20140710.0808

Sherwood Cottage stands amid the rain as I write this. Once again, the heavens have opened up, pouring out life-giving fluid onto Mother Earth and making the weather the end of a typical pornographic scene. It is different than it was when I first came to this part of the world right around a year ago; then, the grass was not so green as it is today and is like to be tomorrow, for there had not been as much rain. I do not know if the area is still in drought, but I know that it is far less so now than it has been. The rivers are still low, but they are actually rivers now instead of ditches with trickles of water flowing through them. It is an improvement, even if it means I will have to mow the lawn again.

I rarely mowed while living in The City. It is not a thing that is much done there; few have grass to mow, and even those who do (such as my wife and I did) have not a lot. My wife usually took care of the grassy bit of the part of Brooklyn in which we lived; the concrete slab was mine to tend. But things are different here. The "traditional" gender roles which we frustrate this summer demand that I be the one pushing the lawnmower and tending to its air filter so that it can continue to run despite the dust that still often kicks up. I am enough of a product of my upbringing and subject enough to popular opinion that I feel compelled to do so--aside from the terms of the lease which demand that the task be done, although not by whom.

It would seem that my struggle with negotiating the purportedly traditional masculinity of my upbringing as a member of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant working class and my later-assumed identity as a scholar of the academic humanities is ongoing. Finding the balance between the type of responsible, ethical adulthood to which my education leads me and the best patterns of behavior to be inherited from the concepts of manhood emergent among the dominant popular culture of the early to mid-twentieth century American Midwest is still not easy; I find myself unable to relinquish either, the one because I know in my mind that it is right, the other because I know it in my heart, even as I see the problems in both. (One tends to inaction because of the impossibility of oppression, while the other tends to overaction because of the unconcern for oppression.)

Thus I remain as I am, not unlike Claudius's "man to double business bound" even if I try to neglect neither. The tension can be productive; it forces me to consider things in certain ways, and that consideration often yields a better path than reflexive following of either. I can hope that it will end up leading to a kind of adulthood I will not be ashamed to teach my daughter. She will have enough problems without the burden of poor models to follow at home...