We were in Maine, and I texted her because we were on the patio of a little tourist-trap restaurant with a lovely view, and I wanted to gossip about the guy at the table right behind me.

Listen, I know: the parenting game is hard, most people are doing their best, and you can never really grasp another’s struggles (“Thou knowest this man’s fall; but thou knowest not his wrassling,” James Baldwin wrote about his own troublesome father.)

That said, neither Katie nor I is above a little bit of parental schadenfreude.

Most of the difficulty stemmed from his trying to reason with his three-year-old. “Why did you order that if you didn’t want it?”

Then, resigned, he tossed his wadded-up napkin on to his plate and he ordered another beer1.

“Next time we’ll just order her marinara sauce,” he said to his wife.

The three-year-old climbed onto his lap, and I had my read of the situation: this guy, probably a decade my senior, had two children younger than my 8-year-old. He was, literally, too old for this shit.

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As if to confirm my intuition, he spoke sharply to the six-year-old: “I want you to think about what you just did: you showed the last fry to your sister and then you ate it.” Other than serving as pretty good shorthand for most sibling behavior, I knew that this remonstrance was more about Geezer Dad than it was about the daughter. She was not going to be doing much reflecting.

I looked over at Katie — a mental-health professional who is great at helping me figure out parenting priorities — and, with the smugness of one who knows, I mouthed, “He’s old, right?”

She shrugged. “Younger than you.”

Hand me a brochure for the Good Shepherd Home, why don’t ya.

Katie reacted to the look on my face: “I mean, maybe he’s 45.”

I’m 43.

The 12-year-old took the opportunity to tune into this brewing dispute: “What is it?”

We explained, briefly and Annie, my angel, my firstborn, agreed with me: “Oh yeah, he’s like, 50.”

“EXACTLY!”

I almost came out of my seat with relief, which got the 8-year-old’s attention. We explained it to him.

“Oh yeah, he’s way older than you, definitely.”

This from a kid not prone to cut his old man a break:

Anyway it was settled: by a 3-1 vote, this guy was definitely a late Gen Xer, who had no patience for these kids he’d had too late. My schadenfreude had, through Katie’s insulting suggestion, turned into an unearned enmity toward this guy, who was now explaining, in a too-treacly voice: “…and Mommy’s going to take you to the car. Daddy’s going to pay the check, and then Daddy’s going to drive home, OK?”

His family left. As he sat there alone, finishing his beer, I kept glancing over my shoulder at him — thinning hair that grayed around the ears, swimming trunks, polo shirt that bulged with a middle-aged paunch — then turning back to try to catch Katie’s eye and shake my head at her betrayal.

Her lack of faith disturbed me.

She laughed.

He got up at last, leaving a $20 bill (on a $116 tab! More evidence! He tips like a Baby Boomer!) and, because she knew I was not going to let this go, Katie was thinking what I was thinking — we got his name off the check.

With the power of a smartphone it took Katie less than a minute to locate a LinkedIn page for what had to be the same guy — photo looked like him, and he lived in Yarmouth, Maine. (I bet Grandpa couldn’t have doxxed us that quickly). All that was left to do was see if the profile had education info that would let us estimate his age. I clicked on it.

I had to download the LinkedIn app to my phone.

The food came. The family started eating.

I was checking email to access the LinkedIn password reset link.

This had become tedious, but at last I was in. I clicked on his education. He had a number of graduate degrees and certificates, but at last I found his undergrad — he went to Trinity, in Hartford, and…

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I was hungry.

I put my phone down.

I started cutting into my scallops.

I got the fork halfway to my mouth before Katie registered that I hadn’t provided the final update … “Well?”

Mouth full, I said “Class of ‘02.”

Katie cackled. That’s her class. She’s younger than I am. I chewed determinedly.

The 12-year-old shrugged: “Well, dad, you don’t look that old. Like, 38?”

My angel.

But now…

So we drove three hours up to just north of Augusta, Maine, on Friday to deposit the 11-year-old at the lovely, rustic Friends Camp. Our across-the-street neighbors have sent their daughters multiple times and raved about it, so we have high hopes1.

If our new camper was nervous about her first two weeks away from home, she hasn’t shown it. She has been packing — or at least pre-packing — for weeks: arranging, sorting, making lists, double-checking them against the lists the camp sent.

Friday morning she was still exuberant. Meanwhile, her brother, 7, intoned darkly as I came down the stairs for breakfast: “Today, we’re taking Annie to go-away camp.”

I am not overly sentimental2, but I was still nursing my wounds from the night before, when Annie had opened a first-camp/5th-grade graduation present from her Aunt M.: a sheet of stamps and some stationery for writing letters home — these I’d known she was getting, as M. had called me earlier in the day to say so, and to ask me if there was a particular book Annie had been wanting. Nothing had jumped out at me, so I looked over, curious to see what M. had chosen.

It was a journal, at which Annie squealed, and began to write in almost immediately.

Guess what the super-awesome camp-present-from-Dad I’d thought of weeks ago but hadn’t yet presented to her was?

Reader, I sulked.

I know, it’s dumb! And I’m over it (mostly)! But I will admit to a pang or two when she started writing right away. I had this “we just missed a golden opportunity for bonding!” freak out (quietly, in my head).

I still gave her my present, because the real writer-to-writer bonding is in the knowledge that you always need another notebook.

We loaded the car, and had an uneventful drive to camp, highlighted by a stop for lunch at the L.L. Bean store in Freeport, Maine, most of the “Hamilton” soundtrack, and being passed by a car with Massachusetts vanity plates that read “FAHTS.”

It was a tear-free camper deposit. And there was surprisingly little complaint from the seven-year-old, who was bribed with a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos when we stopped for gas after dropoff.

“We both got special things,” he said. “Annie’s at camp, and I have these.”

—

That’s two “Did I mention I’m a Dad?” letters in a row but what can I say? It’s what’s been on my mind. I’m very excited about some of the “How Do You Finish a Book?” interviews coming up, though!

Oh, one more thing: remember the fastidious packer mentioned several paragraphs up? We had to go to the post office this morning to overnight her sneakers.

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Reading List

Pulling Count — I’ve been hearing about this story in The Atlantic for more than a year. The writer Michael Holtz spent six months working the line at a Cargill meat-packing plant in Dodge City, Kansas, which is five months and 29 days longer than I’d want to do it. This isn’t The Jungle — no rats or fingers in the hamburger. But it’s a close-up description of the kind of constant physical labor I, for one, have never experienced. (Though I did develop a callus on my left hand yesterday where my wedding ring and the Subaru’s steering wheel pinched a little bit of the skin of my palm).

Holtz is closely connected to a colleague and friend of mine at Northeastern. She told us about his plan when he first applied for the job, and several of us have periodically pumped her for information about how it’s going. It’s exciting to see out in the world.

—

“The boy should be in a robe ringing altar bells or chasing a tattered and dust-covered ball through an equally ragged plaza or searching in a mirror for his first whisker, but somebody’s given him a uniform and a rifle and the idea he belongs here with us.”

Campfire Outside Valdorros is a captivating short-short story by Julian Zabalbeascoa that ran in Electric Literature last week. Julian’s project — a novel centered in part on the Basque experience of the Spanish Civil War — is another project I’ve heard a lot about and am eagerly anticipating. It’s great to see this excerpt (outtake?).

The young writer I.W. Stockman is perched on the precipice of a possibly promising career. Though it’s early, he has nevertheless amassed enough of a body of work for some preliminary appraisals.

Here at A Saturday Letter we are uniquely positioned to attempt this appraisal, as we have gained exclusive, unfettered access to the rapidly growing Stockman archive. More (and more and more) papers arrive every day. The writer is in fact so prolific that his archivist and mother refuses even to digitize everything before making her ruthless deaccessioning decisions.

We fear the archivist’s maniacal rage for order might offer later critics a skewed vision of this writer’s early development. And so, despite the knowledge that Stockman’s future work might cast a very different light on these early efforts, we offer this initial attempt to limn his early thematic concerns and stylistic approaches.

We have transcribed the texts from manuscript, silently correcting spelling errors when the original intention seems clear, preserving the misspellings (if misspellings they are) when it does not. We provide our own interpretation in parentheses following the term.

We begin with his latest story.

TRANSCRIPTION: The Very Grouchy Ladybug … found another leaf full of afeds (aphids) and met the strongest ladybug in the whole ladybug world. 

And the grouchy ladybug said ‘you wanna fight?” 

And he said “Okay,” showing off his six-pack. And the grouchy ladybug said “Actooly (actually) pick on somebody your own size,” frightenedly covering his head like it is turning red.

Clearly a tribute to the late Eric Carle, the beloved picture-book author who died late last month at the age of 91, this riff on The Grouchy Ladybug reimagines and severely curtails the journey of the title character. Instead of challenging a series of increasingly large and unlikely animals to fight, the ladybug provokes the strongest of its own kind.

In the description of this new “strongest ladybug” character, we see the author’s concerns with body and body image. The notion of the “six-pack” — also known as “shredded abs” — has long been a fixation in Stockman’s conversation and interviews (“Dad, do you have a six-pack? A three-pack? … Do you even have a two-pack?”), but this is the first time we have seen the preoccupation emerge in his prose.

Something else seems to be at work in the story’s first-line-cum-title. The cut-out rectangle with the ladybug illustration and the adjective “grouchy” suggests that there may have been other adjectives, other ladybugs — happy, sad, ambivalent — available to the author. This physical intervention draws the reader’s attention to the materiality of the text. The use of scissors and paste evokes William S. Burroughs’s cut-up method — but only in its tools. Rather than using words he’d already written, Stockman made his interventions before writing. A la John Cage, he let some elements of chance determine the course of his composition.

Is this the beginning of a series? Will Stockman use this method again? Or will those other ladybugs with other moods remain forever unrealized?

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The masterpiece thus far

TRANSCRIPTION: The alien was so happy with his family. Then he was a king. He took a rocket ship to erth. He got married again, and then he took his human wife to his own planet. 

They set up a surprise party for their beloved king. The king was delighted to see his old wife. His old wife [was] delighted to see him — until she saw his new wife. Then they were best friends.

Simply the most fully-realized story in the Stockman canon, this science fiction adventure challenges, in the manner of Ursula K. Le Guin, notions of “normal” filial relationships. This unnamed civilization — though monarchical and, on the evidence, patriarchal — seems to hold a relaxed attitude to both polyamory and interspecies relationships.

Or does it? Is this a privilege reserved only for the king? Are the rest of the planet’s inhabitants similarly at liberty? Does the queen acquiesce to her new “best friend” out of genuine fellow-feeling, or because she has no other practical choice? The ambiguities run rich and deep.

Note, too, that at the beginning of the story, our protagonist is only “[t]he alien,” and it was only then that we are specifically told he is “so happy with his family.” Things are about to change.

“Then he was a king.” (emphasis added). The “alien” becomes a king early in the story. Does he also leave behind his happiness? His conventional family? Is this story a parable about the dangers of actually getting what you wish for? Furthermore, did the king take a rocketship to “erth” (both our planet and not) for the purpose of bringing home a bride? Is this only a political marriage?

For this critic, the text lends itself to both conservative and revolutionary readings. It can be construed as either pro- or anti-monarchy. Doubtless Stockman’s future work will offer new ways to read this rich story.

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Non-fiction foray

TRANSCRIPTION: The Chiefs were playing the Raiders. Then the Chiefs scored a touchdown. Then the Raiders scored a touchdown. I can’t remember the rest of the game. But even though they had their best players on the field, they still lost. I was a little bit sad.

In this venture into sportswriting, Stockman eschews a traditional recounting of the game’s “events” for a more affective recounting of the fan experience. This notion of the fan’s interiority — the ups and downs, the distractions and dissociations — as the “real” action of a given sporting event is, we must admit, not new.

Granted that this “sportswriting as fan experience” approach owes a debt to some of the earliest work of Bill Simmons, but we see in Stockman’s work a concision that the founder of Grantland and The Ringer has yet to achieve.

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Whatever future scholars make of Stockman’s career, a quick look at his juvenilia makes it safe assert that he has already evolved into a more serious artist. He’s an artist who now avoids such dangers as we find in this early poem in which his cheap e.e. cummings pastiche does not make up for its scatological and near-colonialist themes.

TRANSCRIPTION: 
yo bro my name is jo                                   
and my but is bigern (bigger)                                   
then mexico.

On this evidence, we should all be grateful for Stockman’s progress.

The 11-year-old got braces on Wednesday, and at about the same time was stricken with a severe bout of pre-adolescence.

I guess I’d be moody, too, though I never had braces. I’d been under the impression that it’s because my teeth were straight enough, but it may just be that they were straight enough for Lafayette County, Missouri. Katie assures me I would’ve met an orthodontist before last month if I’d grown up here on the East Coast.

We’ve also been talking about a little bit of summer travel (vaccines permitting), and it occurred to me to dig up an old travel piece that I was a little irked never got published. I sold it to The Boston Globe’s travel section at the same time as this piece about a trip to Germany with my father (pub. date on that one: October 2016, truly a different time!). As sometimes happens, the other one never made the paper, and it’s safe to say it won’t now, four years later.

But one thing I don’t have to worry about with this newsletter is timeliness! Plus, in the future I’ll be able to pull up this post if I need something to embarrass our budding tween with (she’s five and a half here). Of course, Katie is the hero of this story, as true then as it is today as it was … yesterday:

Without further adieu, here’s … oh, what should we call it? How about:

Can’t Take You Anywhere

We left Cambridge at 11 a.m. on July 1st, headed for North Conway, N.H., and for Story Land, a charmingly threadbare amusement park — like the worn elbow patches on a New England professor's corduroy jacket —scaled for the under-10 set. We’d taken our five-and-a-half-year-old daughter two years before, and she was eager to show her 18-month old brother the ropes.

“Ike, you're not big enough to ride all the rides, but you can ride some of them,” Annie said.

Ike chewed on his book.

After stopping for gas and picking up a thank-you gift for the folks we'd be staying with in Vermont later in the week, we made it almost to I-93 before we had to turn around to grab the stroller we'd left at home.

So we actually left Cambridge at noon on July 1st, headed for North Conway and for Story Land, the DisneyWorld that time forgot.

“Are we still in Cambridge?” Annie asked.

“Yes,” my wife said, before delivering the message that would, over the next several days, punctuate the hours as prayer, chorus, and mantra: “but we're on our way now and it's a long drive so feel free to close your eyes.”

In retrospect, we're lucky we made it as far as we did before the whimpering started. Soft at first, accompanied by audible shifting in her car seat, the “nnnnnhhhhs” and “aaaaaaaahhs” of discomfort became “I have to pee! Nnnnnnnnhhh, nnnnnh, I have to go pee pee!”

We'd been on the road for less than an hour.

Downplay, delay, distract — what are you most excited to do at Story Land? What do you think you'll do when you start camp next week? As wife engaged daughter, I sped past several unpromising exits. On I-95 now, I was looking for a sign that guaranteed a Dunkin’ Donuts. I'd like to say this was due to relative confidence in the chain’s restroom cleanliness, but I also needed more coffee.

We made the exit at Newburyport — still in Massachusetts — Annie's keening now a high-pitched moan. Judging from the volume and urgency, and with a discount for five-year-old dramatics, I put the odds of her making the restroom without incident at about 60-40. As it turned out, that was not the issue.

The toddler and I waited outside. He was strapped into his seat. I stood at the open rear passenger door playing peekaboo. Ike grew tired of the game after about 20 minutes — just 19 minutes later than I did — so we unstrapped and went inside to see what was taking so long, and to get Daddy that coffee.

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The family’s other half had made three separate trips to the bathrooms, including one to the “disgusting” men's room, in futile, frustrating and painful efforts to get Annie to literally relieve herself. Ike patrolled the Dunkin' seating area; I winced as Annie screamed from the restroom.

Dunkin’s patrons winced, too. It sounded as though my wife was performing a whiskey-less Civil War-era field amputation. When Katie emerged from the bathroom with the still-yowling five-year-old wrapped around her, the fact that Annie was using all four limbs to cling to her mother may be the only thing that kept the customers from calling Child Protective Services on us.

“OK. Daddy,” Katie, using her manage-the-crisis tone: soothing, deliberate, yet urgent. “We're going to go to find the hospital, which is nearby.” My quest for an iced coffee just happened also to have led us to the exit for Newburyport's Anna Jaques hospital. I dropped Annie and Katie off at the emergency room, and set out to find a park that might entertain my son.

This is probably a good place to mention that we are not the kind of parents who rush to the hospital every time their kids fall down the stairs. It's just that, two nights earlier, Annie had come into our room around 5 a.m. to ask an urgent question:

“Mommy? What happens when you swallow a penny?”

That woke us up. After some impromptu interrogation, we decided that Annie had probably dreamed her coin-swallowing. In consulting with several pediatrician-friends, we learned the likeliest outcome would be for the penny to pass through her system without incident, and the best strategy was probably to watch and wait.

Back in Newburyport we were regretting that decision, feeling guilty about it, even.

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Ike and I drove around, listening to podcasts. He fell asleep. I bought another coffee. It rained hard. Katie sent text-message updates:

— OK. We are checked in and waiting triage. I think they might fast track her bc she's the only kid.

—  Otherwise the waiting room is packed.

—  We are going [to be] here forever. Haven't been to triage yet.

— She shouldn't have anything to eat/drink until we are sure she won't need any procedures.

—  We just had triage. Then to see NP and likely to get xray.

After my phone buzzed with, of all things, a tornado warning, Ike and I drove back to the hospital about two hours after we'd dropped them off.

X-ray update: no penny, nothing in there at all but an inordinate amount of poop. When we got to the emergency room’s “Fast Track” waiting area, Annie was alternately taking ginger walks around the floor and tiny sips of apple juice, as she waited for the procedure that would, as it were, get things moving. Ike and I played dump the crayons on the floor to distract from his sister's muffled cries of discomfort down the hall.

It worked! Everything came out OK, as my uncle would say. And so, we left Newburyport around 5 p.m., headed for New Hampshire, and Story Land, home of all your child's favorite characters who are also in the public domain.

Nothing tires like tedium, and the 1-2 boredom punch of waiting — and waiting — for health care professionals to rule out the possibility our daughter was also a piggy bank combined with the standard-issue monotony of a long car ride was doubly exhausting. So it was a treat to get off the interstate and on to the winding, two-lane New Hampshire highway that would take us to the door of the hotel in North Conway, right on the border of the White Mountain National Forest. We still had an hour to go, but at least the drive was increasingly beautiful. The trees grew denser, and the mountains rose on either side of us. The kids looked out their windows, Katie looked at her phone for a place to eat dinner, and I looked out at the road ahead as it wound back and forth, up and dow...

“Ugh, GROSS, Ike!” came the cry from the backseat. It was the big sister, hours removed from her first enema, disgusted by her brother’s vomit.

Ike cried and flung his puke around; Katie gave me directions to the nearest restaurant she’d identified as a possibility. We pulled in to the parking lot, Katie dislodged the boy and stripped him bare as I did my best to wipe down the carseat with baby wipes.

“I have to go I have to go I have to go!”

Annie was no longer constipated.

Annie and Katie hurried into the restaurant’s bathroom; I rummaged through our luggage for a suitable replacement outfit; Ike stood wailing in the gravel parking lot, naked save for his shoes. It turned out that the restaurant had a 45 minute wait. We went to the pizza joint across the street.

And so, at 8 p.m., we left Oliver's Pizza, headed for our hotel room in North Conway. At check-in I had one question: “Does this hotel have a bar?”

It did not.

The next day, finally at Story Land, home of the world's mildest attractions, we stood in line for 20 minutes to ride ... the cars, those self-driving ones on a track where all you have to do is push the pedal and pretend to steer. There wasn't much to look at in line, except for old maps of Story Land through the years, and an advertisement for your very own Story Land driver's license. It attempted to attract parents with this tagline-cum-taunt:

“Want a reminder of your visit to Story Land all year long?”

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How Do You Finish a Book?

No interview in the department this week, but some great ones one the way!

In the meantime check out my friend Julian Zabalbeascoa’s interview with Irish novelist and short story writer Kevin Barry in The Believer: “I have noticed in my own work it’s hard to go for the kind of comic lines at the moment, the real boom-tish comic lines. It’s hard to lean into those right now. You think, Who am I fucking kidding?”

Barry offers this: “I’ve essentially convinced myself of two things. One, that there is a God and, two, that she only turns on the internet at 12 noon. I’ve got these two things. So I don’t go online in the morning. I don’t check my phone. I don’t leave it in the bedroom, no devices are allowed. And I just stay in the analog offline world until 12 noon, and that’s plenty enough to give me the space to write before I go to the jittery online mode. I find if I go there first thing in the morning, my mind is whirring at that online pace.”

Me: This is great advice Mr. Barry.

Also Me: <wakes up to pee at 3 a.m. and looks at his phone>

—

I really enjoyed Hannah Gersen’s piece in The Millions, How to Get the Muse to Visit: “The Muse doesn’t care if your work is worthwhile and neither do I. I just want you to have more fun. And I want to have more fun. I wrote these for myself, obviously.”

This is the kind of writing advice I like: there’s a premise — the muse is an actual visitor — but it doesn’t take itself too seriously or get incoherently spiritual.

The Substack Conundrum

If you’re a person who is not obsessed with media circles talking to themselves, you probably don’t know that there’s a somewhat-roiling debate about the platform via which I’m sending out this missive. The Columbia Journalism Review has a pretty in-depth overview here.

I’m just noting — for those of you who are obsessed with and/or members of those media circles — that I’m aware of the discussion, and I may at some point change platforms. For now, I’m following the path writer and publisher Anne Trubek lays out in this thoughtful post.

—

Thanks for reading!

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It’s pretty good, right? The seven-year-old tells me that the human Ash is being cuddled here by Pikachu, Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Pidgey. There may be a fifth one in there, but it’s hard to say. As you surely know, this was drawn in honor of Pokemon Day. On February 27, day 25 years ago, the first Pokemon were introduced. Who knew, other than a few hundred million people spanning parts of three generations?

I was only vaguely aware of Pokemon as a cultural phenomenon until last year, when a friend gave the kid a spare dozen cards got him hooked. The cards are now all over the house. We don’t have the video games, and we had no plans to watch Post Malone headline the Pokemon Day Virtual Concert, so we observed the sacred day by playing four straight rounds of the overly-complicated Trading Card Game. If you would like a play-by-play of my four straight losses, reply to this email and the seven-year-old will record a voice memo in which he details each turn at length.

What does this have to do with anything?

Not much! It’s just that see if your brain isn’t a little mushy after spending two hours waiting to “evolve” Larvesta into Volcarona. I guess we put it in the ever-expanding bucket of Things I Never Thought I’d be Doing.

This project I’m starting is another TINTIBD (acronym needs work). In my “career” as a writer, I’ve functioned best with a deadline and an audience to produce stuff for.

Possibly because I started as a writer in newspapers, my muscle for writing with some longer-term outcome in remains … underdeveloped at best.

Even as I type this I cringe at the Extremely Successful Journalists — hi, folks — in this audience who might scoff at my preciousness. But the fact remains that I’ve been working on a book project for more years than I care to admit; too often, it’s easier to put aside than to face head on.

I heard a podcaster say this week that his projects are these “unfinished pyramids” he has to walk around: one project here, a project there, and another one over yonder. The thing that I really responded to though, was his addendum: “My family has to walk around me walking around these pyramids.” (Cut to spouse nodding in bitter recognition).

“I think writing in general is something you have to continually talk yourself into or remind yourself why it’s so important.” — Lindsay Hunter

It was yet another podcaster who made me want to start this venture. On the “I’m a Writer, But…” podcast, authors Lindsay Hunter and Alex Higley talk with other writers about the ins and outs of getting stuff done, or not.

In the first episode, Hunter, outlining the reason they started their podcast, said “I think writing in general is something you continually have to talk yourself into, or remind yourself why it’s so important.”

If you’re a writer who has other gigs (not you, aforementioned high-powered journalists), and struggles with making time or giving yourself permission, the “I’m a Writer, But…” podcast does what the best literature can do — makes you feel less alone.

So, that’s one part of this project: talking myself into writing because I have an audience and a deadline. (It won’t be writing about not writing, I promise: part of the gig is to entertain). I really appreciate that you’re here.

Let’s finish some pyramids.

Ted Cruz Corner

The most responded-to section of my “Coming Soon” post was the hilarious Ted Cruz hearsay. More than one of you demanded “more Cruz content!” Well, my college roommate, Jack, (hi, Jack; visit his Hellbent Brewing Company if you’re in Seattle), has a cousin who debated Cruz in high school. Watch this space!