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Popsicle Fish

Tales of Fathering

by Michael Murphy, Ed.D. (more about this book and author)

Chapter 31: Of Ants, Identity and Midsummer Afternoons

It was a midsummer Sunday afternoon and I lay on the couch in a deep drowse watching a procession of ants march up a damp tree outside our living room window. The bark of the tree was grayish tan with deep fissures, and the ants were pure black, their plump hindquarters shining in the dull light.

Though, in terms of ant vision, these ants must have been far out of sight of one another, somehow they followed a precisely similar path through the deep valleys and crests of the bark. As they demonstrated this incredible feat of remote coordination, no ant audiences applauded their acumen and no ant cameramen filmed their achievement for future generations of ants. They climbed up the bark with the terrible silent decisiveness of all purely natural behavior, and it is only ant psychologists who would ever know if they regretted their anonymity.

But the impatient voice of Aaron, my eight-year-old son, roused me from my ruminations. "Dad, let's do something!"

I didn't take my eyes off the ants. "Do you want to play cards?" Cards was something you did at the beach on dreary days; you sat around a table and played gin rummy or pitch or poker and you quietly passed hours in which neither work nor active play was possible.

"No," he said as he leaned forward on the other couch. "Let's go bowling."
There was a long gap in the procession of ants. Surely the next one would be confused, would fall with a terrible ant scream from the bark of the tree.

"Let's do something that doesn't cost money," I said, though my own torpor issued a strong internal objection. "Let's do something, not buy something."

"But everything good costs money," Aaron hastened to observe.

I turned away from the window and looked at him. "Being loved by somebody and loving somebody is free, and that's the best thing."

As I heard myself saying this, I was aware that I might sound like a hectoring parent; but sometimes it's a father's job to lob one out there.

Aaron responded quickly. "Paula and Jason are getting married, and that's costing them a lot of money," he said, referring to an aunt who was at that moment planning a big wedding bash.

I almost said that it was the wedding, the ceremony, that was expensive; the love was free. But I sensed if I said that I would create in his young soul a polarizing differentiation between love and marriage, between feeling and action, between mind and body. And, as we all know, love and marriage are already polarized enough. I didn't want Aaron to think that marriage is a container that confines the freedom of love, but that is the way it would sound, because those are the differences that men have believed in and fought for. Aaron's insistent questioning was forever getting me hung up on these dilemmas, forcing me to choose between what was and what I wanted him to believe.

"Anyway, the love is free," I said, avoiding the
issue. "How about if we go kayaking?"

"No."

"You never want to go kayaking," I said, continuing in the lecturing mode. "If you only do the things you think you want to do, then you never get surprised, you know, when you find out you really like something you didn't think you'd like."

Aaron shrugged. "It's not a good day. It's all wet."

I laughed. "But kayaking happens on the water. It's supposed to be wet. Why don't you want to go?"

Aaron was silent for a moment. He spoke then in a mocking tone, like a robot, "I-do-not-know-the-answer-to-your-question."

"You don't know why you don't want to go kayaking?"

There was another long moment of silence. I thought that he might be changing his mind when he finally said, "Yes."

"Yes, what?"

"Yes, I don't know why I don't want to go kayaking."

"Well," I came back, "I sure don't know why you don't know why you don't want to go kayaking. I don't even know why you do know why you don't know why you don't want to go kayaking, if you know what I mean."

It was Aaron's turn to laugh. "I can't help it. I just don't know why I don't know why I don't want to go kayaking."

It looked like we were stuck in one of those loops. I turned away to look out the window and noticed that the ants were gone; probably back in their ant living rooms, drinking little glasses of ant tea
as they discussed the efforts of the day. My adult self insisted that people should know why they do things, and therefore by extension should know why they didn't do things. I remembered when I was a small child my mother would hold me on her knee and listen while I asked her "Why?" and "Why?" and "Why?" again to every statement she made. She was patient and tolerant and even seemed to enjoy it. In reality, because she maintained a home for five children in addition to working full-time, she probably did it about twice in my life, but it was enough to keep me asking, here, forty years later.

"So what do you want to do that's free?"

"I want to go play basketball," he answered.

"But the courts are wet."

"So what? I don't care."

"Now, do you know why you would rather play basketball than go kayaking?"

"Basketball is exercise," he said.

"So is kayaking," I rejoined.

"And it's competition."

So that was it. Drifting on a bay, observing the birds cutting through the gray sky and the wind as it subtlely altered the surface of the water, all that lacked a competitive edge, gave no adrenaline surge. Aesthetic experience was not a game that could be won or lost, with a score that told you how you were doing along the way. Children are threatened by the lack of structure involved in pure aesthetic appreciation, and so they revel in the clarity of the score, the organizing possibility of victory.

And our media, oriented to the eight-year-old mind, play and prey upon this hunger for organization
through competition. If a human experience can be rendered competitive, American media will film it and sell it. Kayaking itself, a wonderful way to glide through the water and observe the world, was a "sport" practiced with enormous energy by competition addicts the world over. In the sport of kayaking, you measured your miles in minutes, and your awareness was as internally focused as if you were running on a treadmill. In this way, the American media machine is slowly converting millennia of human experience into one grand vacant game of competition.

Outside I noticed a single black ant making its way up the tree. It moved back and forth in a frenzied manner, and its movements were more nervous than its predecessors. It was as if the trail was cold and this lonely ant now strived to recover any smell, any sign, of its long departed compatriots. Was this the lazy ant, the one that had refused to be roused from its ant bed when the call for traveling came? And was it now experiencing the desperate, natural consequences of self-indulgence?

Or was this the ant, ostracized from the group because its antennae were too long or too short or too straight or too curly, who now, like all irrevocably different creatures, must find its own way in the world?

That was the wonderful thing about ants; their courageous and generous anonymity allowed you to impose upon them the story of your choice.

"So no kayaking?" I said, giving it one last chance.

Aaron shook his head, arms folded to reinforce his position, "Uh-uh."
I grunted and raised myself up to a roughly vertical position. "Okay, go get the basketball."

As Aaron ran from the room I took one last glance out the window. The lone ant was far up the tree now, hardly visible, but still moving, still searching.

And that's the thing that's different about kids; if they're strong and healthy they won't let you impose upon them the story of your choice. They'll fight like devils to make up their own story, their own too curly, too straight, too long or too short story.

And that, for better and worse, makes all the difference.

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