lot more now to be my friend than it would have twenty years ago. I am just weary, I am at the point where I don’t even know if I’ll have six people to carry my casket, you know? Who knows? (Larry and Cason laugh)

CS: Well, you’ve got four sons, so that’s four.

LS: Well, no, that’s family, you don’t want them to carry the casket.
There’s something about that World War II stuff where your dad, Malcolm, has that camaraderie because of the high risk. One thing that I got that’s part of marketing and sales understanding and training I got is, if we’re going to have an association one thing I have to have you know is that you can be at risk with me. I can be at risk with you and the faster we become at risk the closer that kinship and relationship.

YJ: Mutual assured destruction.

LS: Mutual assurance.

CS: This is what pledging is in fraternities.

LS: And I don’t mean on a fraternity level, I mean on a level that you, Yves, have shared about your Dad, and as a parent, and that you’ve shared, Malcolm about your dad, And you, Cason, haven’t said about your Dad.

CS: That’s because my Dad is also at the table.

YJ: You’re in a tough spot, Cason.

LS: I understand that. And I would not feel uncomfortable leaving. But I would like to know whether or not your Dad has accepted you as a man or not.

CS: No.

LS: I don’t think you think that either. I think this week has helped that. We’re closer now than we’ve ever been in terms of adult/parent.

CS: This is also, you two don’t know this, but this is the first time that Dad has visited me wherever "I" was. I’ve always gone to where he was. We’ve met mutually in different places, like for my wedding to Julia in Michigan. But this is the first time that Dad and Judy, my stepmother, have come out to visit. Julia and I, wherever we were, whether it was Austin--

LS: --First time visiting ANY child--

CS: --first time visiting ANY child, I’m the oldest of this panoply of children. So, it’s been a real experiment to see what happens. I would assume that both your parents, Yves and Malcolm, still live locally.

YJ: Yeah. What kind of relations did you have in the area when you were growing up? Because one of the things Malcolm and I have talked about is we’ve known just about the most extreme forms of nuclear families. I have one great aunt in New York, on the other side of the country and everyone else is in Europe, so I feel like my Mother and my Father were almost too strong of influences on me. It wasn’t tempered by aunts and uncles and other relations and grandparents and so on.

CS: I have never lived near any extended family. My Mother’s family was always in Iowa. Dad’s family is all still in Texas. I was born in North Carolina, we moved to Pennsylvania then to Missouri then to Oklahoma, so I never really lived near any family other than us. So there was never really any other influence like that. The family was nuclear up until sixth or seventh grade and then it was two families, sort of, so I learned of my parents as individuals in a very different way then a lot of people. Certainly more than you guys because I gather that your parents are still married.

YJ: Yeah, my parents are still together. I have friends who have aunts or uncles or grandparents who were enormous influences in their life and it seems as if their personalities are more well-rounded because they have these really strong influences from other family members that I didn’t have at all, and for Marcel I’ve been really glad since we moved back to Seattle because my parents live about a half an hour away and Sienna’s parents live in Port Townsend, an hour and a half away.

And the grandparents, my father compared to Sienna’s father, they’re extremely different people, they’re both very intellectual. Sienna’s father is extremely sensual in a way that is an interesting counterpoint to my Dad, and I just feel glad that Marcel has these excellent influences as grandparents. My sister, who lives in the city, she’s a really strong woman also. Intriguingly enough, my mother always talks about the incredible importance of family, and they moved thousands of miles away from theirs.

CS: One of the things you really replaced your extended family with is books. The idea of male experience or different ways of living as a human being, you’d have a father and then you’d have all of the books that you read which replaced different options, romanticized or not.

YJ: I tend to gloss over a lot of the things I got from my father because sometimes I think that maybe they came from elsewhere. For example, it can be really clear to me that I got social skills from my mother, and how you were saying, Malcolm, about how your father was always reading and I think about that, too, and my family placed this incredible important on the word and reading and the value of knowledge and it all comes from my father and is a huge part of who I am and what is important to me as a human being. Kind of a deep reflection and applying the scientific method to try and understand things.

CS: In order to be able to come back and say "Yes, this of my father I absolutely love and want to be, that I am like."

YJ: I think it’s a rite of passage almost, being able to differentiate yourself from your father.

CS: Not separate and not confused. How do you say "I am not exactly like my father so much to the point where I am confused with my father. I don’t know who I am separate from who my father is and I not completely divorced from who my father is, but I’m distinct from my father. I have qualities of my father that comprise who I am and I got them from him. I am different from my father in these ways and that is part of who I am as a human being. Distinct, not separate or confused.

ML: I think, however, that these are the timeless myths of everything from the prodigal son to the Odyssey, of the heroes return: you have to leave in order to be able to come home.

CS: The Tao is the Tao of returning.

ML: To go back to the extended family thing, I noticed a few years ago that I have a lot of male friends that aren’t just of my age group. I have male friends who are much younger than I am, say eight to ten years and I have male friends who are much older by say, eight to ten years. So it’s almost as if my craving for nephews uncles and grandfathers locally has led me to surrogate nephews uncles and grandfathers. Surrogate fathers as well.

Bryan, for example, who is helping us start this magazine, he’s 23 and there are vast chasms of experience between us and although he is on the same intellectual level that I am I can see him wanting to know about the types of experience that I have been through in a very respectful way in the same way that I have noticed those things about other male friends of mine who are in their late 30s or early 40s whom I gravitate to just because they obviously know that much more than I do.

LS: You three have treated me that way tonight already. You gave me a level of respect greater than the level of camaraderie between the three of you. Yves and Malcolm have been in deference at times, which has been flattering but at the same time it was very clear that you planted a level of reverence: history, and that reverence of history to the current time. And that history is playing in all of our lives and has led us in the past hour or so to let us know who your Dad is.

ML: It’s almost like that incredible quote of Mark Twain’s: when I was 18 I thought my Dad was the dumbest schmuck in the universe and when I was 21 I realized how much he’d learned in three years.

LS: Cason is at a disadvantage, and an advantage because I’m here. His disadvantage is if he feels uncomfortable for what he might say, is there retribution? (To Cason) Let me assure you there isn’t. Okay? Because this is a meeting of minds, and has little or nothing to do with us relationally. But other than that gains us a step further in our adult relationship as what’s happened to us this evening in the last ten minutes is a camaraderie of four men. Not something of deference any longer. Okay? I mean, I felt that. I don’t know if you guys felt that or not. But the comments weren’t closer to brothers, but by the virtue of the ages of my father and Malcolm’s father, what began as a wide generation gap, we have a relationship of distance, I happen to be an intermediary. I’m kind of like the son, the father...

ML:...the holy ghost?

(An explosion of laughter)

LS: But between being a father and between being a son...

(At this time the barmaid came over and asked us to keep it down)

ML: We’re sorry.

YJ: I wondered when she was gonna bust us.

CS: God, these people are...this is serious pool.

ML: They’re studying for their finals, man.

Part Four: The New Man. What's up with that?