The Pull-Back

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Everyone I know texts. My mother texts. My wife texts. My students text. And now my sons text. It gets to the point where the word ‘text’ looks strange, and I can’t type it anymore. It feels strange to use it in the context of teaching, where I’m often compelled to refer to a piece of writing as “a text.”

Yesterday, his new not-so-smartphone in hand, one of my sons called up a friend. Actually called him. He did not successfully reach this friend, but he insisted on trying again. And again. I gently reminded him that most every kid his age, if not every kid his age, sends a message instead of dials a number. Voice to voice, person to person? Come on, it’s not 1970 here. Or the ensuing thirty-odd years.

Before my sons were born and I was living in another place, another time (the before-time), I spoke on the phone with a friend living in Chicago. It was a long talk. It felt good.

When I hung up I thought of my life before I created a profile of myself, spread it around the internet, and then obsessed over its management. I thought of my life before I tried out ebooks, before I tweeted and liked and commented. Heck, I thought of my life before I had a phone. I came to the cell phone late, when I was between my first and second year of graduate school, and I remember thinking then it was a good thing I’d held off as long as I had; brain cancer would infect me late in life, if at all.

That summer, the summer between my first and second year of graduate school, I sat under a tree and read Huckleberry Finn. I read it all day long. I’d skipped reading it in junior year of high school, thinking it wasn’t necessary. That summer in Indiana I realized it was necessary, I needed to read Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn was awesome. This book is great, I remember thinking, and I remember now some other things: how fine the weather was then, not humid as people had been warning me, but warm and mild, like California spring at dusk; the feel of the pages between my fingers, the heft of the paperback edition; the near-complete lack of worry about what others were up to, it was only me, and I didn’t need anyone to know what I was doing here.

I no longer believe I need to make so much available to so many. I’ll still tweet. I’m still on Facebook. My website is not going down. I may even post to this blog again some day. But I want to get back to that tree. I may not find it, but it’s time to try.

The above three paragraphs I wrote over a decade ago. I still talk on the phone with that Chicago-based friend of mine, but our talks are less frequent now. Texting, when it does happen, happens more often. I have to be okay with that.

In Vancouver this summer, I met a fellow husband and father, John, who hailed from Ireland. I’ve come a long way in my ability to socialize. When I was young, I would never have dared to ask a question of anyone as a way to strike up a conversation. That’s changed, and that evening, indoor poolside in Vancouver, I couldn’t resist commenting on John’s accent as a way in. “You’re from Ireland?” I guessed.

We talked for over an hour, the two of us standing up to our waists in the lukewarm water while our boys played together. We spoke of our jobs, our countries, politics — John was especially interested in my take on my country’s political situation. It was the evening of July 13th and Trump had just survived the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania, and John wanted to know everything on my mind in regards to political parties, the past and the future of the United States. Why Americans vote the way they do, why they harbor certain resentments and beliefs. I held forth to an eager, attentive student, and I was reminded why speaking with someone from another country can be so rewarding. They are not jaded. They are not suspicious. They are genuinely curious. They just want to know.

That night I slept well, free of thoughts of social media and the screen. The heady buzz of that hour-long conversation lingered. My son who is especially drawn to the screen but who played hardest in the pool that evening with John’s son slept better than he had in days. At bedtime he was still talking of how great it was to play in the pool with another boy his age. His friends back home bring their phones over to our house; he’s tried to talk to them when they’re looking at the screen.

I had just finished reading Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller The Anxious Generation, and I made a decision the next morning that my wife and I needed to kick our parenting into a higher gear. A return to play-based childhood, starting with a search of like-minded parents who will band together with us in solidarity to face down the FEED.

I never did escape, never did pull off the pull-back I wrote about over a decade ago. Instead, I enmeshed myself further in a trap of my own making. Hope lies with my sons, however. If my wife and I manage to play the next few years right, we’ll have something of a pull-back, our own little pull-back, and that’s better than no pull-back at all.

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