Excerpt of Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon
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Below is the complete text of an essay from Chabon's collection
The Hand on My Shoulder
I didn't play golf, and he had never smoked marijuana. I was a nail chewer,
inclined to brood, and dubious of the motives of other people. He was big and
placid, uniformly kind to strangers and friends, and never went anywhere without
whistling a little song. I minored in philosophy. He fell asleep watching
television. He fell asleep in movie theaters, too, and occasionally, I
suspected, while driving. He had been in the navy during World War II, which
taught him, he said, to sleep whenever he could. I, still troubled no doubt by
perplexing questions of ontology and epistemology raised during my brief
flirtation with logical positivism ten years earlier, was an insomniac. I was
also a Jew, of a sort; he was, when required, an Episcopalian.
He was not a big man, but his voice boomed, and his hands were meaty, and in
repose there was something august about his heavy midwestern features: pale blue
eyes that, in the absence of hopefulness, might have looked severe; prominent,
straight nose and heavy jowls that, in the absence of mirth, might have seemed
imperious and disapproving. Mirth and hopefulness, however, were never absent
from his face. Some people, one imagines, may be naturally dauntless and buoyant
of heart, but with him, good spirits always seemed, far more admirably, to be
the product of a strict program of self-improvement in his youth — he believed,
like most truly modest men, in the absolute virtue of self-improvement — which
had wrought deep, essential changes in a nature inclined by birth to the darker
view and gloominess that cropped up elsewhere in the family tree. He didn't seem
to be happy out of some secret knowledge of the essential goodness of the world,
or from having fought his way through grief and adversity to a hard-won sense of
his place in it; they were simple qualities, his good humor and his optimism,
unexamined, automatic, stubborn. I never failed to take comfort in his presence.
The meaning of divorce will elude us as long as we are blind to the meaning
of marriage, as I think at the start we must all be. Marriage seems — at least
it seemed to an absurdly young man in the summer of 1987, standing on the
sun-drenched patio of an elegant house on Lake Washington — to be an activity,
like chess or tennis or a rumba contest, that we embark upon in tandem while
everyone who loves us stands around and hopes for the best. We have no inkling
of the fervor of their hope, nor of the ways in which our marriage, that
collective endeavor, will be constructed from and burdened with their love.
When I look back — always an unreliable procedure, I know — it seems to have
been a case of love at first sight. I met him, his wife, and their yellow beach
house all on the same day. It was a square-pillared bungalow, clapboard and
shake, the color of yellow gingham, with a steep pitched roof and a porch that
looked out over a frigid but tranquil bay of brackish water. His wife, like him
in the last years of a vigorous middle age, had been coming to this stretch of
beach since early in her girlhood, and for both her and her daughter, whom I was
shortly to marry, it was more heavily and richly layered with memories,
associations, artifacts, and stories than any place any member of my own family
had lived since we had left Europe seventy years before. Everything about this
family was like that. My future mother-in-law lived in the house in Seattle
where she had been born. My father-in-law had grown up down the road in
Portland. They had met at the University of Washington. Everyone they knew, they
had known for longer than I'd been alive. All the restaurants they favored had
been in business for years, they were charter members of their country club, and
in some cases they did business with the sons of tradesmen they had dealt with
in the early days of their marriage. A journey through the drawers, closets, and
cabinets of their house in town yielded a virtual commercial and social history
of Seattle, in the form of old matchboxes, rulers, pens, memo pads, napkins,
shot glasses, candy tins, golf tees, coat hangers; years and years' worth of
lagniappes, giveaways, souvenirs, and mementos bearing the names, in typefaces
of four decades, of plumbing supply companies, fuel oil dealers, newlyweds, dry
cleaners, men and women celebrating birthdays and anniversaries.
From Manhood For Amateurs by Michael Chabon. Copyright 2009 by Michael Chabon. Published by Harper. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
