fatherhood

The Second Third, Week 30: Male Bonding

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

I’ve written a number of Second Third posts about the reasons I need to scale back my work hours and volunteer commitments, but this week drove it home, and gave me a new reason to seek better balance. The past few weeks have been intense at work — a number of major and important projects to bring to a close, a handful of goodbyes to colleagues leaving for new jobs in this time of transition, plus those of us accompanying my boss on his next adventure were supposed to be packing our offices for the move.

Add to that the start of soccer for two of our children, and of daily weightlifting for a third. Then layer on Albertville Friendly City Days this weekend — our KC council sponsors the softball tourney, the beer tent and the pedal-power tractor pull, and appears in the parade. (I have direct involvement with two of these events and at least some vested interest in the success of all of them.) Plus we are trying to organize the annual parish-wide weekend at Camp Lebanon and need to meet with our co-chairs. It’s no wonder I’ve come down with shingles (seriously).

I need to scale back for my family, for the new baby, for my bride, and for my future as a writer. And now I need to do it for my health. But last night, I realized I have yet another reason. I swung by a friend’s place to discuss the fact that I probably didn’t have time to hit the shooting range with him this weekend (and to ask if his family wanted to hand out candy in the parade). He was enjoying the Twins game in his garage, sipping a Summit India Pale Ale. He offered me one, but I was too tired already and had to be up early. We talked about shooting (no), retrieving a deer stand at his brother-in-law’s this weekend (maybe), and other things we ought to get on top of this summer. I told him something I’ve said many times over the past year: “We’re overcommitted. We’ve said ‘yes’ too much.”

“I know,” he said. “You do a lot. It’s good…and it’s bad.”

“It’s bad,” I said.

“You’re needed,” he said.

I don’t know for sure what he meant: needed by the people and organizations we work with and for, or needed by our friends we don’t see. But I know how I took it.

I’ve never had a lot of close male friends, because I’m not a sports nut or a partier; I don’t tell dirty jokes or golf; I don’t build much or have a motorcycle or anything. I love being married, dig my kids, and enjoy reading, writing, music, and faith.

Only now, living in “The Bubble,” I have men around be to whom I can relate, who are walking the same road with the same end in mind. And they like to hunt and fish and enjoy a good beer (and maybe even brew one). They love their wives and balance doting and discipline with their kids. I like these guys. And they deserve more than me swinging by their garage to say I can’t go shooting this weekend.

A while back, another friend was asked by a third if he had seen me around lately. “Nah, I haven’t seen him,” he said. “He’s probably at the church. They volunteer for everything.” That’s gotta change.

Unexpected Visit

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

reunion
crossing campus in the rain, sometimes i duck into mechanical engineering

it’s an excuse really; i don’t much mind the rain

behind the renovations and steel double doors,
down a long narrow hallway, is a room i’ve never entered

a door with frosted glass says plainly: research shop

the professors bear their ponderous brows in silence; the students speak a jargon of deltas
none speak to me as i pause, eye closed, to breathe deeply

the sharp tang of hot curling metal and cutting fluid,
the rumble of carbide biting steel,
the rhythmic thrum of lathe and mill and

i feel my father near: his curling hand-cut leather vest, his broad felt hat and spectacles, his beard gone gray, his calloused hands stained from years of grime and hard labor

my own hands meet softly as in prayer, long studious fingers unmarked, unmarred, so like and unlike his, and i half expect to see him there
when i open my eyes

he’s not — still i look down to see
his fingerprints
all over me

— j. thorp
june 7 2011

The Second Third, Week 29: Expressive Reading

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

Tonight was six-year-old Trevor’s night to lead us in prayer. He opened with an Old Testament reading from our Children’s Bible and did an admirable job: it was chock full of Hebrew names and ancient places and Biblical expressions like “The LORD’s anger was kindled against them.” He navigated it all with remarkable patience and skill, his concentration was absolute — and he almost didn’t sound like himself, since (when he reads his own books) he is quite expressive. With less difficult books, already he is mastering the skill of reading just ahead of his voice with his eyes to pick up on the cues in the text: Is there a question ahead? An exclamation? Is the character frustrated? Scared? Excited?

I, too, struggle to read expressively, mostly because until recently, it had been a long time since I’ve done so — years, in fact, since I’ve read aloud even a classic Dr. Seuss.

Then this spring I picked up The Little Prince, which I had never read before, and decided on a whim to read it to our brood, a bit to a time, after supper. It went over well with all four Thorplets, but although I had the notion of providing voices to the handful of wonderful characters who populate the book, I found it impossible, primarily because much of the time I was to emotionally, uh…engaged…to do so.

Next I tried an old favorite, Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, figuring a familiar tale might be suited to a more dramatic telling — but although I recalled the story and the characters, I quickly found the structure, style, and syntax of LeGuin’s sentences to require a great deal of concentration. At times, I had to back up and start sentences over!

I find that the more I read to the kids, the more I enjoy it. We finished the LeGuin’s book last week and will no doubt return to Earthsea again soon — but in the interim, I’ve resurrected a ghost of my own childhood, outdoor humorist Patrick F. McManus’s The Grasshopper Trap. For years growing up, every time a new McManus book came out (or a new edition of Outdoor Life magazine arrived), Mom or Dad, Jill or I, would read after supper. The first story in the book, “The Skunk Ladder,” is a classic, and the kids were quickly in stitches and begging for another. I remember these characters, too — Crazy Eddie Muldoon, Retch Sweeney, the old woodsman Rancid Crabtree, Pat’s sister the Troll — and tonight, after dinner, I began to have a little fun with voices. It was great fun, and good practice, too: in my Second Third, I intend to read aloud more often, to the older kids, to the new baby, and God willing, the grandkids. I need to hone my skills if I’ve ever going to tackle something like, of I dunno…The Hobbit?

The Second Third, Week 26: The Roots of the Family Tree

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

This particular Second Third post is 90 percent inspiration and 10 percent shameless self-promotion in the form of an opportunity to cross-promote a post I wrote two months ago — a post that I loved, but according to Blogger stat-keeping technology, was largely unread.

Back on St. Patrick’s Day, I posted a piece explaining precisely how Irish I am, and in what ways. (Go on, read it!) I talked about an ancestor who used to go looking for Catholics to fight. Dad reminded me over Easter that this ancestor supposedly became sheriff of Tuscola County, Michigan, during Prohibition, however, and supposedly ignored the moonshining operation of one of my mom’s ancestors in return for a package or two left in the culvert up the road from the farm. Mom’s family was 100 percent Polish Catholic, which just goes to show that a drink between adversaries can occasionally sew the seeds of peace and religious tolerance.

All at once, we fell to googling ancestral names. My sister pulled out a handwritten family tree she’d worked on with my Grandma Thorp, and I quickly turned up a few graves in the cemetery records of rural Tuscola County, then some old obits. Pretty soon we had learned that the sheriff was likely a deputy sheriff and was probably a brother to our brawling ancestor Dad had named at first. We also learned that the particular branch of the family we were investigating appeared to have moved in fits and starts to “the Thumb” of Michigan from a particular area of Ontario, Canada, and that their surname, Hutchinson, may trace back to English royalty in the Middle Ages.

This lit a little fire under us due to a pair of old stories passed down among the Thorps: first, that we are somehow distantly related to an English Queen (Victoria is what I heard as a boy), and second, that a woman among our ancestors was alone in her cabin in the wilds of Canada, and killed an attacking bear with the butcher knife from her kitchen. An hour or so on the internet began to suggest that these stories could, in fact, be true!

We all have great stories and intriguing twists among the roots of our family trees, a few of which I remember (vaguely) and hope to verify:

  • My Grandpa Thorp was stationed in the Philippines, I think, at the end of WWII, and was crawling through the underbrush when he found himself beside the largest snake he had ever seen. He didn’t dare fall behind his crawling companions, and his heart raced as he prepared to encounter the head of the serpent, which appeared to be hidden in the foliage ahead…until he realized it was just the snake’s massive shed skin!
  • My Dziadzi (JAH-jee, or Grandpa Galubenski) was stationed on the Aleutian Islands in Alaska during WWII and was the company bugler, though he couldn’t play. He paid another guy with cigarettes to cover for him!
  • We had always thought my great-dziadzi, Bronislaw (BRONE-ee-swaff, aka Brony, Bruno or Brownie) Galubenski had come to America from Poland, but according the digitized documents on Ellis Island’s web site, he seems to have come by way of Russia, where they had been living. (Also, he may have been a bootlegger…)
  • We are rumored to have some American Indian blood in us; that, coupled with the fact that some Pacific Northwest Thorpes (with an “e”) traced themselves to us, has fueled speculation that I may, indeed, be related to the great Native American athlete Jim Thorpe, who, I just now learned, was given the name Jacobus Franciscus Thorp, was baptized Catholic, and was said to have French and Irish blood. Interesting…
  • One of my great(-great?)-grandfathers on my dad’s side rolled into Michigan from New York state in his 20s to start a grocery in the Thumb. He stopped by a local farm, introduced himself, stayed for supper, then stayed the night. In the morning, he told the farmer he was starting a business and was in need of a wife. He asked the farmer if he might part with his oldest daughter (age 13), and the farmer reckoned he would — ask, and ye shall receive. According to all I’ve heard, they had a long marriage and many children!
  • At Yale, a Polish language professor told me she had never heard of the name Galubenski (Americanized pronunciation: Gal-yoo-BEN-skee; Polish pronunciation should be more like Gah-loo-BEHN-skee). It’s a style of name that should have a meaning; you should be able to see Polish words or roots in it, but they aren’t there. Within our family, at least three different spellings of Galubenski have evolved based on how my great aunts and uncles were taught to write it (by grade-school teachers who didn’t speak Polish and just sounded it out as best they could, I think): Galubenski, Galubinski, and Galbenski. Googling any of these names turns up no results in the old country. These facts make me wonder if, in fact, the original misspelling may have happened on Ellis Island. Perhaps a more common Polish name, like Golubiewski (pronounced roughly Go-lum-BYEV-skee) was misheard and thus misspelled?
There are others, no doubt, which I will add as I can. The point is, our histories are rich with story and tradition, humor and adventure, if we can uncover it. My grandfathers and maternal grandmother have passed away, but in my Second Third, I have stories to gather!

There Be Dragons

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment
Just returned from the movie in the trailer above, There Be Dragons, based on the early life of St. Josemaria Escriva, who founded Opus Dei (God’s Work). This post is not a review, and contains no plot spoilers — but lots of people in our parish are interested in the film and want to know how “strong” a PG-13 it is, and I wanted to capture a few thoughts before I lose them.

I would rate it a solid PG-13. It is violent and emotionally intense at times, and characters are juxtaposed to show virtue and moral ambiguity. Numerous people die in battle, and others die from assassination, murder, suicide, illness, and (thankfully) natural causes. Most of the deaths are not dwelt upon, however, there are a few relatively brief but bloody scenes. There is no nudity, relatively little sexuality (implied or actual), especially for a PG-13 movie in 2011, and a sprinkling of strong language throughout (it is a war movie, after all). Our 13-year-old, Brendan, will see it tomorrow with a friend of ours and her son. Our almost-11-year-old, Gabe, wants to see it, too, but despite his desire to be a priest, and the film’s beautiful portrayal of the priestly vocation, he will wait until we can rent it and I can watch and discuss it with him, pausing as needed.

I knew very little about Fr. Escriva, Opus Dei, and relatively little about the Spanish Civil War, and yet followed everything well enough. The structure of the movie, which features a handful of complex relationships between people shown at different ages and times, and used flashbacks and a present-day narrator to convey the story, can be a little disorienting, but again, I followed well enough. I was struck early on that this is a film shot in an old way: somehow it looks to me like a classic film of the 1960s, and some of the scenes (particularly of the main characters as children) seem more deliberately acted, almost theatrical. It occurs to me that this may help convey the sense of a young boy’s memories, but I will admit, I noticed it as film-making (assuming it was intentional).

Two final thoughts:

  • First, another friend at the same showing said he enjoyed watching it so soon after Blessed John Paul II’s beatification. I missed the beatification coverage, but not long ago, listened to the JPII biography Witness to Hope, and you can definitely see parallels between the lives and priesthoods of the late Fathers Escriva and Wojtyla.
  • Second, there is a powerful scene following a heartbreaking act of violence in which Fr. Escriva teaches his followers how close the edge truly is, and how any one of us might slip into darkness and violence. On the heels of Bin Laden’s death, that scene was particularly thought-provoking to me.

The reviews I’ve seen for this movie have been mostly mediocre to terrible.* I thought it was a very good movie, but I’m Catholic and had some idea what I was getting into and what I hoped to get out of it. See it!

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*The USCCB has a complete review of the film online, which may also help parents decide which kids to take. I find they are more conservative than me, and they suggest that older teens could see it, so I think we’re in the ballpark…