Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (74 page)

Ozzie

Oswald Nelson, at thirteen, was the youngest person ever to become an Eagle Scout. Oswald went on to become Ozzie Nelson, the father in
Ozzie and Harriet.
Though the show aired years before the advent of reality television, Harriet was Ozzie’s real wife, Ricky and David were his real sons, and eventually Ricky’s and David’s wives were played by their actual spouses. The current requirements for Eagle Scout make it impossible for anyone to ever beat Ozzie’s record.

Penguins, Again

The female emperor penguin “catches the egg with her wings before it touches the ice,” Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson writes in his book
The Emperor’s Embrace
. She then places the newly laid egg on her feet, to keep it from contact with the frozen ground.

At this point, both penguins will sing in unison, staring at the egg. Eventually, the male penguin will use his beak to lift the egg onto the surface of his own feet, where it will remain until hatching.

Not only does the penguin father endure the inconvenience of walking around with an egg balanced on his feet for months on end, but he also will not eat for the duration.

Quiz

Religion

In 1979, Lauren Chapin, the troubled actress who played Kitty, had a religious conversion. She credits her belief in Jesus with saving her life. After
his
television career ended, Methodist Minister Hugh Beaumont became a Christmas tree farmer.

Sputnik

On October 4, 1957,
Leave It to Beaver
first aired. On that same day, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite. Sputnik I was about the size of a basketball, took roughly ninety-eight minutes to orbit the Earth, and is often credited with escalating the Cold War and launching the U.S.-Soviet space race.

Later, long after
Leave It to Beaver
ended its network run, a rumor persisted for years that Jerry Mathers, the actor who played Beaver, had died at the hands of the Soviet-backed communists in Vietnam. Actress Shelley Winters went so far as to announce it on the
Tonight Show.
But the rumor was false.

Toilets

Leave It to Beaver
was the first television program to show a toilet.

Using Drugs

The presence of a supportive father is essential to helping children avoid drug problems, according to the National Center of Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Lauren Chapin may be a prime example here. Tim Allen would be one, too. Fourteen years after his father died at the hands of a drunk driver, Allen was arrested for dealing drugs and spent two years in prison.

I also fit the gloomy pattern. Though I have so far managed to avoid my father’s relentless problems with alcohol, I wasted about a decade of my life hiding behind marijuana, speed, and various hallucinogens.

Vasectomies

I had a vasectomy in 1994.

Ward’s Father

In an episode titled “Beaver’s Freckles,” we learn that Ward Cleaver had “a hittin’ father,” but little else is ever revealed about Ward’s fictional family. Despite Wally’s constant warning — “Boy, Beav, when Dad finds out, he’s gonna clobber ya!” — Ward does not follow his own father’s example and never hits his sons on the show. This is an example of xenogenesis.

Xenogenesis

(zen′
u
-jen′
u
-sis), n.
Biol.
1. heterogenesis 2. the supposed generation of off-spring completely and permanently different from the parent.

Believing in xenogenesis — though at the time I couldn’t define it, spell it,
or
pronounce it — I changed my mind about having children about four years after my wife’s first suggestion of the idea.

Luckily, this was five years before my vasectomy.

Y-Chromosomes

The Y-chromosome of the father determines a child’s gender, and is unique, because its genetic code remains relatively unchanged as it passes from father to son. The DNA in other chromosomes is more likely to get mixed between generations, in a process called recombination. What this means, apparently, is that boys have a higher likelihood of directly inheriting their ancestral traits.

Once my wife convinced me to risk being a father — this took many years and considerable prodding — my Y-chromosomes took the easy way out. Our only child is a daughter.

Maria, so far, has inherited many of what people say are the Moore family’s better traits — humor, a facility with words, a stubborn determination.

It is yet to be seen what she will do with the negative ones.

Zappa

Similar to the “Beaver died in Vietnam” rumor of the late 1960s, during the late 1990s, Internet discussion lists were filled with assertions that the actor who played Mr. Green Jeans, Hugh “Lumpy” Brannum, was in fact the father of musician Frank Zappa. Brannum, though, had only one son, and that son was neither Frank Zappa nor this author.

Too bad.

Kathleen Norris

 

KATHLEEN NORRIS
’s books of poetry include
Little Girls in Church, How I Came to Drink, My Grandmother’s Piano
, and
The Year of Common Things.
Her nonfiction books include
Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
,
The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith
, and
The Virgin of Bennington.
A Benedictine oblate since the late sixties, Norris’s essays on monasticism have appeared in the
Gettysburg Review, The Hungry Mind Review, The Massachusetts Review
, and the
North Dakota Quarterly.

The Cherub was stationed at the gate of the earthly paradise with his flaming sword to teach us that no one will enter the heavenly paradise who is not pierced with the sword of love.

— St. Francis de Sales,
Treatise on the Love of God

 

Celibacy is a field day for ideologues. Conservative Catholics, particularly those who were raised in the pre-Vatican II church, tend to speak of celibacy as if it were an idealized, angelic state, while feminist theologians such as Uta Ranke-Heinemann say, angrily, that “celibate hatred of sex is hatred of women.” That celibacy constitutes the hatred of sex seems to be a given in the popular mythology of contemporary America, and we need only look at newspaper accounts of sex abuse by priests to see evidence of celibacy that isn’t working. One could well assume that this is celibacy, impure and simple. And this is unfortunate, because celibacy practiced rightly is not at all a hatred of sex; in fact it has the potential to address the sexual idolatry of our culture in a most helpful way.

One benefit of the nearly ten years that I’ve been a Benedictine oblate has been the development of deep friendships with celibate men and women. This has led me to ponder celibacy that works, practiced by people who are fully aware of themselves as sexual beings but who express their sexuality in a celibate way. That is, they manage to sublimate their sexual energies toward another purpose than sexual intercourse and procreation. Are they perverse, their lives necessarily stunted? Cultural prejudice would say yes, but I have my doubts. I’ve seen too many wise old monks and nuns whose lengthy formation in celibate practice has allowed them to incarnate hospitality in the deepest sense. In them, the constraints of celibacy have somehow been transformed into an openness that attracts people of all ages, all social classes. They exude a sense of freedom. They also genderbend, at least in my dreams. Sister Jeremy will appear as a warrior on horseback, Father Robert as a wise old woman tending a fire.

The younger celibates of my acquaintance are more edgy. Still contending mightily with what one friend calls “the raging orchestra of my hormones,” they are more obviously struggling to contain their desires for intimacy, for physical touch, with in the bounds of celibacy. Often they find their loneliness intensified by the incomprehension of others. In a culture that denies the value of their striving, they are made to feel like fools, or worse.

Americans are remarkably tone-deaf when it comes to the expression of sexuality. The sexual formation that many of us receive is like the refrain of an old Fugs’ song: “Why do ya like boobs a lot — ya gotta like boobs a lot.” The jiggle of tits and ass, penis and pectorals, assault us everywhere — billboards, magazines, television, movies. Orgasm becomes just another goal; we undress for success. It’s no wonder that in all this powerful noise, the quiet tones of celibacy are lost; that we have such trouble comprehending what it could mean to dedicate one’s sexual drives in such a way that genital activity and procreation are precluded. But celibate people have taught me that celibacy, practiced rightly, does indeed have something valuable to say to the rest of us. Specifically, they have helped me better appreciate both the nature of friendship, and what it means to be married.

They have also helped me recognize that celibacy, like monogamy, is not a matter of the will disdaining and conquering the desires of the flesh but a discipline requiring what many people think of as undesirable, if not impossible — a conscious form of sublimation. Like many people who came into adulthood during the sexually permissive 1960s, I’ve tended to equate sublimation with repression. But my celibate friends have made me see the light; accepting sublimation as a normal part of adulthood makes me more realistic about human sexual capacities and expression. It helps me to respect the bonds and boundaries of marriage.

Any marriage has times of separation, ill-health, or just plain crankiness, in which sexual intercourse is ill-advised. And it is precisely the skills of celibate friendship — fostering intimacy through letters, conversation, performing mundane tasks together (thus rendering them pleasurable), savoring the holy simplicity of a shared meal, or a walk together at dusk — that can help a marriage survive the rough spots. When you can’t make love physically, you figure out other ways to do it.

Monastic people are celibate for a very practical reason: the kind of community life to which they aspire can’t be sustained if people are pairing off. Even in churches in which the clergy are often married — Episcopal and Russian Orthodox, for example — their monks and nuns are celibate. And while monastic novices may be carried along for a time on the swells of communal spirit, when that blissful period inevitably comes to an end, the loneliness is profound. One gregarious monk in his early thirties told me that just as he thought he’d settled into the monastery, he woke up in a panic one morning, wondering if he’d wake up lonely every morning for the rest of his life.

Another monk I know regards celibacy as an expression of the essential human loneliness, a perspective that helps him as a hospital chaplain, when he is called upon to minister to the dying. I knew him when he was still resisting his celibate call — it usually came out as anger directed toward his abbot and community, more rarely as misogyny — and I was fascinated to observe the process by which he came to accept the sacrifices that a celibate, monastic life requires. He’s easier to be with now; he’s a better friend.

This is not irony so much as grace, that in learning to be faithful to his vow of celibacy, the monk developed his talent for relationship. It’s a common occurence. I’ve seen the demands of Benedictine hospitality — that they receive all visitors as Christ — convert shy young men who fear women into monks who can enjoy their company. I’ve witnessed this process of transformation at work in older monks as well. One friend, who had entered the monastery very young, was, when I first met him, still suffering acutely from an inadequate and harmful sexual formation. Taught that as a monk he should avoid women, he faced a crisis when he encountered women as students and colleagues on a college faculty. Fear of his own sexual desires translated all too easily into misogyny. As a good Benedictine, however, he recognized, prayed over, and explored the possibilities for conversion in this situation. Simply put, he’s over it now. I’m one of many women who count him as a dear friend, including several who became serious scholars because he urged them on.

One reason I enjoy celibates is that they tend to value friendship very highly. And my friendships with celibate men, both gay and straight, give me some hope that men and women don’t live in alternate universes. In 1990s America, this sometimes feels like a countercultural perspective. Male celibacy, in particular, can become radically countercultural if it is perceived as a rejection of the consumerist model of sexuality, a model that reduces women to the sum of her parts. I have never had a monk friend make an insinuating remark along the lines of, “You have beautiful eyes” (or legs, breasts, knees, elbows, nostrils), the usual catalogue of remarks that women grow accustomed to deflecting. A monk is supposed to give up the idea of possessing anything and, in this culture, that includes women.