Pinterest Pornography, The Endless Interstate 5, Paul Simon’s Graceland, And The Country of Adulthood
This month was overweighted with Events of Significance. There was my 39th birthday, Zac’s 31st birthday, Arthur and Beatrice’s birthdays (7 and 9, respectively), and Mother’s Day. Several friend had birthdays, too, and others, new babies. The last of my divorce paperwork finalized. It was also the end of the school year, the beginning of summer, a time to write a lot of “thank you and goodbye” notes to teachers and coaches. I hardly had time to think big thoughts about one thing before another occurred, hardly time to think at all between last-minute trips to buy birthday balloons and Mother’s Day cards and 12 matching picture frames for baby shower decor.
The day after school ended, we drove up to Humboldt Redwoods State Park to go camping. Camping in Humboldt has become a family tradition (we named our cat “Southfork Honeydew” after the freeway exit for our campsite). Every June we go to Humboldt; every January, to Colorado. Camping under redwoods, skiing under aspen trees, bookends to our arid L.A. life.
We camped for five nights and then drove home on my birthday, 600 miles down the 101 and the 5. I picked up the driving in Santa Rosa, Zac dozed off in the seat beside me. Beatrice was reading The Secret Garden, Arthur was reading Harry Potter, William was working through his new coloring book, intently and methodically, the way he does everything. Inspired by a recent Twitter thread, I turned on Paul Simon’s Graceland.
Driving through the Bay Area, a place I lived for many important years many years ago, on the last birthday of my third decade, was already overweighted with significance. Turning on Graceland was the emotional equivalent of taking a second edible because you’re pretty sure the first one isn’t working.
Like many people from my generation, I have a profound emotional reaction to Graceland. Graceland was the album our parents played on road trips, at parties we overheard from our bedrooms, Paul Simon’s enervated voice strafed by raucous bursts of adult laughter. The album came out in 1986, when I was seven years old; we had it on cassette. My father would play it while he and I drove around Los Angeles together running errands. I remember listening to “That Was Your Mother” in the parking lot of the old Bullocks on Wilshire Boulevard, Simon singing to his son, “You are the burden of my generation/I sure do love you/let’s get that straight.” The venerable department store had just closed, or was soon closing — in my mawkish memory, the front door is roughly boarded up and crossed with heavy chains, the parking lot stirred with wind-blown trash, a feeling of something good ending.
Adulthood was a country and Graceland was the national anthem. Adulthood was where my father lived, and I wanted so much to be there with him. In an old essay on adulthood for The Nervous Breakdown, I said of my parents: “I empathised with their adultness: the fretful unease, the constant low-level tiredness like a parasitic infection.” But though I felt I understood adulthood, I couldn’t access it. I could see it in the indifferent color of waiting room chairs, in the break room at my dad’s office, stuffy and overly illuminated, and I could hear it in Simon’s voice, rueful with a sort of resigned weariness a child could mistake for wisdom.
In an introduction I wrote for S.P. Tenhoff’s excellent short story “Liability,” I wrote of “the twin poles of adult melancholy: things keep happening, nothing ever happens.” As a child it seemed that middle age was a timeless place where everyone was old but not getting any older. In Graceland, the past is a distant memory, the future will just be more of the same. Everyone is traveling, but no one is getting anywhere.
I’ve made the drive along the 5 from San Francisco to Los Angeles so many times that I can recite the name of every exit along the way. I know every mile, starting with the Bay Area’s bullying interchanges that buffet you from lane to lane, left exit to right exit, unexpected glimpses of gray-blue water on every side, like stars in your eyes between blows. Then hours of flitting between impassive 18-wheelers past Central California’s orderly mechanized farms and bizarre, hectoring signs about water policy, white-knuckling the steering wheel through the constant indifferent wind.
I listened to Simon sing “my traveling companion is nine years old” right as Beatrice turned nine. From the backseat I could hear the particular quality her breathing takes when she’s reading. The children’s birthdays hit me much harder than my own. There’s an entire genre of Pinterest quotes, manipulative and scolding, reminding you that someday your children will go away and leave you. (I wrote about this a bit years ago, “You Have Plenty of Time to Love Them Later.) The most infamous is about the last time you will hold your children before they grow up and don’t need you anymore. I found it just now on a blog under the leering headline “The parenting poem GUARANTEED to make you cry”: “One day you will carry them on your hip, then set them down, And never pick them up that way again.” And it did indeed make me cry. It makes me livid because it works. It’s so stupid and mean and it works every single time.
These quotes are true emotional pornography, and they work even when you know they shouldn’t, in the same way the most perverse thought can turn you on even as it repulses you. If I ever needed to cry on cue, I know I could summon tears in an instant by thinking about this stupid “poem,” even as I recognize how cruel it is to chide someone who’s already exhausted from dragging a dead-weight toddler through the preschool parking lot that she better enjoy it, because someday she’ll wish she could feel one more time the pain of two small rubber rain boots kicking her in the thigh.
The miracle of the 5 is that you do get home eventually. The drive is long, monotonous, the distance to Los Angeles never seems to get any shorter. Then at last the Grapevine, the gateway to the L.A. basin! The Grapevine has never enjoyed a nice day, it is always sun-scorched or ice-driven, raw in every season, and it dumps you down at last into the city I love.
Next year I’ll be 40. I got there, too, gradually and almost imperceptibly. Enough life happened — nothing particularly momentous, and yet the sum of it does feel a little bit like wisdom.
I’m glad we can live here together, my father and I, citizens of the same country. Someday my children will live here, too, and we’ll be neighbors then, all of us together, and I won’t pick them up then so we’ll walk side by side through the long, slow valley of middle age that empties finally into Graceland.
