Manhood for Amateurs

The Omega Glory

I was reading, in an issue of Discover, about the Clock of the Long Now. Have you heard of this thing? It is going to be a system of gigantic mechanical computers, slow, simple, and ingenious, marking the hour, the day, the year, the century, the millennium, and the precession of the equinoxes with a huge orrery to keep track of the immense ticking of the six inner planets on their great orbital mainspring. The Clock of the Long Now will stand at least sixty feet tall and cost tens of millions of dollars, and when it’s completed, its designers and supporters — among them visionary engineer Danny Hillis, a pioneer in the concept of massively parallel processing, Whole Earth mahatma Stewart Brand, and British composer Brian Eno (one of my household gods) — plan to hide it in a cave in Great Basin National Park in Nevada, a day’s hard walking from anywhere. Oh, and it’s going to run for ten thousand years. That is about as long a span as separates us from the first makers of pottery, among the oldest technologies we have. Ten thousand years is twice as old as the pyramid of Cheops, nearly twice as old as that mummified body found preserved in the Tyrolean Alps, one of the oldest mummies ever uncovered. The Clock of the Long Now is being designed to thrive under regular human maintenance during the whole of that span, though during periods when no one is around to tune it, the giant clock will contrive to adjust itself. But even if the Clock of the Long Now fails to last that long, even if it breaks down after half or a quarter or a tenth of that span, this mad contraption will already have long since fulfilled its purpose. Indeed, the Clock may accomplish its greatest task before it is ever finished, perhaps without ever being built at all. The point of the Clock of the Long Now is not to measure out the passage into their unknown future of the race of creatures that built it. The point of the Clock is to revive and restore the whole idea of the Future, to get us thinking about the Future again, to the same degree we used to, if not in quite the same way, and to reintroduce the idea that we don’t just bequeath the future — though we do, whether we think about it or not. We also, in the very broadest sense of the first-person-plural pronoun, inherit it.

Strictly speaking, the Sex Pistols were right: There is no future, for you or for me. By definition, the future does not exist. “The Future,” whether you capitalize it or not, is always only an idea, a proposal, a scenario, a sketch for a mad contraption that may or may not work. The Future is a story we tell, a narrative of hope, dread, or wonder. And it’s a story that we’ve been pretty much living without for a while now.

Ten thousand years from today: Can you imagine that day? Okay, but do you? Do you believe the Future is going to happen? If the Clock works the way it’s supposed to — if it lasts — do you believe there will be a human being around to witness, let alone mourn, its passing; to appreciate its accomplishment, its faithfulness, its immense antiquity? What about five thousand years from now or even five hundred? Can you extend the horizon of your expectations for our world, for our complex of civilizations and cultures, beyond the lifetime of your own children, of the next two or three generations?

I was surprised when I read about the Clock of the Long Now at how long it had been since I had given any thought to the state of the world ten thousand years hence. At one time I was a frequent visitor to that imaginary mental locale. And I don’t mean merely that I regularly encountered the Future in the pages of science-fiction novels or comic books, or when watching a TV show like The Jetsons (1962) or a movie like Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970). The story of the Future was told to me when I was growing up, not only by popular art and media but by public and domestic architecture, industrial design, school textbooks, theme parks, and public institutions from museums to government agencies. I heard the story of the Future when I looked at the space-ranger profile of the Studebaker Avanti, at the burnerless range top of a Jenn-Air stove, at Tomorrowland through the portholes of the Disneyland monorail, at the tumbling plastic counters of my father’s Seth Thomas Speed Read clock. I can remember writing a report in sixth grade on hydroponics; if you had tried to tell me then that by 2005 we would still be growing our vegetables in dirt, you would have broken my heart.

Even thirty years after its purest expression on the covers of pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and, supremely, at the New York World’s Fair of 1939, the collective cultural narrative of the Future remained largely an optimistic one of the impending blessings of technology and the benevolent computer-assisted meritocracy of Donald Fagen’s “fellows with compassion and vision.” But by the early seventies, it was not all farms under the sea and family vacations on Titan. Sometimes the Future could be a total downer. If nuclear holocaust didn’t wipe everything out, then humanity would be enslaved to computers, by the ineluctable syllogisms of “the Machine.” My childhood dished up a series of grim cinematic prognostications best exemplified by the Hestonian trilogy that began with the first Planet of the Apes (1968) and continued through The Omega Man (1971) and Soylent Green (1973). Images of future dystopia were rife in rock albums of the day, as on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (1974) and Rush’s 2112 (1976), and the futures presented by seventies writers of science fiction such as John Brunner tended to be unremittingly or wryly bleak.

In the aggregate, stories of the Future presented an enchanting ambiguity. The other side of the marvelous Jetsons future might be a story of worldwide corporate-authoritarian techno-tyranny, but the other side of a postapocalyptic mutational nightmare landscape like that depicted in The Omega Man was a landscape of semi-barbaric splendor and unfettered (if dangerous) freedom to roam, such as I found in the pages of Jack Kirby’s classic adventure comic book Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth! (1972–76). That ambiguity and its enchantment, the shifting tension between the bright promise and the menace of the Future, was in itself a kind of story about the ways, however freakish or tragic, in which humanity (and, by implication, American culture and its values, however freakish and tragic) would continue in spite of it all. Ee’d plebnista, intoned the devolved Yankees in the Star Trek episode “The Omega Glory” (1968); they had somehow managed to hold on to and venerate as sacred gobbledygook the preamble to the Constitution, norkohn forkohn perfectunun. All they needed was a Captain Kirk to come and add a little interpretive water to the freeze-dried document, and the American way of life would flourish again.

I don’t know what happened to the Future. It’s as if we have lost our ability or our will to envision anything beyond the next hundred years or so, as if we lack the fundamental faith that there will be any future at all beyond that not too distant date. Or maybe we stopped talking about the Future around the time that, with its microchips and its twenty-four-hour news cycles, it arrived. Some days when you pick up the newspaper, it seems to have been co-written by J. G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, weather control, pharmaceutical mood engineering, rapid species extinction, U.S. presidents controlled by boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television: Some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century were a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother extending it. Meanwhile, the dwindling number of items remaining on that list — interplanetary colonization, sentient computers, quasi-immortality of consciousness through brain download or transplant, a global government (fascist or enlightened) — have been represented and re-represented so many hundreds of times in films, in novels, and on television that they have come to seem, paradoxically, already attained, already known, lived with, and left behind. Past, in other words.

This is the paradox that lies at the heart of our loss of belief or interest in the Future, which has in turn produced a collective cultural failure to imagine that Future, any future, beyond the rim of a couple of centuries or the void of planetary catastrophe. The Future was represented so often and for so long in the terms and characteristic styles of so many historical periods from, say, Jules Verne forward that at some point the idea of the Future — along with the cultural appetite for it — came itself to feel like something historical, outmoded, no longer viable or attainable. One possible turning point here was Star Wars (1977), with its setting in the remote past, its western gunfights and World War I dogfights, its deliberate evocation of the styles and conventions of Metropolis (1927) and old Flash Gordon serials. After Star Wars, every cinematic Future has drawn heavily on the Futures imagined by previous historical eras. Even what is perhaps our era’s most heavily subscribed, culturally predominant narrative of the Future — the crypto-Christian vision of the End presented in the “Left Behind” series — is derived from imagery and narrative, some of which is by now almost two thousand years old.

If you ask my older son about the Future, he essentially thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says — floods, storms, desertification — but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his next birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange, and bewildering book. If you had told me when I was his age that a kid of the future would feel that way — and what’s more, that he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings — it would have been even worse than hearing that his world would offer no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jet packs for everyone. That truly would have broken my heart.

When I told my son about the Clock of the Long Now he listened very carefully, and we looked at the pictures on the Long Now Foundation’s Web site. “Will there really be people then, Dad?” he said. “Yes,” I told him without hesitation, “there will.” I don’t know if that’s true, any more than do Danny Hillis and his colleagues, with the beating clocks of their hopefulness and the orreries of their imaginations. But in having children — in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world — parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now. They are betting on their children, and their children after them, and theirs beyond them, all the way down the line from now to the 130th century. If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet and that they and their grandchildren and their grandchildren’s grandchildren will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free. And I don’t see how anybody can force me to pay up on my bet if, in the end, I turn out to be wrong.

Getting Out

I met David Foster Wallace only once, at UCLA in October 2004, when we appeared together with a number of other writers at a fund-raiser for the Kerry campaign. I doubt we exchanged more than twenty-nine words, none of them memorable, at least by me. He struck me as shy and uncomfortable in the setting: in the big backstage area at Royce Hall, a whole bunch of people milling around, Cheney debating Edwards on a television in a corner and Wallace left to himself, getting ready to go out and, at least by virtue of his presence in front of a largish audience, endorse the doomed ticket. In my memory, he is wearing the trademark always unlikely bandanna, but this image may be the influence of too many author photos. The political nature of the event and Wallace’s participation in it seemed to trouble him, I thought. Not that he wanted anything other than to see Bush defeated. He just seemed suspicious of the whole enterprise — a twenty-first century presidential election — and of his own role as a putative agent therein. The kindness and politeness he showed to me and my wife was exemplary, but I admit I was intimidated by him. If you had read his formidable work, especially Infinite Jest (which I had failed twice to finish), then it was hard, at least for me, not to feel that Wallace easily could have made more out of you, found more to say on your behalf and by way of explanation of you, than you had so far managed to do for yourself. I felt that he was disappointed in me, or maybe in the fact that I evidently cared so much what he thought about me. I felt in the two minutes that fate allotted me to pass in the company of David Foster Wallace, I had somehow let him down. Indeed, when he followed me on that evening’s program, coming onstage to read to us (a story, as I recall, or anyway, a piece of a story, about a weird boy’s awful birthday party), the first thing he said into the microphone was something like “Oh, great, another white man with glasses.” Maybe he was disappointed in us both.

So I did not know David Foster Wallace. I thought of him as a peer, but one removed from me by a number of coextensive distances, of space, of aesthetic, of temperament. I had found intense pleasure in his essays and would have been prepared to defend his work as crucial if not signal to our time. But his death has been the focus of my thoughts for the past few days, as if, in a happier world, I had been given the opportunity to know him as a friend. I keep coming back to him in that last moment, hour, day, year of his life, trying to understand and to see and, in some awful way, to imagine the finite series of thoughts that led him to take his own life.

My first impulse is to assert that suicide is an idea alien to my way of thinking. I guess that’s mostly a matter of wiring and fortune. So far, knock wood, I have not suffered enough from any hurt, or sunk deeply enough into any hole, to wish that my life, my precious life, were over. At my worst moments, in the darkest, rawest hours nearest to perdition, I have always found myself comforted by a cool voice inside me whispering that nothing, not even unbearable sorrow, lasts forever. I have that idiot optimism that is one quarter ruthless and one half mindless: a dangerous and, in its own way, often fatal trait. And yet the image of suicide fills my work from the first novel to the last. Self-interment, self-negation, and the hope, illusory or certain, of escape from the pain of life make up a central thematic thread in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The plot of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union turns entirely on the mystery of self-murder. One of the heroes of Gentlemen of the Road is almost habitually prevented from killing himself only by his hemp pipe and the careful management of his best friend, and in Wonder Boys, Grady Tripp has never outrun the shadow of the suicidal horror writer August Van Zorn. I keep coming back to the subject, to a degree that strikes me now, given my supposed alienation from the act of suicide, as hard to explain.

My wife suffers from bipolar disorder, which from time to time has given her ready access to the pain and hopelessness required to cast a comparative luster on the prospect of oblivion. When she gets low, I always imagine her mind as a child folding itself inside one of those three-panel department-store mirrors, past and future reaching off in an endless, dim, identical prospect of days, with her own head always right smack there in the way. In early 2005 she posted an entry to her then-blog in which she very calmly and methodically laid out the nature of bipolar II, its burdens and unexpected benefits. In this post she cited twice a statistic alleging that one in four people diagnosed with bipolar II eventually kills him- or herself.

I was in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the time, in a low mood myself (no disrespect to Little Rock) because it was gray and chilly, and George W. Bush was still and apparently forever president of the United States, and I was alone in Little Rock (sorry, Little Rock), and far from home. I had been over to visit the then-new Clinton presidential library, where they had two electoral maps showing the vast swaths of blue that went for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, a sight that filled me with wonder and despair. Then I went back to my grim hotel room in the rain. The world was all gray sky and pressboard veneer and the map of Everything was always going to be red, red, red. I tried to call home, but no one was there. So, as if to reach her, I went online and checked my wife’s blog.

I was shocked by what I found there, and upset. I called her cell phone and reached her, but she was in the middle of seven different things, driving the car while wiping someone’s nose while running to an appointment while talking to me. She sounded fine; she was being brave, handling the job, doing fine without me. I hung up feeling that I must have been overreacting to the post. I persuaded myself that in my own funk, I had been reading in, imagining, the hints of suicide in her post, or that if such hints were there, she could not really mean them to be taken seriously. She had a well-known tendency to exaggerate states of outrage and emotion. Surely she was only fooling around, I told myself, albeit in a dark vein. That is the way you tend to think when, like me, your optimism is of the idiot variety. It did not occur to me that suicide was itself a kind of final and unanswerable exaggeration. Surely we have no way of knowing that things cannot possibly get any worse, any more than we can know for certain that the situation will not — perhaps very soon — improve. To declare one or the other by taking one’s own life is a patent exaggeration unsupported by any evidence: a lie. And yet it remains, by its nature, irrefutable.

When I returned the next day from my trip, I learned to my horror that my wife had come very near to swallowing a bottle of pills the night before. Only a middle-of-the-night phone call from a friend in Israel who had read the blog post and who insisted — staying on the line to see that she did it — that my wife call her psychiatrist and wake him up interrupted the involute downward flow of Ayelet’s mood to the bottom. This friend was one of several people, including a number of strangers on the Internet, who called or e-mailed her with some sense of urgency to see if she was okay. These people had a clear enough view of the world to understand how seriously my wife’s fooling around ought to be taken.

Who knows why it came upon her and why it departed? Serotonin, hormones, neurons, the light. Childhood, puberty, childbirth, the heavy passing of time. All explanations are cliché, as is the assertion that there can finally be no explanation. In the end I can only try to make sense of my wife’s depression and the death of David Foster Wallace on my own terms, for my own purposes; to grasp or articulate to myself what my fiction has been saying to the world all along.

The world, like our heads, was meant to be escaped from. They are prisons, world and head alike. “I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose,” Wallace once told an interviewer, “is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.” The purpose or the blessing of that kind of access — which I have often thought of and characterized by means of the word escape—is ultimately to increase our sense of shared experience, of shared suffering, rapture, nostalgia, or disgust, with our fellow humans, whose thoughts and emotions are otherwise locked away. And yet that gift of access, for all its marvelous power to console the lonely and to dislodge the complacent, is a kind of trick, an act of Houdiniesque illusion. When the vision fades and the colored smoke disperses, we are left alone and marooned again in our skulls with nothing but our longing for connection. That longing drives writers and readers to seek the high, small window leading out, to lower the makeshift ropes of knotted bedsheet that stories and literature afford, and make a break for it. When that window can’t be found, or will no longer serve, or when it inevitably turns out to be only paint on the unchanging, impenetrable backdrop of our heads, small wonder if the longing seeks another, surer means of egress.

Radio Silence

Not long before it went off the air forever, KFRC-FM switched its format to Greatest Hits of the ’70s and ’80s, a change that left me feeling oddly freaked. Before the switch, KFRC had been a standard oldies station playing pop, rock, and soul hits spanning the era from the middle to late 1950s to the middle 1970s, roughly from Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry to the O’Jays and Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac. But the core of the playlist was pure sixties: the British Invasion and Motown, book-ended by the Four Seasons and Sly Stone. The switch in format had been covered in the local press, but somehow I had missed it. The change itself, the disproportionate share suddenly given over to music of the seventies, was subtle enough to elude me for a little while. And then one day I realized that KFRC was playing a song by Phil Collins, and I felt a weird minor grief.

The old format hadn’t offered a revelatory or even, I suppose, very interesting playlist. If you listened to KFRC a lot — and I still listen to broadcast music on a conventional radio all the time, every day, in my car and in my house — you tended to hear the same two or three hundred songs over and over and over. They played not the big hits but the famous hits, aural monuments such as Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” and Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” tracks that are no longer even really songs at all so much as logos of the decade that produced them. The station rarely played wondrous freaks of the charts (say, “Something in the Air,” by Thunderclap Newman, which reached No. 37), minor hits such as the Box Tops’ “Soul Deep” (No. 18), or sixties hits by groups like the Who, more likely to be encountered on stations with a classic-rock format. Certain tracks seemed to fall randomly into intense rotation, and you would hear the Blues Image’s “Ride Captain Ride” (a fine song, I hasten to add, with excellent support from future Iron Butterfly guitarist Mike Pinera) almost every day for months on end, often at roughly the same time of day.

It’s hard to see why I should have found the format switch so disturbing. I own far more great pop music of the sixties (and of the seventies, for that matter) than KFRC ever played, and thanks to MP3s and my iPod, I can listen to it whenever and wherever I want to. What difference does it make if there’s nowhere on the FM dial to hear Herman’s Hermits sing “I’m Into Something Good”? There. Three mouse clicks and I’m listening to Peter Noone. Two more clicks and I’m listening to the superior pure-British pop stylings of minor geniuses the Honeybus, who never charted in the U.S. and may never have been heard on any radio station here ever. Big deal. So why, on the day when I dialed in to 99.7 and heard “Sussudio” and had the creeping realization that the shift had taken place weeks ago without my ever quite noticing, did I feel that vertiginous despair?

I’m old. That was my first thought. I’m so old that a hit song from a year when I was already in graduate school now qualifies as an oldie. But that wasn’t really the source of my unease. The length of time required to coat a hit song with a layer of oldie dust has always been breathtakingly short. When George Lucas’s American Graffiti came out in 1973, the oldest number on its sound track was Bill Haley and the Comets’ “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock,” and that song sounded utterly ancient to my nine-year-old ears. Every song featured in American Graffiti — as with the fashions, the hair, the automotive styles, the whole world the movie depicted — felt as distant, as removed from me as Laurel and Hardy or the Andrews Sisters, though in fact it was set only ten years before its release. There may be no span of years longer than that which separates your parents’ youth from your own. I heard Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” the other day, and I could easily imagine, could feel, just how remote the world of that song and Purple Rain (about as distant from my eight-year-old as Bill Haley was from me) must sound and look to a kid today.

My mother loved American Graffiti, and it was in her car, in her memories, and with her generation (she was born in 1942) that I first encountered the concept of the golden oldie. My mother liked to listen to a D.C. station, WMOD (“Washington’s Goldmine”). The playlist — as I dimly recall — derived entirely from the era bracketed by Big Joe Turner and Lesley Gore: doo-wop, rockabilly, girl groups, surf music, pre-Motown soul, novelty weepers like “Tell Laura I Love Her,” country hits like Carl Smith’s “There She Goes,” and anything that constituted what was then known as classic rock and roll. “Runaround Sue,” by Dion & the Belmonts (1961), was my mother’s all-time favorite. We used to hear it sometimes on WMOD, and she always got a certain look when it came on, something between surprise and reverie.

All those songs and, even more, their familiarity and evident importance to my mother — the associations and memories they stirred, the good feelings they engendered — came to mean something to me. Their lyrics, their instrumentation, the outmoded crooning or falsettos of their vocalists, their monaural shimmer, became part of my understanding of the era that had produced them, and of my understanding of my mother, and of the way she saw and talked about her life. Most important, they alerted me to the mysterious power of the chance interaction between radio and memory.

My earliest memory not supported or supplanted by a photograph is of a song on the radio. I was with my mother in some kind of doctor’s office in downtown Phoenix (and therefore not yet four years old). We were downtown, because in the song that was playing on the radio in the doctor’s office, a lady was singing about what a great thing it was to go downtown, where the lights were much brighter and you could forget all your cares. Things will be great, this lady promised, when you’re downtown. I looked around. I remember a fearsome nurse in white stockings, glass jars with chrome lids, a maternal promise of lunch in a restaurant after the appointment. I think I was just old enough to understand that there was and could be no direct connection between my physical whereabouts and the place referred to by the song that I was hearing on the radio. It was coincidence. I knew that. But that fortuity invested the moment with a shock and a magic that reverberated down the next forty years. When I hear Petula Clark on the radio now, if the circumstances are right — the station AM, the speakers tinny, the volume low — I feel this wave of something old and powerful flowing through my chest and my belly, a bodily remembering of that crucial early-childhood compound of anxiety and the promise of a treat.

Sometimes a song happens to come on the radio and imbue a moment that way, with its aptness. More often there is no obvious thematic connection between a song on the radio and the memory that it somehow or other comes to preserve, between the iridescent bubble of the music and the air of the past that it randomly traps. It’s simply the magic of an accidental conjunction, a flitting moment and the resin drop of a pop song transformed by luck and alchemy into amber. The radiant shins of a girl named Jennifer Dagenais, for example, as she oiled herself with Bain de Soleil at the Phelps Luck swimming pool in the summer of 1978 are retained in the opening riff of “Hold the Line” by Toto. The Megginsons, and my fondness for them, and the vinegar smell of a bushel of apples we had just picked at Sewell’s Orchard, and all of us crammed into their rattletrap orange VW Beetle, is restored to me for some reason by a forgotten Three Dog Night hit, “The Show Must Go On” (1974).

No medium is as sensuously evocative of the past as radio. No other medium deploys that shocking full-immersion power of random remembrance. But for the power to have its maximum impact, the process of remembering has to be random at both ends. Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” is playing over the PA in a Gap store at the Mall in Columbia on an unremarkable afternoon when you’re sixteen, and then one day you’re forty and driving to get your kid from nursery school and the song comes on, and there in your minivan you can smell the chlorine from the mall’s fountain, and hear your best friend telling you about Pauline Kael’s review of Last Tango in Paris as reprinted in Reeling, and see the vast blue wall of denim before you, and remember the world in which Bill Murray was God and Jimmy Carter was president and in which, at the Gap, they sold nothing but Levi’s. The song has to take you by surprise, catch you when your guard is down, when you aren’t expecting it — ideally, when you aren’t even listening to the radio at all. A bright little piece of your life passes you by in a car with the windows rolled down, wells up in the pain-relief aisle of a Rite-Aid. That kind of chance encounter can’t happen as readily on an iPod you’ve programmed yourself.

The sense of mourning I felt when I realized that KFRC had changed its format was not over the music — the music is all there, at ninety-nine cents a download — but over this sudden sealing off, as if by avalanche or detonation, of an entire network of tunnels, secret passageways, into the past. Into history as an everyday thing that happens between visits to the doctor and rides home from picking apples. That is, I was suffering from a sudden loss of memory. Most of my own pop history was still well represented on the updated KFRC playlist. But the process of radio oblivion is inexorable and steady. Just as I didn’t notice at first when a huge swath of the 1960s pop charts disappeared from the KFRC playlist, so I hadn’t noticed when the hits of the fifties had disappeared — exiled, I suppose, to one of those forlorn AM stations that used to play only Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney and Dick Haymes, the last stop before those songs disappear entirely from the landscape of everyday memory, along with the people whose history they preserve, in luminous fragments. And now WBIG, the station that succeeded WMOD as the home of oldies in Washington, D.C., has modified its format, as did New York’s storied WCBS before that, and KFRC is off the air, shriveled down to a tiny streaming audio link on the KCBS Web site. “The audience is getting older,” explained the Clear Channel executive responsible for the change in programming at WBIG, “and going away.” Now I know how I will know when I am gone.

Normal Time

We’ve had a run of crazy stuff going on around here lately, culminating (for the moment) with global economic collapse and my mother-in-law’s suffering an injury that looks as if it may permanently alter the contour and quality of her life, as well as the whole family’s — a pair of calamities that followed on a series of unpleasant surprises, diagnoses, minor crises, the dog undergoing a “spinal stroke,” professional setbacks, sorrows in the second grade, the loss or destruction of many objects of value, a brutal twenty-month-long presidential campaign, and all the usual, unusual alarums and disruptions that result when six people and a Bernese mountain dog, requiring various mental, emotional, and physical accommodations, therapies, and treatments, conduct an ongoing experiment in measuring mutual interference in one another’s reality distortion fields by sharing a house in Berkeley, California, a place that may, at any moment — which will, given the way things have been going lately — be destroyed by a massive once-a-millennium earthquake, or by a raging October wildfire, or by the fire that immediately follows the earthquake. And when I say lately, I’m using the term very loosely. This shit has been going on around here for years.

The thing is, we are six lucky people (and a dog), and all our needs and desires are amply met. We have set up the household to run smoothly when possible and to recover quickly when smooth is not an option. The children do their chores and their homework, the adults our work as spouses, parents, and writers, and if you took a sample of any random hour any day, if you employed some human calculus to arrest our progress, to ascertain our state at any given instant, you would find contentment with one another’s company, love and respect, a fruitful exchange of ideas, compulsive storytelling, joking around, even the odd outbreak of peace and quiet. But since this thing with my poor mother-in-law (broken femur, shattered wrist), I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out how long it has been since the days around here have been normal. Steady. Routine. Productive. Neither beset nor fraught nor teetering on some brink of disaster, free of emergency and crisis. I spend a lot of time thinking about, wishing for, working to arrange and to render inevitable, the return to our lives of Normal Time. And yet in trying to work my way back to the last golden era, I find myself casting my memory so far that the exercise begins to call into the question the very idea — an idea, by the way, that forms the basis of my understanding of our family life, here on our notional seam between the fault line and the burn zone — that there has ever been such a time. It turns out that the whole thing may be a delusion.

Like everyone — I hope — I suffer from a number of delusions, many of them apparently ineradicable. There are the geographical delusions. When I am in Pittsburgh or Paris, for example, I can never prevent myself from thinking of the point where the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio conjoin as facing eastward, or of the Left Bank as extending to the north of Notre-Dame. Most of my delusions of longest standing have to do (such is my legacy as a human being) with the acuity of my judgment, of my memory, and of my insight into the hearts of others. But the worst and most wondrous of the delusions that plague me tend to take the form, like this idea of Normal Time, of vague but unquestioned certainties about the nature and course of my life.

Here’s an example: I am forty-five years old. By even the most conservative estimate, it has been nearly a quarter of a century since I climbed eagerly aboard this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood and left the planet of my childhood forever in my starry wake. I know this. My grandparents, my boyhood bedroom furniture, a miniature schnauzer of admirable character named Fritz, the dazed and goofy splendor of bicentennial America: I will never see any of those or a million other things again. And yet always lurking somewhere in the back of my mind is the unshakable, even foundational knowledge — for which certainty is too conscious a term — that at some unspecified future date, by unspecified means, I will return to those people and to those locales. That I am going back.

No, that’s false. The delusion is not really that I believe or trust that I will be returning one day to the planet of childhood; it’s that the world I left behind so long ago is still there, somewhere, to be returned to; that it continues to exist, sideburns, Evel Knievel, Spiro T. Agnew, and all, like some alternate-time-line Krypton that never exploded, just on the other side of the phantom-zone barrier that any determined superman would know how to pierce. When I watch a film or a television show from the period and see again the workingmen wearing short-sleeved shirts with neckties, or the great wide slabs of Detroit automobiles, or the blue mailboxes with the red tops, or when I happen to hear from some random radio the DeFranco Family singing “Heartbeat (It’s a Love Beat),” I do not think merely, Oh, that’s right, I remember that or the more pathetic I wish I could go back there again. What I feel is something more like gratitude, a sense of relief, the way you feel when you wake from a dream in which your beloved has died, and the world is grief and winter, and then you find her warm and snoring in the bed beside you.

But even that delusion pales beside this mad hankering, this utopian or millenarian yearning for the coming days of Normal Time, of time to spare, of time in plenty. Time not just for work and reflection and unhurried lovemaking but for all kinds of fine and tiny things. Time to learn German. Time to print out the digital photos and reorganize the albums. Time to lavish on my younger children as I seem to have lavished it on their older siblings (though back then I thought there was never enough time for anything). Time for regular lunches with my mother. Time to get deep into a baseball season again, to linger over the box scores in the morning, to watch a meaningless game between teams I don’t care about, just out of fondness for the game. Time to write the short stories I used to fling like Frisbees out into the blue, the libretto for an opera of The Long Goodbye, an annotated version of my failed, never-completed novel Fountain City. Time simply to stretch out, to play with, to dandle and dilate and waste with my children and my wife.

Instead it’s just, as Arnold Toynbee or Henry Ford or Dr. McCoy used to say of history, one damn thing after another, and often several damn things at the same time, overlapping swaths of color on the digital calendar, conflicts and cancellations, two tasks half-done badly where one might have been pulled off in style. There is never, in the words of Irish poet Tom Paulin, any “long lulled pause / before history happens.” Only days after my wife and I guided our last baby into kindergarten, we began preparing in earnest to send our half-grown woman off to high school next fall; in the interval, the stock market crashed and my mother-in-law fell down a flight of stairs. There is no Normal Time, or rather, this is it, with all its accidents and discontinuities. With a breathtaking sequence, your last child leaves home, gets married, has children, and then you fall and break your leg, and the next thing you know, you’re approaching the point at which space curves back on itself or doesn’t. The end, unless the end, too, is a delusion. After that, either way, there is no time at all, and you’re never going back again.

Xmas

I was walking past a public elementary school off Solano Avenue a few weeks ago and noticed, hanging over its entrance, a large paper banner decorated in orange and black, featuring a motif of jack-o’-lanterns and scarecrows and proclaiming the imminent observation by its students of the school’s annual Harvest Festival at the end of October. The sign, like the other elements of decor hung from the gates of the schoolyard, said nothing about Halloween. There was no imagery of ghosts, bats, witches, haunted houses, etc., but I noticed that aside from the pumpkins and the scarecrows, there was nothing in the way of agricultural or other harvesttime imagery, either — no haystacks or, I don’t know, ripened ears of maize, cornucopias, sickles, threshing machines, ritual stonings. Apart from the gardens in its backyards — lavish as many of those are — and the bounty of hydroponic plantations in its closets and basements, Berkeley, California, has, as far as I know, no harvest to be observed. I wondered whose sensibilities were being respected by this absurd bit of subterfuge or, if you prefer, cultural sensitivity. Perhaps those of evangelical Christians who have been known to object to the historical association of the eve of All Saints’ Day with witches, devils, and other characters one would have imagined might fall beneath the contempt of a truly effective personal savior, at least when depicted in crepe paper, latex, and cake frosting. Or maybe it was, paradoxically, non-Christians whose feelings were being respected, given the connection between Halloween and the ancient Catholic feast of All Hallows. Or maybe the decision to rebrand and denature Halloween had been made out of respect for, though without recourse to any observable facts about or even a passing knowledge of, the feelings of small children. But mostly, I wondered, Who the hell do the people who authorized that sign and that “festival” think they’re kidding?

I’m not saying that school districts — or anybody else, for that matter — ought to go around scaring people without their consent, or that disrespecting people’s feelings ought to be any public institution’s official policy, though I think I could make an argument for the latter in certain cases, such as that of people who see grave moral danger in an eight-year-old wearing a bedsheet. I don’t think public schools should impose Christian worship on anybody, least of all Christians. I don’t want my children taught that it’s all right to persecute or demean others for their beliefs or, for that matter, that on October 31 the souls of the damned rise up from their graves to go carousing with the Prince of Evil. But if had a choice, I might pick either of those over teaching them that it’s our unavoidable lot as modern humans to dwell everlastingly, wearing an eternal smirk of knowingness, in bullshit.

The same thing goes for Christmas and the by now ubiquitous school holiday or winter pageant. I am a liberal agnostic empiricist, proud to be a semi-observant, bacon-eating Jew, and I have only contempt for the intolerance, ignorance, anti-intellectualism, self-deception, implicit violence, and misogyny that underlie religious fundamentalism of every flavor, from bearded to clean-cut. But I’m all for putting the Christ back in Christmas, and not only in the hope, doubtless in vain, that it might shut a few evangelical Christians up. It pains me to say it, but the people who argue that it’s dishonest to equate Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa are, at least in this instance, and with very little in the way of percentage gain in their own overall level of honesty or correctness, correct. I like to eat latkes as much as the next Jew, and candlelight is lovely, but the glorification of Hanukkah by American Jews is another example of voluntary group self-deception. It’s an exercise in collective bad faith in which everyone agrees to ignore what everyone knows to be true: that Hanukkah is a pissant holiday elevated beyond its station and intrinsic meaning for the gratification of toy manufacturers, greeting-card companies, and the makers of chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil, in an effort to battle the cultural stranglehold of Christmas, an effort that has never been and never will be successful, if only because Hanukkah songs are so painfully lame. As for Kwanzaa, I can’t say for sure, but I see no compelling reason to give it the benefit of the doubt. Christmas is a big deal, a much bigger deal than Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or any other Christian holiday, for that matter, apart from Easter. So, fine, let’s put the Christ back in it or get rid of Christmas entirely. Either way, let’s do it honestly, which, if we are fundamentalists, means throwing out Santa Claus, candy canes, and mistletoe, not to mention decorated trees, light-up life-size plastic reindeer, and the entire Christmas economy itself.

Thank God, though, we are not fundamentalists. And maybe there’s a way we can keep Christmas, Christ and all, and still respect and acknowledge both the traditions of non-Christians and the First Amendment of the Constitution. Because I would kind of hate to lose Christmas, a holiday that — as with poor old Jesus Himself — I’ve always been rather fond of.

In my family, the yearly colonization of Jews by Christmas produced a kind of pidgin holiday free of adjectives and ritual angst. The Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Savior, Jesus Christ, the King of the World, born amid portents and miracles in the manger with the talking animals and the little drummer boy, was put through an extremely fine sieve, leaving only a residue: stockings over the fireplace personalized with Elmer’s glue and glitter, a half-gallon of eggnog in the refrigerator, and a set menu of animated television shows (A Charlie Brown Christmas, The Year Without a Santa Claus, and the parable of Whoville). There was a stocking for the dog, too, in which, on Christmas morning, he would find a dog biscuit just like every other dog biscuit he had ever been given but which he would nonetheless greet with a gratifying show of holiday spirit. We didn’t have a mantel to hang our stockings from, mantels having fallen out of fashion by then, so we hung them on the iron utensil hooks with the poker and the shovel and the tongs. To this thin Yuletide residue we then added a few syncretistic customs of our people. We went to the movies with a bagful of chocolate Santas, having ensured beforehand that they were solid and not hollow. We went for a walk in our gloves and scarves, admiring the doorways and windows of our gentile neighbors’ houses, crayoned in lights against the evening, with the hasty squiggle of a tree or a hedge in front. Most crucial, we ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant. And even though we ate dinner at the very same Chinese restaurant at least twice a month, the Christmas meal seemed more leisurely, and the traditional pupu platter, with its central flickering brazier of heatless comedy fire, lent a festive suggestion of bounty and esoteric rites. The whole day was like that, a bright flame that did not burn, a holiday without gravity or meaning or claim on our memories, a lost day when the stores closed, the roads emptied, people stayed inside their houses, and the world was briefly left to Jews like us to do with as we pleased.

Still, there were, every year, strange face-to-face encounters with the conquering holiday that left me feeling obscurely moved. Take that Peanuts TV special, for example. At its climax, Linus Van Pelt, the character with whom I most strongly identified, saved the day by reminding everyone, in the lean, poignant language of the King James Bible, of the reason for the ornaments and pageants and teriyaki-pineapple chunks on bamboo skewers. It never occurred to me to wonder whether any of it could possibly be true. The idea that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, that He was the Messiah, that if you did not believe in Him you would go to hell, and so forth, these ideas were even more insubstantial to me then than they are now, when my learning to doubt everything has created a condition strongly akin to that of fierce belief. But all the same, there was something profoundly touching in Linus’s voice when he spoke those words, particularly when he got to the part where the angel of the Lord appeared to the shepherds “and they were sore afraid.” There was nothing about the story in itself that was any more powerful or moving or true than the stories over on our side of the Bible, but it was a story fixed upon, so determinedly and exhaustively, by all my favorite forms of popular media, from comic strips to sitcoms to the radio playing “Jingle Bell Rock,” a story repeated so often that I could not help but respond on some deep level to its appeal, to its promises of answered prayers and brotherhood and home.

I don’t see anything wrong with that; A Charlie Brown Christmas didn’t convert me, or threaten me, or imperil my ties to Judaism. What it did was educate me. But then the antidote to any kind of bullshit, bad faith, hypocrisy, or cant, whether offered in the name of Jesus or of multiculturalism, is always education. I still know that chapter and verse of the Gospel of Luke by heart, and no amount of subsequent disillusionment with the behavior of self-described Christians, or with the ongoing progressive commercialization that in 1965 had already broken Charlie Brown’s heart, has robbed the central miracle of Christianity of its power to move me the way any truly great story can.

My own children have attended a private school administered under the auspices of the Episcopal Church. Every year, as part of the school’s annual Christmas pageant, the second-graders put on a Nativity play, just like the Peanuts kids. They dress as sheep, wise men, Joseph, Mary, angels of the Lord — my daughter wore a halo, and my son carried a shepherd’s crook. The story is presented straight, in the language of the gospels, with the sole nods to multiculturalism being a running translation into Spanish provided by their schoolmates and musical accompaniment by the choir singing Nativity-related carols from around the world. During the first part of the program, there are usually a couple of Hanukkah songs and a nod to Kwanzaa. But there is no Hanukkah play, no reenactment of the miracle of the oil or even, for that matter, any mention of the Maccabees at all.

There are a fair number of Jewish kids at the school, and I know that sitting through the annual recounting of the birth of Jesus — an event that, however opportune for Christians, has brought millennia of suffering and persecution to Jews — makes many of their parents uncomfortable. Even more than the Friday chapels (at which the kids are admittedly as likely to hear about Ramadan, César Chávez, Yom Kippur, or recycling as they are about the life of, say, St. Brigid), the Nativity play seems to quicken all their anxieties about sending their little Jews to an ecumenical and progressive but unabashedly Christian school.

Not me. I love hearing the story of Jesus’ birth, and I always have, just as I have always loved hearing about the births of Moses, King Arthur, Hercules, John Henry, and the Peach Boy of Japanese folklore. Like all stories of miraculous births, the Nativity is the story of a great promise being made to the world. In the case of Christ, that promise, while unredeemed, has led demonstrably to the making of the world we live in, and if the subsequent years have brought as much disgrace as glory to those who have accepted or claimed to accept the promise of Jesus’ birth, I don’t think it does anyone any harm to hear the promise itself: a statement of hope, forgiveness, and love among all the people of the world, repeated by a bunch of little kids dressed up in kingly turbans and cottony fleece. On the contrary, it breaks my heart every time.

Sure, it’s a lie — if there was a Jesus, chances are He wasn’t born under anything resembling the circumstances narrated by St. Luke, Linus, or the second grade at St. Paul’s. But unlike banning ghosts and witches from Halloween or adding a light splash of latke to the winter pageant, it’s a lie that tells the truth: about the hope and the promise that ought to attend the birth of every child, however mean or difficult the conditions of that birth and however disadvantaged and persecuted that child’s people; about the dangerous and woefully unredeemed state of the world and the potential that all children have to redeem it, or else perishing therein like the innocents doomed by Herod for the crime of having been born.

There is no use pretending that Christmas is not beautiful, or that it can be finessed away or filed down to an innocuous nub by the rasp of cultural sensitivity. Changing the name of Halloween to the Harvest Festival changes nothing; it just adds another slug to the treasury of counterfeits out of which we pay our children’s fare through the world. Like all of us, my kids ought to hear the truth about Christianity, a truth that is built, like all human truths, on a story woven of wishes, possibilities, and lies. They need to be taught to judge the followers of Jesus as we all must be judged, and taught to judge on our own terms, by our own claims and asseverations, by the promises we hold out to the world, and by the betrayal of those promises. Unless we hear the story, the lie, in all its power, we will never fully understand the truth of it, nor how far short all of us — including those who most fervently profess that truth — fall.

The Amateur Family

At the museum we handed over our coats to a pleasant young man with an English accent, and something about us, my children and me, stunned him. His eyes widened and his mouth fell open; he looked as if he had been, as I believe his countrymen would put it, gob-smacked.

The source of his astonishment turned out to be, of all things, the design silkscreened on my older son’s T-shirt. The young Brit marveled at it, then at my son, then turned to me, helpless, hoping for an explanation of this impossible thing. “Is that — is that a Dalek?” he said.

But that was not what he wanted to ask us; he knew the answer to the question. Of course it was a Dalek — one of those mobile armored shells, shaped roughly like traffic cones, studded at their base with convex dots and tricked out at the rounded tip with a couple of death-dealing wands (one of them resembling suspiciously a toilet plunger); metal husks whose kernels are the pulpy, sluglike, extremely irritable former inhabitants of the planet Skaro, embarked since 1964 on a tireless mission to conquer the universe of the classic British television program Doctor Who. What the young Englishman at the Smithsonian really wanted to ask was What the hell do you people know from Daleks? Here he was in America, a land and a television market in which Doctor Who had never taken off; the Daleks, shrill, priggish, occasionally rather hysterical cybernetic staples of the nightmares of British children for forty-five years, were supposed to be far away, across the sea, gone forever — canceled, even, along with the original program, in 1989.

“There’s a new show,” I said. “A new Doctor Who.”

“Is there?”

My children and I looked at one another, marveling ourselves. Poor, sad little Englishman in Washington, so far from home. He didn’t know!

“It’s on Sci-Fi Network,” my older daughter explained. At the moment, she was not wearing her Time Lord T-shirt (the show’s eponymous doctor hails from Gallifrey, homeworld of the Time Lords). “And BBC America and PBS. Or you can just download them from iTunes.”

“I have a Cybermen T-shirt,” my youngest son put in, referring to the less perfectly terrifying yet still awesome-looking second-banana metal nemeses of the Doctor. “I wore it yesterday. But I threw up on it on the plane.”

“And I have one with K-9,” said my younger daughter. During the 1970s run of the show, K-9 was a robot dog who — but no, perhaps we had better not get into K-9.

“It’s a pretty good show,” I said, but I knew that my tone and my posture and the wild fannish tenor of my voice were saying It’s the greatest show ever in the history of television.

As we began to engulf him in the intensity of our passion for Doctor Who, a different light came into the young man’s face, less bewildered, a light of tolerant understanding. He took our coats, his face animated by the faint hint of a smirk. He had us now. We were a family of geeks.

“Ex-ter-minate,” we said in fluent Dalek.

I don’t own a Doctor Who T-shirt, but if I did, like my children, I most certainly would have so informed the young Englishman taking our coats. Indeed, I would not have been able to prevent myself from doing so; I suppose I am a geek, the geek matrix of four bright geek spawn. And if you aren’t watching and loving the glorious new BBC incarnation of Doctor Who, geeking out on the mythos of Daleks and Time Lords and Cybermen, swooning to the polysexual heroics of Captain Jack Harkness, aching over the quantum transdimensional heartache of Rose Tyler, and granting yourself the supreme and steady pleasure of watching the dazzling Scottish actor David Tennant go about the business of being the tenth man to embody the time-and-space traveling Doctor on television since the show’s debut in 1963, then I pity you with the especial harsh pity of the geek.

I had always hoped and worked with patience and care — offering running seminars in Vulcan physiology, Jon Anderson lyrics, the history of the Marvel Universe — to have geeky children, though the term geek, like its common synonym nerd, is woefully imprecise, with connotations of physical awkwardness, high-water trousers, loserhood, emotional retardation, etc. Geek carries as well the additional unfortunate echo of sideshow freaks orally decapitating chickens. Fan is more accurate, I suppose, but it spends too much time hanging around the sports page and ESPN, and anyway, the word (even with its fanspeak plural, fen) is a clipped form of the pejorative fanatic, with all its connotations of narrowness, intolerance, unreason, a condemnatory fervor. Fanboy gets tossed around a lot these days, but two of my children are female, and fanchild is not a word, and the term was originally coined to describe and deprecate a kind of mindless, by-the-greasy-handful consumption of popular culture, uncritical, automatic, halfway to zombie.

Perhaps there is no perfect word for the kind of people I have raised my children to be: a word that encompasses obsessive scholarship, passionate curiosity, curatorial tenderness, and an irrepressible desire to join in the game, to inhabit in some manner — through writing, drawing, dressing up, or endless conversational riffing and Talmudic debate — the world of the endlessly inviting, endlessly inhabitable work of popular art. The closest I have ever come for myself is amateur, in all the original best senses of the word: a lover; a devotee; a person driven by passion and obsession to do it — to explore the imaginary world — oneself. And if we must accept the inevitable connotation of hopeless ineptitude that amateur carries, then at least let us stipulate that we shall be hopeless and inept like Max Fischer, the hero of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore: in the most passionate, heedless, and whole-hearted way.

I was that kind of a fanchild — a passionate amateur — I have grown up to be that kind of man, and my writing, straight up to my most recent novel, represents an ongoing effort to write myself into the worlds and the narratives, from those of Conan Doyle and Fritz Leiber to those of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gabriel García Márquez, that I grew up longing to inhabit. As a child, I was lucky enough to have a father who inculcated in me a love of Star Trek, Japanese monster movies, the Marx Brothers, comic books, and the like. I suppose we constituted a fan club of two. But when I was twelve years old, my parents divorced, and my father moved far away, leaving me to inhabit above all else, loving it or not, a world characterized chiefly by its immense solitude. I could not drive, and suburban Maryland was no white-hot center of fandom. I had no access to the world of self-published APAs and fanzines that preceded (and helped to shape the culture of) the Internet. My younger brother was born without the mutated fanboy protein, utterly uninterested in the question of whether Spock’s human mother had been won through the ritual combat of the Pon Farr or whether the Atlantis of Superman’s mermaid girlfriend, Lori Lemaris, was the same as Aquaman’s Atlantis. I was left alone, a fan club of one, and perhaps that was not unusual, because solitude is the portion of every geek, nerd, or fanboy, and I was kind of an amateur of solitude, too.

It is only recently, as I and my children (and lately, even their mother) have plunged into the exceptionally rich, dense, and time-layered world of Doctor Who fandom, that I’ve begun to understand the accidental gift that I (and she) have given our four little amateurs, geeking out in the back of the minivan over, let’s say, the exact nature of the plunderous, flatulent Slitheen family of extraterrestrials, or the intricate, paradoxical mystery of the Time War that supposedly wiped out all the Daleks and all the Time Lords except for the Doctor: We have given them one another.

For in playing, or writing, or drawing, or simply talking oneself deep into the world of a popular artwork that invites the regard of the amateur, the fan, one is seeking above all to connect, not only with the world of the show, comic book, or film but with the encircling, embracing metaworld of all those who love it as much as you do. As a kid, I always seemed to have trouble with that aspect of the art of being a fan; for many, many years after my father left home, I found it difficult to reach out and find other people with whom I could construct a shared universe of enthusiasm. But my kids have one another, four little Whoheads in cryptic T-shirts that only they and a random British dude understand.

And of course they have me, and — of course — I have them. Together we have spent hours not only watching and talking about the show but drawing our own versions of putative Eleventh and Twelfth and Twenty-Seventh Doctors, drawing pictures of Daleks and Cybermen and of the Tardis, the Doctor’s time-and-space machine, disguised as a vintage wooden phone booth. We have made Tardises and Daleks out of Lego bricks and have worked out our own scenarios for the resurrection of the unfortunate dimension-lost Rose Tyler.

The greatest, most essential creation of fandom is fandom itself, and maybe all along, part of my desire to have so many children was the longing for a fan club to belong to, for imaginative fellowship, for the society of passionate amateurs like me. In my children, I have found a band of companions — like the companions, Rose Tyler among them, who have always accompanied the Doctor on his adventures — as surely as they have found companions in one another.

Every one of the Doctor’s human companions comes to learn, eventually, the hard truth: Sooner or later, the adventure will cease. The Doctor will leave them behind, abandon them, move on to a new incarnation, a new season, a new companion; this melancholy fate lends a strange and mournful gravity to a show that is otherwise unfailingly jaunty, even when it is telling stories that are spooky, romantic, or profound. My own dear Doctor lost track of me on the Planet of the Seventies, and since then he and I never have quite found our way home. In the hands, minds, and geekish chatter of my children, I have found again that long-lost, long-desired connection. Each of us stands ready, at any moment, to talk Who, to riff and spin and sketch out new contours for the world we collectively inhabit, creating and endlessly re-creating the fandom that is our family.

Maybe all families are a kind of fandom, an endlessly elaborated, endlessly disputed, endlessly reconfigured set of commentaries, extrapolations, and variations generated by passionate amateurs on the primal text of the parents’ love for each other. Sometimes the original program is canceled by death or separation; sometimes, as with Doctor Who, it endures and flourishes for decades. And maybe love, mortality, and loss, and all the children and mythologies and sorrows they engender, make passionate amateurs — nerds, geeks, and fanboys — of us all.