Now is when I miss being the father of small children.
The first pang came when we wandered into the pumpkin festival at Penn State’s botanic garden a week ago.
Such events were my world for so long. These days, with three kids in their 20s, I know hardly any parents of little ones anymore, which means that I have almost no contact with little ones themselves.
I miss them. I miss how funny they are. I also miss their intensity. Children at play are like Madison Bumgarner on the mound (see this year’s World Series). All business. Unless they’re romping in a pile of straw, like they were at the pumpkin festival. Or leaping into piles of leaves, as I saw three little girls doing in the glorious gold light of a recent October afternoon. That was my second pang. Raking isn’t nearly as fun without kids re-scattering the heaps.
This is my 19th Halloween in Happy Valley. The first one was memorable. I had rolled into town around the middle of October. My family joined me on the 31st – the day we could occupy our house in the Highlands. The furniture wasn’t due until the next day so our first order of business was to take the kids trick-or-treating, which was a great way to meet the neighbors. Bedless, the five of us spent our first night in the new digs camping on our living room floor.
Halloween 2 was the year we got pranked. A neighbor rang the doorbell and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. I saw that my unlocked car had been rolled down the driveway and “parked” with its rear wheels on the curb, front wheels on the street, driver’s door open. No damage, though. And no more leaving the car unlocked.
Then came a series of Halloweens when the dining room of our house became Dad’s Costume Workshop. I’m generally not the artsy-craftsy type but at trick-or-treat time I would be seized by a mad compulsion to make ingenious get-ups. One year I turned a gold shopping bag into King Tut’s headdress, striping the gold with blue masking tape and sawing off the head and neck of a plastic dinosaur to use as the cobra on Tut’s forehead.
Another year I blew up head shots of my kids to life-size and stuck them upside down near the bottom of large poster boards, then cut out holes for their real heads near the top of the boards so they could trick-or-treat as playing cards. I used a similar idea on yet another Halloween to substitute my daughter’s head for George Washington’s head on an out-sized dollar bill. I was hugely proud of these efforts, but they paled beside the costumes fabricated by the Swansons around the block, whose creations routinely featured battery-powered lights or dry ice-generated steam.
When readers respond to my critiques of the more cult-like aspects of life in Happy Valley by urging me to leave if I find it so odious, these are some of the sweet memories of raising my family here that I want to cite as proof that I don’t dislike State College at all.
Or I can cite Oleksandr Boichenko, a Ukrainian writer who spoke on campus the other day. Prof. Michael Naydan read an English translation of Boichenko’s essay about his hometown in western Ukraine, Chernivtsi, which happens to be home to a large university. Here’s how it starts:
“Among certain, one may say, narrow circles of my limited countrymen, the notion exists that I don’t really love Chernivtsi much at all. That’s a lie. I do love it. But not all the time.”
The title of Boichenko’s piece tells us all we need to know about how he feels about a place he often bashes. He calls it “Out of Love.” I “poke a stick in the lion’s cage,” as a friend puts it, in that same spirit of wanting a good place to be better.
What does it mean to like or dislike a place, anyway? After I’d been in Ukraine a couple of months back in 2012, a friend asked me how I felt about it. The question didn’t mean very much to me by then. I was living and working there. On days that went well, I liked it a lot. On days that didn’t go well, I liked it less. This had less to do with the nature of life in Ukraine than with the nature of life in general.
If I were lonely or un- or under-employed here in Happy Valley, I would probably be itching to leave. But I’m not any of those things. So I’m fairly content. On glorious gold October afternoons I’m damn near blissed out.
As for the pangs, they’re nature’s way of telling me I’m ready for grandchildren.
Popular Stories:
Eat Fresh: New Grant Allows Farmers’ Market to Expand Reach
Victim in Street Brawl Punched from Behind, Suffers Facial Fractures
Penn State BOT Votes Against Reopening Freeh Report in Heated Meeting
Congressional Election Spotlight: Glenn Thompson on Jobs, Energy & Education
SCASD Performs Above State Academic Averages, Continues to Seek Improvement
Penn State Football: Athletic Director Sandy Barbour Responds To Officiating Controversy
Penn State Football: Nittany Lions Hoping Punting Woes Will End With Open Competition
Penn State Football: Dieffenbach Prepares For Possible Weekend Return
