The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

Our Birth Is Nothing but Our Death Begun

A fetus doesn’t sit passively in its mother’s womb and wait to be fed. Its placenta aggressively sprouts blood vessels that invade its mother’s tissues to extract nutrients. A mother and her unborn child engage in an unconscious struggle over the nutrients she will provide it. Pregnancy is, as the evolutionary biologist David Haig says, a tug of war: each side pulls hard; the flag tied to the middle of the rope barely moves. Existence is warfare.

Human beings have existed for 250,000 years; during that time, 90 billion individuals have lived and died. You’re one of 6.5 billion people now on the planet, and 99.9 percent of your genes are the same as everyone else’s. The difference is in the remaining 0.1 percent—one nucleotide base in every 1,000.

You’re born with 350 bones (long, short, flat, and irregular); as you grow, the bones fuse together: an adult’s body has 206 bones. Approximately 70 percent of your body weight is water—which is about the same percentage of the earth’s surface that is water.

A newborn baby, whose average heart rate is 120 beats per minute, makes the transition from a comfortable, fluid-filled environment to a cold, air-filled one by creating a suction 50 times stronger than the average adult breath. I was a breech birth, the danger of which is that the head (in this case, my head) comes out last, which dramatically increases the possibility that the umbilical cord will get wrapped around the neck (in this case, my neck). I entered the world feet first, then remained in the hospital an extra week to get a little R & R in a warm incubator that my father guarded like a goalie whenever anyone came within striking distance. If I laid still for more than a few minutes, my father reportedly pounded on the glass dome. I wasn’t dead, Dad. I was only sleeping. All my life I’ve pretended to seek a cold, air-filled environment (danger), but really what I’m drawn to is that comfortable, fluid-filled environment (safety).

I remember once being complimented by my mother for not entering a playground when the gate was locked and my father being disgusted that I hadn’t climbed the fence. As a wide receiver, I would run intricate patterns, then stand all alone in the middle of the field, waving my hands, calling for the ball. I never dropped a pass, but when I was hit hard, I would typically tighten up and fumble. I was the best softball player in the neighborhood, but as we grew older, we began to play overhand, fast-pitch hardball, and I started flinching. Trying to beat out a ground ball, I would always slow down so that the throw to first base would arrive ahead of me and I’d avoid getting hit in the head with a wild toss. Batting, I was afraid of getting hit with the pitch; fielding, I dreaded bad hops off the rocky infield. I could run 100 yards in 10.8 seconds, but I had very long legs and the track coach insisted that I run high hurdles; I stutter-stepped before each hurdle to make sure I cleared it and came in last. Having never learned to dive, I jumped in the pool feet first. The swimming instructor dragged me to the edge of the diving board, positioned my arms and legs, held me in the air for a second, then dropped me into the pool. At the last instant, I turned my face, and water broke my fall like a bed of electric needles. What was I scared of? Why have I always been so afraid of getting hurt?

In the Bhagavad Gītā, the human body is defined as a wound with nine openings.

A newborn baby is, objectively, no beauty. The fat pads that will fill out the cheeks are missing. The jaws are unsupported by teeth. Hair, if there is any, is often so fine as to make the baby (especially Caucasian babies) appear bald. Cheesy material—called vernix caseosa—covers the body, providing a protective dressing for the skin, which is reddened, moist, and deeply creased. Swelling formed by pressure during the passage through the birth canal may have temporarily deformed the nose, caused one or both eyes to swell up, or elongated the head into a strange shape. The skull is incompletely formed: in some places, the bones haven’t fully joined together, leaving the brain covered only by soft tissue. External genitalia in both sexes are disproportionately larger because of stimulation by the mother’s hormones. For the same reason, the baby’s breasts may be somewhat enlarged and secrete a watery discharge called “witch’s milk.” The irises are pale blue; true eye color develops later. The head is very large in proportion to the body, and the neck can’t support it, while the buttocks are tiny.

The average baby weighs 7¼ pounds and is 21 inches long. Newborns lose 5 to 8 percent of their birth weight in the first few days of life—owing, mainly, to water loss. They can hear little during the first 24 hours until air enters the eustachian tubes. They miss the womb and resent any stimulus. They will suck anything placed in or near their mouth. Their eyes wander and cross. Their body temperature is erratic, and their breathing is often irregular.

At 1 month, a baby can wobble its head and practice flexing its arms and legs. At 2 months, it can face straight ahead while lying on its back. On its stomach, it can lift its head about 45 degrees. At 3 months, a baby’s neck muscles are strong enough to support its head for a second or two.

Babies are born with brains 25 percent of adult size, because the mechanics of walking upright impose a constraint on the size of the mother’s pelvis; the channel through which the baby is born can’t get any bigger. The baby’s brain quickly makes up for that initial constraint: by age 1, the brain is 75 percent of adult size.

Infants have accurate hearing up to 40,000 cycles per second and may wince at a dog whistle that adults, who can’t register sounds above 20,000 cycles per second, don’t even notice. Your ears contain sensory hair cells, which turn mechanical fluid energy inside the cochlea into electrical signals that can be picked up by nerve cells; these electrical signals are delivered to the brain and allow you to hear. Beginning at puberty, these hair cells begin to disappear, decreasing your ability to hear specific frequencies; higher tones are the first to go.

A newborn’s hands tend to be held closed, but if the area between the thumb and forefinger is stroked, the hand clenches it and holds on with sufficient strength to support the baby’s weight if both hands are grasping. This innate “grasp reflex” serves no purpose in the human infant but was crucial in the last prehuman phase of evolution when the infant had to cling to its mother’s hair.

My father reminds me that according to Midrash—the ever-evolving commentary upon the Hebrew scriptures—when you arrive in the world as a baby, your hands are clenched, as though to say, “Everything is mine. I will inherit it all.” When you depart from the world, your hands are open, as though to say, “I have acquired nothing from the world.”

If a baby is dropped, an immediate change from the usual curled posture occurs, as all four extremities are flung out in extension. The “startle reflex,” or “embrace reflex,” probably once served to help a simian mother catch a falling infant by causing it to spread out as fully as possible.

When Natalie was born, I cried, and my wife, Laurie, didn’t—too busy. One minute, we were in the hospital room, holding hands and reading magazines, and the next, Laurie looked at me, with a commanding seriousness I’d never seen in her before, and said, “Put down the magazine.” Natalie emerged, smacking her lips, and I asked the nurse to reassure me that this didn’t indicate diabetes (I’d been reading too many parent-to-be manuals). I vowed I would never again think a trivial or stupid or selfish thought; this exalted state didn’t last, but still…

The Kogi Indians believe that when an infant begins life, it knows only three things: mother, night, and water.

Francis Thompson wrote, “For we are born in other’s pain, / And perish in our own.” Edward Young wrote, “Our birth is nothing but our death begun.” Francis Bacon: “What then remains, but that we still should cry / Not to be born, or being born, to die?” The first sentence of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

Much mentioned but rarely discussed: the tissue-thin separation between existence and non-. In 1919, at age 9, my father and his friends were crossing train tracks in Brooklyn when my father, last in line, stepped directly on the third rail, which transformed him from a happy vertical child into a horizontal conductor of electric current. The train came rattling down the tracks toward Milton Shildcrout, who, lying flat on his back, was powerless to prevent his own self-induced electrocution. (When I asked my father why he changed his name, he said that his WWII sergeant “had trouble reading words of more than two syllables printed in the daily camp bulletin; he also had trouble correctly pronouncing what he described as ‘those god-awful New Yawk names.’ He said, in his thick-as-molasses Southern accent, ‘That name of yours, Corporal, is so danged long it wouldn’t fit on a tombstone just in case ya step on one of Tojo’s bullets when we go overseas. You should shorten it to something a grown man like me can pronounce. From now on, I’m going to call you Shieldsy.’ A few weeks later, Sergeant Hill shortened it to Shields. And Shields it was for the 36 months I was assigned to the 164th Quartermaster Company. I got used to Shields and, when I returned from the war, had it changed.”)

I wouldn’t be here today, typing this sentence, if someone named Big Abe, a 17-year-old wrestler who wore black shirts and a purple hat, hadn’t slid a long piece of dry wood between galvanized little Milt and the third rail, flipping him high into the air only seconds before the train passed. My father was bruised about the elbows and knees and, later in summer, was a near-corpse as flesh turned red, turned pink, turned black, and peeled away to lean white bone. Toenails and fingernails crumbled, and what few hairs he had on his body were shed until Miltie himself had nearly vanished. His father sued Long Island Rail Road for $100, which supposedly paid—no more, no less—for the doctor’s visits once a week to check for infection.

Decline and Fall (i)

All mammals age; the only animals that don’t age are some of the more primitive ones: sharks, alligators, Galapagos tortoises. There are different theories as to why humans age at the rate they do: aging is genetically controlled (maladapted individuals die out and well-adapted ones persevere); the rate of aging within each species has developed for the good of each species; an entropy-producing agent disrupts cells; smaller mammals tend to have high metabolic rates and die at an earlier age than larger mammals do; specific endocrine or immune systems are particularly vulnerable and accelerate dysfunction for the whole organism; errors in DNA transcription lead to genetic errors that accelerate death. All of these theories are disputed: no one knows why we age.

Schopenhauer said, “Just as we know our walking to be only a constantly prevented falling, so is the life of our body only a constantly prevented dying, an ever-deferred death.” (Dad: “Why would a supposedly wise man want to think this way?”)

“As we get older,” the British poet Henry Reed helpfully observed, “we do not get any younger.”

On average, infants sleep 20 hours a day, 1-year-olds sleep 13 hours a day, teenagers sleep 9 hours, 40-year-olds sleep 7 hours, 50-year-olds sleep 6 hours, and people 65 and older sleep 5 hours. As you get older, you spend more time lying awake at night and, once asleep, you’re much more easily aroused. The production of melatonin, which regulates the sleep cycle, is reduced with age, which is one of the reasons why older people experience more insomnia. By age 65, an unbroken night of sleep is rare; 20 percent of the night consists of lying awake. As I constantly have to remind my now light-sleeping father, people ages 73 to 92 awake, on average, 21 times a night owing to disordered breathing.

An infant breathes 40 to 60 times a minute; a 5-year-old, 24 to 26 times; an adolescent, 20 to 22 times; an adult (beginning at age 25), 16 times. Over the course of your life, you’re likely to take about 850 million breaths.

As a mammal, you get “milk teeth” by the end of your first year, then a second set that emerges as you leave infancy. When children start school, most of them have all of their baby teeth, which they’ll lose before they’re 12. By 13, most children have acquired all of their permanent teeth except their wisdom teeth. The third molars, or “wisdom teeth,” usually emerge between ages 20 and 21; their roots mature between ages 18 and 25. As you age, your plaque builds up, your gums retreat, your teeth wear down, and you have more cavities and periodontal disease. The last few years, as my father’s gums have shrunk, bone has rubbed up against his dentures, causing pain whenever he chews.

Children’s fingernails grow one millimeter a week. Toenails grow one-quarter as fast as fingernails—one millimeter a month. Pianists’ and typists’ fingernails grow faster than others’. Fingernail growth is fastest in November, slowest in July, and less rapid at night. The first and fifth digits grow more slowly; in severe cold weather, fingernails grow more slowly. From age 30 until 80, fingernail growth slows by 50 percent. Contrary to myth, Dad, your nails and hair don’t keep growing after you die.

Boys vs. Girls (i)

The XX and XY chromosome pairings create females and males, respectively. Females have an advantage in having two X chromosomes to rely on throughout life, because the second X chromosome provides a backup if something goes wrong with a gene on the first one. A female with a disease-carrying gene on one of her X chromosomes can use the normal gene on the other X chromosome and avoid the expression of the disease, though she still carries the gene.

Female is the “default” sex: if you don’t get a signal to form testes, your germ cells form ovaries and you become female. It takes the positive action of genes on the Y chromosome to make a potentially female body into a male body.

Women have a slower metabolism than men, beginning at conception: male embryos divide faster than female ones. The faster metabolic rate makes men’s cells more vulnerable to breakdown; the entire male life cycle is completed more promptly than the female one.

Y-bearing sperm travel a little faster than X-bearing sperm; about 51 percent of newborn babies are male. Even more than 51 percent of conceptions are male, but male fetuses are more likely to undergo spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and miscarriages than females. Premature girls tend to fare better than premature boys do. More boys than girls die in infancy.

Despite their slower metabolism, girls, at birth, are more advanced in bone development than boys. By the time they start school, girls are ahead of boys by approximately one year, and by third grade they’re one and a half years advanced.

Until I was 9, I was the fastest person I knew. I ran to the store, around the block, to school, up the stairs, away from people, with people, toward people, on dirt, on sand, on asphalt, on the beach, in bare feet, in sneakers, in sandals, in boots, in good thin tight shiny laced black shoes. I had no hair on my legs, had legs hard as rubber, tanned as an Indian. My girlfriend was 9 and ran, too. We ran together. We raced, and she won; I thought she got a false start and demanded a rematch. She said no. I took off my sneakers, threw them into the lake, stepped on twigs, rocks, glass in my bare feet. She ran away from me. A few years later she started smoking cigarettes, lost her wind, and became a cheerleader.

Origins

Holding on to the plastic strap that was attached to my rocking horse’s ears and mouth (name: Peaches; it was peach-colored and I liked peaches), I hoisted myself onto the saddle and wriggled around in my pajamas until I was comfortable and ready to ride. One cracked glass eye shone out of the right side of his head, the left eye having shattered in a previous skirmish, and his mouth, once bright red and smiling, was now chipped away to a tight-lipped and unpainted pout. His nose, too, was bruised, with gashes for nostrils, and he had a thick brown mane that, extending from the crown of his head nearly to his waist, was made from my grandmother’s discarded wigs and glued to the wood. I pulled on the plastic strap that served as the rein, wrapped it around my fist, and slid my feet into the leather stirrups that hung from his waist.

I bounced up and down and set him in motion, rocking, tilting, sliding. The runner skidded slightly on the wooden floor. I sat up, leaning forward, pressing my lips to the back of his hairy neck, and said, “Don’t creak. Don’t make noise.” (Infantile, naïve, I thought I could talk to wooden animals.) I wrapped my arms around his neck and kicked my legs back and forth in the stirrups, then lay my cheek against the back of his head, pressing myself to his curves and carved-out shapes. When he pitched forward, I scooted up toward the bottom of his spine, and when he swung back, I let go of the leather strap and leaned back as far as I could so that I was causing his motions at the same time I was trying to get in perfect rhythm with them. I twisted my hips and bounced my thighs until it felt warm under me. My pajamas itched and stuck to my legs. My skin felt wet. No one knew; no one could know. I knew it was private, but I didn’t know why. Forgetting that I should have been in bed and, if not under the covers, at least not creating such a commotion, I rocked faster, drove him across the floor and toward the far wall by jerking my body forward in the seat and squeezing my knees into his sides.

When my father opened the door and turned on the light, I turned Peaches away from him and the runner glanced off his foot. It felt warm under me and I wasn’t going to stop. “Giddyup.”

“Daver Baver,” my father said, clearly amused by my equestrianship but attempting to embody the law. Such is my memory, anyway; who knows how accurate these recollections are? I was 4, maybe 5. “Your mother and sister are trying to sleep. I was trying to sleep. You’ll wake up the house.”

“I’ll be quiet, Daddy.”

“You need to get back in bed, Daver B.”

“But I’m not tired.”

“Do you have any idea what time—”

“It feels so good.”

Each time Peaches rocked forward, I bumped my crotch up against the smooth surface of the seat and my whole body tingled. I clutched my horse and made him lurch crazily away from my father and toward the wall. I bucked back and forth until it hurt and I couldn’t ride any longer. My dad brought Peaches to a halt from behind, picked me up by the waist, and twirled me round and round the room—Airplane!—then brought me down, tossing me onto the bed. Whee. Then he sang me to sleep with my favorite song, about a boy and his daddy and a mockingbird.

I have a recurring dream in which I open the front door to my childhood home, and my father has a slanted block of wood, the door stop, in his hand. Without his glasses, in the unlit hallway, he thinks I’m a burglar. He’s going to stop me with a 3"-by-5" piece of wood. He squeezes the wood and gets a sliver in his palm, dropping the door stop on his shoes. (Dad as unlikely Cerberus.)

It’s good to see you, Father, I say, although I’ve never in my life called him “Father.”

There’s no light on in the house. It’s 4:00 in February and I want a lamp, a candle, or a fire to take the cold off the walls and out of the wooden floors. The windows are shut and the shades are drawn.

Don’t track dirty snow into the house, he says. Go shake your shoes off outside. (Suddenly my dad is Martha Stewart? So, too, growing up in California, I didn’t see snow until I went East to college.)

Random walls of snowdrifts rise out of the field, and in the dismal sun the trees reflect onto the snow like huge, broken umbrellas. The wind sweeps the snow off the ground, through the trees, and against the windows of the house.

In the living room, he rocks in his chair, with his feet on the stool. His hands are folded in his lap—a semi-feminine figure. He opens his mouth, but no words come out. Newspapers (containing articles he’s written? I think so) are scattered across the floor. I sit away from him on the springs of a couch without cushions.

Under the glass tabletop next to him is a black-and-white picture of him hiking in the mountains with a walking stick in one hand, a pipe in the other. In the photograph, he is carrying a backpack and is half-turned toward the camera; in the photo, sunlight glamorizes his face. (The High Sierras: mountains of such magic importance to my childhood as to be commensurate with aboriginal promises of beauty and peace; jagged pinnacles far, far away, but so omnipresently in the mind.)

I open the window shade. Outside, to my surprise, it’s twilight. The wind snaps twigs off the tree limbs. The snowdrifts are higher now.

Is the walkway clear? he asks.

The walkway from the porch to the driveway to the street is two feet deep in snow.

No, Father, I say. Why?

I’m expecting a letter, he says. (Implicitly, a letter from me.) Will you shovel the walkway?

I dig into the snowdrifts on either side of me. The weight of the shovel and a sudden gust of wind nearly make me fall. He stands behind the screen door, wearing a jacket so big he could use it as a sleeping bag. The pockets are at his knees and the hood is puffed out, framing his face—a skinny Jewish Eskimo.

I hit the blade against the ice, but it’s frozen solid. He steps down off the porch, shuffling his feet until we get to the road, which is nearly a foot deep in snow. We trudge toward the post office at the end of the block. Frail as an old-age-home denizen, he holds on to my shoulder to prevent himself from falling.

The post office is an old brick building. Its cement steps are covered with snow, and its wooden door is halfway off its hinges. Inside are benches, a warped floor, and a couple hundred post office boxes: rose-colored glass rectangles with black numbers.

He takes off his coat and uses it as a pillow, kneeling on the floor and turning the dials of a box, rattling it until it opens. He beats his right hand against the sides.

The letter’s been held up, he says, again. (I’ve failed, again.)

Outside, the sky is blankly black, the color of my gloves. Too cold to move, he clings to my arm. Ice gathers on his hood, forming a comical cap. He stops to cough, closing his eyes and breathing heavily. The return trip is always an exceedingly brief flash-forward. And there the dream ends.

Paradise, Soon Lost

Natalie celebrated her 10th birthday with 12 of her closest friends at Skate King, where the lights are low, the mirror ball glitters, the music crescendos every 30 seconds, and the bathrooms are labeled Kings and Queens. The girls, wearing rollerblades, seemed preternaturally tall, as if they were wearing high heels. My father had come up to Seattle from the Bay Area in honor of Natalie’s big day, and at the party he mentioned to me that Natalie looked a little plump, her belly edging over her waistband; I asked him if he ever gave it a rest.

Several of Natalie’s friends bought Best Friends split necklaces: one girl wears one half while her best friend wears the other. There was quite a competition for certain girls. Natalie’s best friend, Amanda, asked the DJ to play a Michelle Branch song, and when it came on, Amanda beamed.

Seeing the lights go off, all of the younger girls rushed onto the rink. They liked the dark setting, which made them feel less noticeable, and yet Natalie and several of her friends were wearing orange glow sticks. So they didn’t want their bodies to be noticed, but they did want their bodies to be noticed. This, I want to say, is the crux of the matter.

The girls skated backward. Then they skated in the regular direction. After a while they did the limbo. The DJ played the standards: “I Will Survive,” “Gloria,” “YMCA,” “Stayin’ Alive,” Madonna, the Black Eyed Peas, Avril Lavigne, Usher. Some of Natalie’s friends bought plastic roses for themselves. Two teenaged kids were feverishly making out in a far corner. Duly noted by my father, who informed the management—quickly remedied. A quirky Puritanism: his abhorrence of any public display of affection. Whenever Laurie and I go to a movie with him, if I put my arm around her or hold her hand, he inevitably—and unconsciously, I think—erupts into a coughing fit until the PDA ceases.

As the father of a daughter who remains a Skate King devotee, I find the place utterly terrifying. It’s all about amplifying kids’ sense of themselves as magical creatures and converting this feeling into sexual yearning—a group march toward future prospects. For Natalie and her friends, still, just barely, the purpose of Skate King is to dream about the opposite sex without having to take these romantic feelings seriously, let alone act on them. In the dark, Natalie held Amanda’s hand and lipsynched to Aaron Carter.

The last song of the afternoon was “The Hokey Pokey,” which, the DJ explained to me, “adults don’t care for.” Of course adults (with the exception of my father, who wanted to join in until Natalie frantically waved him off) don’t care for it; you wind up having to put your whole body in. What—Natalie and her friends were wondering—could that possibly consist of?

Girls develop breast buds between 8 and 10 years old, and full breasts between ages 12 and 18. Girls get their first pubic hair and armpit hair between ages 9 and 12, and they develop adult patterns of this hair between ages 13 and 14. I once heard statutory rape defended by the phrase “If there’s grass on the field, play ball.” In 1830, girls typically got their first period when they were 17. Thanks to improvements in nutrition, general health, and living conditions, the standard age in America is now 12 (12.75 in the 1960s, 12.5 in the early 1990s, and 12.3 early in this decade). Girls are getting fatter, which also helps trigger menstruation.

The average menstrual cycle is a little over 29 days. The moon’s cycle of phases is 29.53 days. According to Darwin, menstruation is linked to the moon’s influence on tidal rhythms, a legacy of our origin in the sea. For lemurs, estrus and sex tend to occur when there’s a full moon.

At age 9 or 10, a boy’s scrotum and testicles enlarge and his penis lengthens; at age 17, his penis has adult size and shape. Boys’ pubic hair, armpit hair, leg hair, chest hair, and facial hair start at age 12, with adult patterns of the hair emerging at 15. First ejaculation usually occurs at age 12 or 13; at 14, most boys have a wet dream once every two weeks. I’ve forgotten the names of nearly everyone I went to junior high school with, but I’ll never forget Pam Glinden or Joanne Liebes—best friends, bad girls, reputed “drug addicts”—to whose yearbook photos I masturbated throughout eighth grade. At the time, this activity seemed magical, private, perverse, unique, all-important. It wasn’t. It was blood flowing through me which, at some point in the not entirely unforeseeable future (18,000 days, say, at the outside), will no longer flow. My dad will be dead soon; one day I’ll be dead; despite—or perhaps because of—all the data gathered in this book, I still find those two facts overwhelming.

“The difference between sex and death,” explains Woody Allen, “is that with death you can do it alone and no one’s going to make fun of you.”

Boys are heavier and taller than girls because they have a longer overall growth period. The growth spurt in boys occurs between 13 and 16; a gain of four inches can be expected in the peak year. For girls, the growth spurt begins at 11, may reach three inches in the peak year, and is almost completed by 14. At 18, three-quarters of an inch of growth remains for boys and slightly less for girls, for whom growth is 99 percent complete. Between ages 15 and 18, I grew from 5′4″ to 6′1″; I still visualize myself being small. Natalie, shorter than most of her classmates, is mad at me for not having my growth spurt until the end of high school. She can’t wait to “stretch out.”

When Natalie was 2, Laurie and I were putting on Natalie’s clothes to take her to day care. My father was visiting for the week. Natalie cried frantically, complaining that the clothes were the wrong clothes—this was the wrong color, that was too tight. She kept saying, “Mine, mine, mine.” Afterward, I asked my dad what he thought Natalie was trying to tell us, and he said, “She meant, ‘These limbs, these legs, these arms: they’re mine. Don’t do this to my body. It’s my body.’” I asked him if I ever did stuff like that as a kid, and he said, “Are you kidding? You drove me and your mother up a wall, especially that first year. What a crybaby!”

News Flash: We Are Animals

My friend Suzanne e-mailed me about her daughter: “Naomi is nine now, edging up to those perilous years, and while I realize that some awkwardness is inevitable for teenagers, I sense that for girls the body-confidence that is lost is often lost for good. I keep this image of Naomi in my mind: when she comes home from school, she likes to grab a yogurt from the fridge and eat it out on the deck while she hula hoops. She uses two hula hoops at once and she’ll stand practically still, barely twitching her nonexistent hips, spooning yogurt into her mouth and telling me about her day. The hula hoops spin around her as smoothly as satellites, as if there is some intense gravitational pull coming from inside of her. This ritual never ceases to leave me gaping in astonishment and gratitude. Where does this grace come from? My hunch is that her utter lack of self-consciousness about the pleasure it gives her to move her body renders her incredibly graceful. She has an anthem that I love. She’ll approach me very seriously and say, ‘Mom. Mom. I have to tell you something.’ She locks me into a deep stare and then suddenly she’s bouncing up and down in a dance that’s all knees and elbows, singing, ‘There’s a little bit of frog in all of us, no matter who you be!’”

When Natalie was 11, panda bears (sad-eyed, sedentary, round: cute) were her favorite things in existence. She made a board game entitled I’m Outta the Pound!: pets escape the pound and try to find a home. “Sex must be an okay thing,” she told me, “because people have sex to produce more life.” She still does stunningly accurate imitations of animals.

My favorite moment of Natalie’s weekly soccer game occurs when the game is over, the parents are handing out snacks, and all the girls are sitting in a circle, not really talking much but drinking their juices and eating their cookies, enjoying their bodies’ exhaustion, utterly in tune with themselves and one another. Sometimes my dad will be there and he’ll stop taking pictures for a minute and, his eyes misting, he’ll just revel and kvell in the moment, the fact and glory of physical existence.

Hoop dream (i):

There has always been some strange connection for me between basketball and the dark. I started shooting baskets after school in third grade, and I remember dusk and macadam combining into the sensation that the world was dying but I was indestructible. One afternoon I played H-O-R-S-E with a classmate, Renée Hahn, who threw the ball over the fence and said, “I don’t want to play with you anymore. You’re too good. I’ll bet one day you’re going to be a San Francisco Warrior.”

Renée had a way of moving her body like a boy but still like a girl, too, and that game of H-O-R-S-E is one of the happiest memories of my childhood: dribbling around in the dark but knowing by instinct where the basket was; not being able to see Renée but smelling her sweat and keeping close to her voice, in which I could hear her love for me and my life as a Warrior opening up into the night. I remember the sloped half-court at the far end of the playground, its orange pole, orange rim, and wooden green backboard, the chain net clanging in the wind, the sand on the court, the overhanging eucalyptus trees, the fence the ball bounced over into the street, and the bench the girls sat on, watching, trying to look bored.

The first two weeks of summer, Renée and I went steady, but we broke up when I didn’t risk rescuing her in a game of Capture the Flag, so she wasn’t around for my 10th birthday. I begged my parents to let Ethan Saunders, Jim Morrow, Bradley Gamble, and me shoot baskets by ourselves all night at the court across the street. My mother and father reluctantly agreed, and my father swung by every few hours to make sure we were safe and bring more Coke, more birthday cake, more candy.

Near midnight, Bradley and I were playing two-on-two against Jim and Ethan. The moon was falling. We had a lot of sugar in our blood, and all of us were totally zonked and totally wired. With the score tied at 18 in a game to 20, I took a very long shot from the deepest corner. Before the ball had even left my hand, Bradley said, “Way to hit.”

I was a good shooter because it was the only thing I ever did, and I did it all the time, but even for me such a shot was doubtful. Still, Bradley knew and I knew and Jim and Ethan knew, too, and we knew the way we knew our own names or the batting averages of the Giants’ starting lineup or the lifelines in our palms. I felt it in my legs and up my spine, which arched as I fell back. My fingers tingled and my hand squeezed the night in joyful follow-through. We knew the shot was perfect: when we heard the ball (a birthday present from my father) whip through the net, we heard it as something we had already known for at least a second. What happened in that second during which we knew? Did the world stop? Did my soul ascend a couple of notches? What happens to ESP, to such keen eyesight? What did we have then, anyway, radar? When did we have to start working so hard to hear our own hearts?

At the end of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, the only thing the eponymous elderly protagonist can affirm is not love or art or religion but the sound of frogs, trapped in mud, belling with the cessation of torrential rain. Nietzsche: “There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.” Wittgenstein said, “Our only certainty is to act with the body.” Martha Graham: “The body never lies.” We are all thrillingly different animals, and we are all, in a sense, the same animal. The body—in its movement from swaddling to casket—can tell us everything we can possibly know about everything.

Motherhood

At the Alaska SeaLife Center, Aurora, a Giant Pacific female octopus, was introduced to J-1, a male octopus. They flashed colors and retreated to a dark corner of the center’s “Denizens of the Deep” display. A month later, Aurora laid thousands of eggs. Despite the fact that her eggs didn’t appear to develop and aquarists—the animals’ caretakers—believed the eggs were sterile, Aurora daily sucked in water through her mantle and sent cleansing waves over the eggs, defending them against hungry sea cucumbers and starfish. Even when aquarists, certain the eggs weren’t fertile, began draining her 3,600-gallon tank, Aurora sprayed her eggs, exposed and drying on rocks. Several eggs from Aurora hatched exactly 10 months after her encounter with J-1 (long since deceased); nine baby octopi received food through an electronic, automatic feeder in a rearing tank. Although Giant Pacific females usually die about the same time as their eggs hatch, mostly because they stop eating for months and spend their energy defending their eggs, aquarist Ed DeCastro said Aurora appeared invigorated and that “she was still tending the eggs.”

In seventh grade, Natalie suddenly loved to criticize Laurie for getting a point of information wrong or having pieces of food caught between her teeth or chewing too loudly or, especially, talking while eating. These were, I now know, the opening fisticuffs of the apparently inexorable mother-daughter donnybrook that will dominate our house for the next several years.

My father takes a variety of medications to combat anxiety, depression, and sleeplessness. Earlier this year, he and I visited his psychiatrist to make sure that he was taking them in the right combination. We had a few extra minutes at the end of the session, so I asked my father’s very Freudian psychiatrist why teenage daughters are so critical of their mothers. He said, “All that hormonal energy is coursing madly through a daughter’s body, and it becomes, for various reasons, anger at the mother. I think the daughter unconsciously senses the tremendous leverage the onset of her fertility gives her, which causes the family to start treating her with more deference. She’s the chance for the family to perpetuate itself. Her mother’s leaving this arena just as the daughter’s entering it. When they study this issue, disputes between mothers and daughters, not only does the father invariably side with the daughter”—I can’t remember my father ever doing this with my sister; my mother ruled the roost, regardless—“but so does everybody else. The genes are driving the family to protect the most fertile female. So a good deal of a girl’s anger at her mother has to do with the mixture of power she feels with the onset of fertility and the burden she feels at being the designated bearer of children.” My dad sat next to me, listening to this, nodding and mmmhuhing, elbowing me in the ribs at appropriate moments, proud of his shrink’s Olympian overview.

The Actuarial Prime of Life, or Why Children Don’t Like Spicy Food

Tolstoy, in his late 70s, said, “As I was at five, so I am now.” St. Ignatius Loyola said, “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.” Wordsworth wrote, “The Child is father of the Man.” Is the father the father of the man as well? I suppose he must be.

Aging begins immediately after the actuarial prime of life. In the United States and in most other developed countries, the actuarial prime of life is age 7. After you turn 7, your risk of dying doubles every eight years.

By the time you’re 5, your head has attained 90 percent of its mature size. By age 7, your brain reaches 90 percent of its maximum weight; by 9, 95 percent; during adolescence, 100 percent. Two percent of total body weight and 60 percent fat, the brain receives 20 percent of the blood coming from the heart and consumes 20 percent of all the oxygen in the body.

Between ages 5 and 10, your kidneys double in size to keep up with the increased metabolic wastes of the body. At ages 6 and 7, lymphoid tissues, which produce antibodies, reach a peak in size.

A toddler’s stomach is the shape of a cow’s horn; at 9, it’s the shape of a fish hook; at 12, it’s the shape of a bagpipe and has achieved adult functional maturity.

The average duration of a 6-to 10-year-old’s activity is six seconds for low-intensity activities and three seconds for high-intensity activities. “At ten,” Schopenhauer said, “Mercury is in the ascendant; at that age, a youth, like this planet, is characterized by extreme mobility within a narrow sphere, where trifles have a great effect upon him.” This is a perfect description of my father as he is and as he always has been: a perpetual 10-year-old.

Growth from birth to adolescence occurs in two distinct patterns: the first, from birth to 2 years, is one of rapid but decelerating growth; the second, from 2 years to the onset of puberty, is one of more consistent annual increments. An average 1-year-old is 30 inches tall, a 2-year-old is 35 inches, a 4-year-old is 40 inches, and an 8-year-old is 50 inches. During the elementary school years, children’s growth slows to about two inches a year. Your height relative to your peers usually doesn’t change much after age 6, and the proportions of your weight tend to remain the same as well.

Weight increase follows a similar curve. An infant doubles his or her birth weight by 5 months, triples it by 1 year, and quadruples it by 2 years. Between ages 2 and 5, you gain about the same amount of weight each year: four to five pounds. Between ages 6 and 10, your growth levels off—a lull between the rapid growth of early childhood and prepubescence. During these years, you gain about five to seven pounds per year.

Between ages 6 and 11 your head appears to enlarge, and your facial features exhibit significant changes, because of the growth of your facial bones. Your face literally grows away or out from its skull.

By age 5, the heart has quadrupled its birth size. At age 9, it’s six times its birth weight, and by puberty it’s almost ten times its birth weight. As the heart grows, it assumes a more vertical position within the thoracic cavity. The diaphragm descends, allowing more room for both cardiac action and respiratory expansion.

When you’re born, taste buds cover your mouth, with flavor sensors on the roof of your mouth, your throat, and the lateral surface of your tongue—which is why most very young children don’t like spicy food. The entire top of their oval cavity is covered with taste buds; for young children, tasting Tabasco sauce is an entirely different experience than it is for an adult. By the time you’re 10, most of these extra taste buds are gone.

The ability to exactly duplicate foreign sounds disappears after age 12.

Two to four years before puberty, most children have already attained 75 to 80 percent of their adult height and 50 percent of their adult weight. Just before the onset of puberty, the shaft and ends of your “long bones” (femur, tibia, fibula) fuse: the maturation of the skeletal system and that of the reproductive system are perfectly synchronized. What fearful symmetry to our mortal frame.

Nobody knows what causes puberty to begin.

Sex and Death (i)

Every once in a while, an egg cell becomes activated while it’s still in the ovary and starts to develop all on its own. The result, in mammals, is a teratoma. (The sperm-forming cells of the testis also produce teratomas on occasion.) The egg divides and begins the early stages of embryogenesis seemingly normally, but it fails to complete the proper developmental sequence. The embryo forms a shapeless mass of cells containing a variety of different cell types and partly formed organs: bones, skin, bits of glands, and even hair.

A teratoma can develop into a teratocarcinoma, a life-threatening cancer that will, when transplanted—in a lab experiment—from animal to animal of the same genetic strain, grow without limit until it kills its host. However, if some cells are taken from the teratocarcinoma of, for example, a mouse, and if these cancerous cells are then injected into an early-stage mouse embryo, the resulting animal will be entirely normal: the teratocarcinoma cells will be tamed by the developmental signals being produced in the early-stage embryo.

In other words, cancer cells can behave very much like the cells of an early embryo. Many of the genes responsible for cancer late in life are intimately involved in the regulation of cell growth and differentiation early in life. The genes that have such devastating effects late in life when expressed in diseases such as Alzheimer’s seem to be identical to their early life form, when they serve a useful function. In a teratocarcinoma, the germ cells become a voracious parasite of the body. The balance is lost between the goals of the body (preserving health and life) and the goals of the germ cells (reproduction).

For every cell, there’s a time to live and a time to die. Cells can die by injury or by suicide. The pattern of events in death by suicide is so orderly that the process is often called “programmed cell death,” which destroys cells that represent a threat to the integrity of the organism—for instance, cells infected with viruses, cells with DNA damage, or cancer cells. Dylan Thomas wrote (I love this line and my father abhors it),

Hoop Dream (ii)

As members of the Borel Middle School Bobcats, we worked out in a tiny gym with loose buckets and slippery linoleum and butcher-paper posters exhorting us toward conquest. I remember late practices full of wind sprints and tipping drills. One day the coach said, “Okay, gang, let me show you how we’re gonna run picks for Dave.” My friends ran around the court, passing, cutting, and screening for me. All for me. Set-plays for me to shoot from the top of the circle or the left corner—my favorite spots. It felt like the whole world was weaving to protect me, then release me.

That summer, my father had been fired from his job as publicity director for the Jewish Welfare Federation and accepted a much lower-paying job as director of the poverty program of San Mateo County. He sat in a one-room office without air-conditioning and called grocery stores, wanting to know why they didn’t honor food stamps; called restaurants, asking if, as the signs in the windows proclaimed, they were indeed equal opportunity employers. Sometimes, on weekends, he flew to Sacramento or Washington to request more money for his program. Watts rioted; Detroit burned. His constituents worshipped him. He said, “Please. I’m just doing my job.” They called him the Great White Hope and invited him to barbecues, weddings, softball games. At the softball games he outplayed everybody. The salary was $7,500 a year, but he was happy. The ghetto was his.

After school I’d walk across town, leave my books in my father’s office, then go around the block to play basketball with black kids. I developed a double-pump jump shot, which among the eighth graders I went to school with was unheard of. Rather than shooting on the way up, I tucked my knees, hung in the air a second, pinwheeled the ball, then shot on the way down. My white friends hated my new move. It seemed tough, mannered, teenaged, vaguely Negro. The more I shot like this, the more my white friends disliked me, and the more they disliked me, the more I shot like this. At the year-end assembly, I was named “best athlete,” and my father said that when I went up to accept the trophy, I even walked like a jock. At the time, I took this as gentle mockery, although I realize now he meant it as the ultimate accolade.

From kindergarten through eighth grade all I really did was play sports, think about sports, dream about sports. I learned to read by devouring mini-bios of jock stars. I learned math by computing players’ averages (and my own). At 12 I ran the 50-yard dash in six seconds, which caused kids from all over the city to come to my school and race me. During a five-on-five weave drill at a summer basketball camp, the director of the camp, a recently retired professional basketball player, got called over to watch how accurately I could throw passes behind my back; he said he could have used a point guard like me when he was playing, and he bumped me up out of my grade level. I remember once hitting a home run in the bottom of the 12th inning to win a Little League All-Star game, then coming home to lie down in my uniform in the hammock in our backyard, drink lemonade, eat sugar cookies, and measure my accomplishments against the fellows featured in the just-arrived issue of Sports Illustrated. Christ, I remember thinking, how could life possibly get any better than this?

A little too often my father likes to quote the line “Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, / Make me a child again just for to-night!” Here he is, turning backward: “School always excited me. Easy to understand why: I was a pretty good mixer, had few ‘bad’ days. I knew how to read when I entered first grade; my three older brothers, especially Phil, a columnist for the New York Sun, had seen to that. Learning how to spell was a never-ending source of delight and wonderment; it still is. And I did well after school on the running track and the softball diamond. I got a big charge out of competing against—and usually beating—my fellow students. Soon, I had friends who wanted to bask in my reflected glory.”

When he was in his mid-20s, he attended an open tryout with the Brooklyn Dodgers and lasted all the way to the final round, when someone named Van Lingle Mungo hit every pitch my father threw—onto Bedford Avenue. Undeniably, I inherited my athletic genes from him. When Natalie assisted on the goal that won her soccer team the city championship, he crowed, “The Shields bloodline!”

Bloodline to Star Power (i)

My father’s birth certificate reads “Milton Shildcrout.” His military record says “Milton P. Schildcrout” (he had no middle name; he made it up). When he changed his name in 1946 to “Shields,” the petition listed both “Shildkrout” and “Shildkraut.” His brother Abe used “Shildkrout” his sister Fay’s maiden name was “Schildkraut.” Who cares? I do. I want to know whether I’m related to Joseph Schildkraut, who played Otto Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank and won an Academy Award in 1938 for his portrayal of Alfred Dreyfus in The Life of Emile Zola.

I grew up under the distinct impression that it was simply true—the actor was my father’s cousin—but now my father is considerably more equivocal: “There is the possibility that we’re related,” he’ll say, “but I wouldn’t know how to establish it.” Or: “Do I have definite proof that he was a cousin of ours? No.” Or: “My brother Jack bore a strong resemblance to him; he really did.” From a letter: “Are we really related, the two families? Can’t say for certain. What’s the legend I’ve fashioned over the years and what’s solid, indisputable fact? I don’t know.” “We could be related to the Rudolph/Joseph Schildkraut family—I honestly believe that.”

In 1923, when my father was 13, his father, Samuel, took him to a Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side to see Rudolph Schildkraut substitute for the legendary Jacob Adler in the lead role of a play called Der Vilder Mensch (The Wild Man). Rudolph was such a wild man: he hurtled himself, gripping a rope, from one side of the stage to the other. After the play, which was a benefit performance for my grandfather’s union—the International Ladies Garment Workers—my grandfather convinced the guard that he was related to Rudolph Schildkraut, and he and my father went backstage.

In a tiny dressing room, Rudolph removed his makeup and stage costume, and he and Samuel talked. According to my father, Rudolph said he was born in Romania, and later in his acting career he went to Vienna and Berlin. (“Schildkraut” is of German-Russian derivation. “Schild” means “shield” “kraut” means “cabbage.” We’re protectors and defenders of cabbage.) He and his wife and son, Joseph, came to New York around 1910, went back to Berlin a few years later, and then returned to the United States permanently in 1920. (Joseph Schildkraut’s 1959 memoir, My Father and I, confirms that these dates are correct, which only proves that my father probably consulted the book before telling me the story.) Samuel asked Rudolph whether he knew anything about his family’s antecedents—how and when they came to Austria. Rudolph said he knew little or nothing. His life as an actor took him to many places, and his life and interest were the theater and its people. The two men spoke in Yiddish for about 10 minutes; my father and grandfather left. What little my father couldn’t understand, my grandfather explained to him later.

“For weeks,” my father told me, “I regaled my friends and anybody who would listen that my father and I had visited the great star of the Austrian, German, and Yiddish theater in America—Rudolph Schildkraut. What’s more, I said, he was probably our cousin. Nothing in the conversation between my father and Rudolph Schildkraut would lead me or anybody else to come to that conclusion for a certainty, but I wanted to impress friends and neighbors and quickly added Rudolph and Joseph Schildkraut to our family. I said, ‘They’re probably second cousins.’ Some days I made them ‘first cousins.’ Rudolph Schildkraut—as you know, Dave—went on to Hollywood and had a brief but successful motion picture career. I told everybody he was a much better actor than his countryman Emil Jannings.”