Raymond Proulx, 1923-2009

My grandfather died this week. The following is adapted from the first chapter of The Daddy Shift, for which I had interviewed him.

My great-grandfather was born in rural Quebec, Canada. At the age of twelve, he immigrated with his widowed mother and four sisters to Lowell, Massachusetts, and all of them started work in the city’s textile mills.

In Lowell, my great-grandfather married and had thirteen children. My grandfather, Raymond Proulx, was born in 1923. Starting at the age of eight, my grandfather worked side-by-side with his father at home, tending the garden that helped feed them and taking care of the pigs, chickens, and cows they kept.

I asked my grandfather what lessons he learned from his father. He replied: “You do what you have to, and if you don’t, you don’t eat.” Their relationship was not an intimate one. Discipline was strict and enforced with the back of a hand.

At fifteen, my grandfather found a job in a slaughterhouse butchering cows. He quit school and never went back. In 1945, he was drafted and served in World War II. In 1946, he married my grandmother and started work at a quarry—a job he would hold for the next forty years.

“My wife was so poor,” he said. “They didn’t have nothing. I took her out of poverty when I married her. At the quarry, I got fifty cents an hour, working like a horse. There wasn’t a union, we just worked. If you asked for a raise, you’d get four cents.”

A year later my mother was born; my two uncles both came within the following decade. “It was my wife’s responsibility to take care of the kids, and I used to go to work,” said my grandfather.

He told me that he wanted to play a role in their development—which he defined as making “sure they do what they’re supposed to do”—but the main measure of his success consisted of going to the quarry every day and putting a roof over their heads. “I used to go to work, come home. I didn’t drink at all. I didn’t spend my money foolishly. Everything went to feed the kids and the clothes.”

I never heard any of his children say otherwise; my mother says that she often saw my grandfather work seven days a week, for up to 12 hours a day. By the standards of his time and social class, my grandfather was an excellent father. He had been a soldier and a breadwinner and those were the two things he was proudest of. I had always had the impression that he defined those two roles by duty, modesty, and steadfastness.

His sacrifices were enormous, but my grandmother, Cecile Proulx, seemed almost crushed by the burdens of her life. I can’t include her voice here—she died years ago—but I have pictures and memories of a woman who seemed to be always battling against herself and the world, her lips set, her eyes fearful.

“She worked for me,” said my grandfather of his wife. “I always said, You work for me. She took care of the kids and I took care of the money; I brought it home, so she would have enough.” When I asked him if he faced any challenges in raising the kids, he replied: “I never did. My wife took care of all that. She brought the kids up.”

In reading through my college journals, I am surprised to see many small reminisces about my grandfather—though I didn’t see him more than twice during my undergraduate years, his appearances in my journals outnumber those about both my parents. In one entry, I recall an incident when he had accidentally killed a man at the quarry and we found him at the kitchen table, head in his hands; on another page, I describe a bicycle he built for me, “the best bike I ever had, the fastest in the neighborhood.”

We were never close. Why did I write about him so often? I think in many ways I was haunted by how different he seemed to be from me; I was quite simply incredulous that we were related. He apparently represented some rough masculine quality that I never had and didn’t want, but which still held the same attraction that the image of Havana seemed to have for the second-generation Cuban-Americans that I knew in my Miami high school. My friends had no desire to go back to Cuba—they felt their families led freer, richer lives in Miami—but they still romanticized Havana’s shark-finned cars and crumbling buildings, which cast a long shadow over their lives. My family had not crossed an ocean strait, but in many ways I was just as far away from my grandparents.

My grandfather died on January 7, 2009. Raymond Proulx didn’t want a funeral; the family isn’t having one.

Doing the right thing

The more I think about it, the more moved I am by this post from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I've reflected a lot--personally--on Obama's campaign and the values of parenting. I often think about how his Dad left him, and never knew that his son would be within days of the presidency of the greatest power in history. Think about this--what else could a father want? My own Dad often says that too many black men see child-rearing as "responsibility" and not "personal investment." They forget about the joy that children bring, and instead focus on the bills, or on stupid, petty beefs with women. As my own son creeps past eight, I've been reminded of that.

Obama's mother, a relatively young woman when he was born, will not be here to see him inaugurated, should he win. Whenever, I think of that I just get sad--mostly because she did know the rewards of parenting and threw herself at her kids. There's something unjust in the fact that she won't get to see the results of all her work.

But now, more than anyone, I am thinking of Barack Obama's grandparents. One of the big mistakes we make when we look at the history of race in this country is to focus on big people and big events. What should be remembered is that, though our racial history is mired in utter disgrace, though the deep cowardice of post-reconstruction haunts us into the 21st century, at any point on the timeline, you can find ordinary white people doing the right thing. Frederick Douglass, himself a biracial black man, is a hero of mine. But arguably more heroic, is Helen Pitts, his second wife--a white woman, who traced her history back to the Mayflower, whose ancestors founded Richmond Township, NY, and who was cast out for marrying Douglass. Here is a white woman who spent the best years of her life fighting for suffrage and racial justice. After Douglass died, she dedicated the rest of her life to seeing him honored, when everyone else was on the verge of forgetting.

Likewise, I was looking at this picture of Obama's grandparents and thinking how much he looks like his grandfather. And suddenly, for whatever reason, I was struck by the fact that they had made the decision to love their daughter, no matter what, and love their grandson, no matter what. I'd bet money that they never even thought of themselves as courageous, that they didn't give much thought to the broader struggles in the the world at the time. They were just doing what right, honorable people do. But the fact is that, in the 60s, you could be disowned for falling in love with a black woman or black man. There is a reason why we have a long history of publicly biracial black people, but not so much of publicly biracial white people.

We often give a pass to racists by noting that they were "of their times." Fair enough, and I know Hawaii was a different beast, but still, today, let us speak of people who were ahead of their times, who were outside of their times. Let us remember that Barack Obama learned the great lessons of life from courageous white people. Let us speak of those who do what normal, right people should always do when faced with a child--commit an act of love. Here's to doing the right thing.

When Grandpa Steals the Baby

It's been a week to the day since my father-in-law, somewhat inadvertently, kidnapped the baby.

One part of me doesn't blame him for what appears to have been an act of over eagerness. Left to their own devices, my in-laws would be happy to sit for Spot every day, and let us visit him for an hour or so.

This is an immeasurable help to me, to Spot's mom, and of course to Spot himself, who clearly adores his maternal Grandparents. If he has a chance of really learning Chinese and being bilingual, it's because he hears it during his morning visits to their apartment; he enthusiastically consumes the volumes of tofu they send home with him several times a week; and one of his joys is to ride with Grandma on her wheelchair voyages, perched on her ample lap at a precarious angle that seems precarious only to me.

For all these and other reasons, I'm grateful to them. Which is why I was shocked when, waking up from a brief nap in the park where we had met, I saw Spot whisked away on the Grandma trolley, pushed by an unusually fleet-footed septuagenarian.

I looked over at Spot's stroller, strangely empty, and then considered myself: unshaven, damp, increasingly middle-aged, and alone in a baby park with no kid. Not a good feeling. Last time I checked, Grandpa and Spot were doing laps around the jungle gym. Ten minutes later, they've taken off.

Thus began the angry smoldering, less about the act itself than about the principle -- which I had never really thought about before then -- that if anyone wants to take the baby, they have to ask me first. It's just one of those lines in the sand. I'm the primary caregiver. You can't just take the baby. Even if I know you, even if I'm related to you, even if you're his Grandpa. Even if I was napping on a bench like a negligent bum and you didn't want to disturb me.

So I collect the empty stroller, and all the little bags of treats that I feed to Spot like a dolphin trainer at Sea World, and set off in pursuit of the 70 year old man pushing the 200 pound invalid grandmother with the baby on top.

Following the shortest path across the park, for the lack of a sidewalk, Grandpa directs the family parade into the street, along a row of diagonally parked cars and into oncoming traffic. For once Grandpa seems to be walking faster than me, I can't catch up with him, giant SUV's are swerving into the opposite lane to avoid the happy chariot, and from the back I can tell that Spot is having the time of his life, waving the two giant cottonwood leaves he had collected in the park, one in each hand, literally the size of plates, as if he were a flagman diverting rush-hour traffic.

I finally catch them in the lobby of their senior building, where traffic was slowed by severe wheelchair congestion around the elevator bank. Grandpa gets into the first available elevator. I nudge my empty stroller up to the door as it shuts in my face.

My moral adaptation to the role of at-home dad thus announced itself to me. This was an infraction of the rules. More importantly, it was an affront to the dignity of my labor of at-home dadness, a sense of dignity that seems to have taken shape on its own and only now come to the surface.

But that's only half the story. It quickly became apparent that if I was angry enough, I could make it much more difficult for my in-laws to see Spot. For one of the few times in my life, I knowingly enjoyed a form of power that was concrete and undeniable, something that a single, simple act of will could initiate that would have an equally concrete and undeniable effect on other people. There was nothing "soft" about it.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. Power is an ambivalent thing, like magic, like mana. It turns out that I didn't need to exercise my sanction at all; Grandpa sent a polite little apology Sunday night, and the weekday baby-exchange was able to proceed as usual the following morning.

But I was suddenly quite conscious that I have power: something that someone else wants, that I can take away. The possibility of that sanction is a deterrent, like having a nuclear warhead. You don't have to use it, but having one will definitely change how everyone else in the room behaves.

I'm still not sure how I feel about that.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

The sidewalk in our neighborhood, unusual for the galaxy of Chicago pavement, ends a block and a half up the street.

At the last house, across from a vast tree-ringed field, the sidewalk stops. If you're small like Spot, you'll notice that the regular series of cracks that mark the progress of your daily walk come to an end, and an unruly universe of chlorophyll, litter, and uneven ground opens ahead of you.

Instead of the cracks, so useful for games of 2-square, we come upon a transition of cosmic proportions. Behind us, smooth concrete pavement skirting a row of tidy homes. Ahead, beyond the edge of the last concrete paver, the wilderness: dirt, weeds, the riotous undergrowth of mid-summer, low-hanging mulberries, the snow of cottonwood in July, and a grassy path along the ancient lake shore where the trains go by.

There are no moon-birds where this sidewalk ends, and no peppermint wind, but there is a community garden, some garbage, an old tree-house, an occasional homeless person, and a 93-year old German gardener named Gerta.

Or maybe that's not right: Gerta may indeed be a moon-bird. If nothing else, she is certainly a very rare creature, a sort of ivory-billed woodpecker swooping out of the European past. On our last few walks, Spot and I have learned that, as she put it, there are two things that keep Gerta alive: summer gardening, and, in the winter, season tickets to the symphony.

We've invited her over for dinner, but she won't come. She used to attend free concerts at the University a few blocks away, but got tired of asking for rides. If she goes anywhere now, she walks to her garden along the tracks, or takes the bus downtown to Symphony Hall. We usually find her where the sidewalk ends.

After a number of conversations about dill and chives, drainage and fragrant mosses, I attempted myself to turn some earth.

"Where were you born?"

"Berlin."

"When did you leave Germany?"

"1939."

So she was there. She had seen it all. At least, everything anyone would have needed to see, and more than anyone would have wanted to, before getting out. Which she did, leaving behind a brother in the SS, another in the infantry, and a mother in the Party. It was ten years, she told me, before she went back, sat down with her family at the kitchen table and told them that everything that had happened, they had brought upon themselves.

Spot sits in my arms, nibbling on his forefinger as he does when in a contemplative mood, and lets us talk, about crooked Chicago politics, Japanese beetles, and the butterfly season. We talk about the election of January, 1933, when Gerta was 17, and she remembers the day.

These are some of the most interesting conversations of my daily stay-at-home-dadness, far more interesting than any chit chat at the playground. They all happen on the sidewalk, near the end of it. I'm beginning to realize that a lot of stuff happens on the sidewalk. Spot's first few steps, kids on bikes and push scooters, averted glances, altercations, and joyous reunions.

And Gerta. I'm glad Spot knows Gerta. It's a strange but pleasant feeling holding a baby and talking to this stooped, lucid, bronzed and 93 year-old German gardener, who crosses challenging traffic twice each day to tend to her flowers and greens, and can prove to Spot, or at least to me, that the world began much earlier than the day either of us were born.

Harvey Milk for President!

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay politician "in the history of the planet," to quote Time magazine. He represented my neighborhood on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and was killed in 1978 (along with Mayor George Moscone) by city supervisor Dan White, a seemingly nice guy, by some accounts, who turned out to be a raving lunatic.

But when White was sentenced to a mere seven years for the crime, there were riots at City Hall and in the Castro. Here's some (murky) footage:



Now director Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Paranoid Park, etc.) is making a film of those events, staring Sean Penn as Milk, and much of the shoot occurred during the past several months on Castro Street, where I live on the border between the Castro and Noe Valley neighborhoods.

It's fascinating to watch a film put together: the facades of many Castro businesses were torn down and rebuilt to appear as they were in the 1970s; we saw famous people loitering around coffee shops; we watched staggering amounts of preparation for scenes that appeared to last for two minutes; and we residents were herded like cattle to avoid stumbling into scenes where our clothing would have made us anachronisms. Here's a little video someone did on the transformation:



But it was also interesting to hear gray-haired gay men reminisce about those days--and to hear the Castro's children ask about this Harvey Milk person. Liko wanted to know what all the fuss was about, of course, and I explained as best I could.

He gets that some of his friends have two mommies or two daddies, and it doesn't seem weird to him. I don't need to explain "gay" to him, though he doesn't know that word. He just knows that kids have different mixes of parents, and that boys can be affectionate with boys and girls with girls, just like his mom and I are affectionate. That's not so complicated, is it?

But it was painfully difficult to explain that there was once a time when the parents of his friends could not be parents--they couldn't be anything. They were invisible. And people like Harvey Milk helped create a place for them in playgrounds, schools, neighborhoods, and every area of life.

Love is easy to explain; hate is hard. It's not really suitable for children. One early morning I walked with Liko down Castro, and they had apparently just finished filming scenes of the "White Night Riots." The Castro was once again transformed, now with smashed windows, burned-out cars, and graffiti.

"What's going on, daddy?" Liko asked. I didn't say anything and I was just thankful that this was the reenactment of the riot, not the real thing. It was genuinely chilling to see the neighborhood in a state of ruin, however temporary and imaginary.

This history is often news to children of both queer and straight parents--both are learning about Harvey Milk and what he meant for the neighborhood. One afternoon during the shoot I heard this conversation between my friend Lisa (a lesbian mom) and her oldest son, about 9:

"Why was Harvey Milk so important?"

"He helped stand up for the rights of gay people."

"But what does that mean?"

"It means that we can take care of you and not be afraid of anyone taking you away."

Which is really cool, in every single way. I'm glad Van Sant is making this film, and I'm looking forward to seeing it, and I'm proud to live in a place with such great history.

By coincidence, the video of an updated version of Wyclef Jean's "If I Was President" was shot in the neighborhood at the same time as Milk. Liko and my wife Olli got roped into it one afternoon and they cheerfully participated, and now the video is out and they're in it, with many amusing San Francisco street scenes. They appear (for about a second in front of the Castro Theater) at the three minutes, eleven seconds point, near the end:



It's an accidental, personal juxtaposition, but it seems to me that "If I Was President" has a lot to say to Milk:

[chorus]
If I was president,
I'd get elected on Friday, assassinated on Saturday,
and buried on Sunday.

If I was president...
If I was president

An old man told me, instead of spending billions on the war,
we can use some of that money, in the ghetto.
I know some so poor, they use the spring as the shower,
when screaming "fight the power."
That's when the vulture devoured

[chorus]
If I was president,
I'd get elected on Friday, assassinated on Saturday,
and buried on Sunday.

If I was president...
If I was president...
If I was president...
If I was president

Tell the children the truth, the truth.

The Way We Were vs. The Way We Are

This photo depicts the J. Bates home in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the late 1800s. Note the size of the family and the size of the porch they share. Families of this period were large, both because extended family stayed together and because children were still an economic necessity: more of them meant more hands to work in farms and shopfloors. Fathers and sons often worked side by side, and so did mothers and daughters. The economic and domestic were not separate spheres; though in the process of being eclipsed by large-scale enterprise, at this time the home economy was still America's fundamental economic unit.

As a consequence, marriage was primarily a business decision--as it had been throughout the world for thousands of years. For the lower, middle, and upper classes, people had little choice about whom to marry. Once married, they could divorce only in special or extreme circumstances. Fathers were the undisputed heads and masters of households, by both law and custom. Marital rape and wife-beating were, in most cases, perfectly legal.

Another thing to note about the J. Bates family: it is monoracial and was almost certainly monocultural. Though interracial marriage was more common than we might suppose--see Randall Kennedy's 2003 Interracial Intimacies--it was still widely condemned and illegal in many states. Nineteenth century families had more in common with previous generations than they might have with families today, but society was changing. The family as an economic unit declined; as a consequence, love rose in importance. Young people began to feel that when love dissolved, so should the marriage. Between 1880 and 1890 the divorce rate soared 70 percent.


Throughout the first half of the 20th century, people left farms and small towns for cities. Extended families fragmented and the nuclear family emerged as the dominant family form. Children became more of an economic liability than an asset; as a result, sentimental attachment to them intensified. As the century wore on, child labor was abolished and universal schooling was made mandatory. Government programs like the GI Bill educated millions of American men and increased their social mobility.

By the middle of the century, postwar prosperity made the male breadwinner and female homemaker family possible. Most men worked in offices and factories far from home; they did not take care of children. The vast majority of mothers did not work and raised kids far from from extended family. Thus mothers were isolated and many children grew up without fathers, grandparents, aunts, or uncles as stable, regular presences. By the late 1950s, middle-class women--and their children--started to rebel against isolated, retricted lives. "It took more than 150 years to establish the love-based, male breadwinner marriage," writes family historian Stephanie Coontz. "It took less than 25 years to dismantle it."


At the beginning of the 21st century, families are egalitarian, diverse, isolated, and voluntary. Where once there was no choice at all, today we have too many choices. Take a look at this 2004 photo of Brian Brantner and Matt Fuller holding their 2-month-old adopted daughter, Audrey, in San Francisco. Their family could not have co-existed with the J. Bates family in 19th century Minnesota. The gay family is, in fact, something totally new under the sun, blossoming side by side with stepfamilies, female breadwinner/male homemaker families, multiracial families, and so on. Today, only 7 percent of families fit the 1950s mold of breadwinning father and homemaking mother.

At the same time, the American economy is far less stable and social mobility has declined dramatically; class barriers are much more rigid than they are anywhere else in the developed world. This means that family is more important than ever in determining a child's chances in life. Poor children are falling behind richer counterparts, a process that starts before they even enter school. Educated parents are investing large amounts of time and money in their small number of offspring; both husbands and wives are spending more time with kids and at work, and less time with each other or in the community, which puts tremendous strain on love-based marriages.

Surveying decades of research, the sociologist Gosta Esping-Andersen writes, "What is now becoming clear is that the seeds of inequality are sown prior to school age on a host of crucial attributes such as health, cognitive and noncognitive abilities, motivation to learn, and, more generally, school preparedness." As marriages become more egalitarian, society becomes less so. We should celebrate the gains made in women's economic empowerment and male participation in domestic labor. At the same time, we should do what we can to resist rising inequality and social under-development.



Most of the photos above illustrate an article by Stephanie Coontz that will appear in the September issue of Greater Good magazine, which will focus on the relationship between the diversification of family types and the well-being of parents and children. I'm happy to provide a free copy to any blogger who promises to write about the issue. Send me an email at jeremyadamsmith (at) mac.com.

Bridging the Generations

Spot has more female admirers at 5½ months than I’ve racked up in a lifetime. The curious thing about it is that most of them are over 65. Spot has managed to acquire his senior groupies in the course of regular visits to his grandparents’ retirement community a few blocks away, where he puts on his show a few mornings a week. It seems to be a straightforward win-win all around: Spot has more grandmas than can possibly be hugged and cooed at in one visit, and they, having already seen most of their own grandchildren reach adolescence and beyond, get to enjoy the hassle-free pleasure of having a baby around. When things start to turn sour, I’m there to wheel him offstage. He’s been called the community mascot and the community therapy baby. Who needs a dog when you can pass Spot around?

Less than a year before Spot was born, my wife and her brother, who are American-born Chinese, convinced their Chinese-born parents to do the unthinkable: defy an Asian-American law of cultural gravity and move east from the West Coast. There were a lot of good reasons for this reversal of the American Dream: they were by then retired, my wife’s mother was increasingly dependent and needed an affordable assisted-living environment -- which they weren’t going to find in the Bay Area -- and we were getting serious about starting a family. Even with all of these centripetal forces at work, it still took a good amount of cajoling. In the end, they gave in, and are now quite happily living within a mile of their only grandson.

So now the generations are reunited, and Spot has his groupies. And I am infinitely thankful for having one set of grand-folks very close by, and for the affection and enrichment they give him, to say nothing of the everyday practical assistance. I don’t know how long we’ll all be together, so I don’t know what he’ll remember, if anything, of these weeks and months when he joins the ladies of the club for late morning tea in the sun room, or finds a parking space between the variety of walkers and other contraptions during wheelchair aerobics, or listens to family gossip in Chinese. But he's being cared for by many hands; he's becoming familiar with faces of all shapes, sizes, and colors; he's learning to trust people, not just mom and dad, to get an early taste of the conversation of mankind.

But he's not the only one who is growing as a result. Now, not only do I find myself in the role of at home dad, constantly trying to process what that means and trying to adapt it to the odd assortment of personas that make up my identity; I find myself in a sort of team effort with none other than my father-in-law, who like me has blossomed into a huge "baby guy." It's a metamorphosis that has surprised his own adult children. My wife assures me it's a result of the physics of Confucian kinship structure: barred from overt displays of paternal affection to his immediate children, he is liberated with the arrival of a grandchild, who he is no longer directly responsible for. The upshot is that Spot is now getting a good chunk of his care from two men of different generations.

I don't know what it must look like from the outside when an underemployed academic historian (me) and a retired chemical engineer have a polite argument about whether Spot needs a new diaper, or when he and I huddle in the ill-equipped lobby restroom handling a major poopy blowout like two army field surgeons. I regularly grill him over how much sleep Spot had, how much he ate, and inspect their back bedroom to make sure it's being kept up to the highest nap-time standards. But recently Grandpa has completely trumped me: he's come up with big plans to fly kites on the beach next spring. I'm jealous. Three Cigars and a Playdate, anyone?

Of course I jest; I couldn't be happier that Spot has such an involved grandfather (to speak of only one half of the family) -- the more kites, the better, and I'm happy to let grandpa take the lead. I happen to enjoy kites. In fact, the inner boy in me perked up when I first heard this idea. "Wow," I thought, "I haven't done that since I was 10, and it's been way too long." Maybe it's something we can all do, the three of us, out there on the beach when the whitecaps roll in.