Truckin' with Sam

Lee Gutkind

Description

After years of thinking he'd never have kids, Lee Gutkind became a father at forty-seven and, following his divorce, soon found himself taking over more and more of the primary care responsibilities for his son, Sam. As one of a growing number of "old new dads" (recent studies have shown that one in ten children are born to fathers over forty), Gutkind realized that he faced challenges—both mental and physical—not faced by younger dads, not the least of which was how to bond with a son who was so much younger than himself. For the past five years, Gutkind's approach to this challenge has been to spend several weeks of every summer "truckin'" with Sam, a term they define as a metaphor for spontaneity, a lack of restriction: "Truckin' means that you can what you want to do sometimes; you don't always need to do what's expected."

What began as long, cross-country journeys in a pick-up truck, including one memorable trip up the Alaska-Canadian Highway en route to a writer's conference in Homer, Alaska, have in more recent years ranged farther afield, to Europe, Australia, and Tibet. Whether listening to rock and roll music, entertaining themselves with their secret jokes and code words, fishing for halibut, or fighting over tuna fish sandwiches and how best to butter one's toast, Lee and Sam have learned to respect one another. In the process of their travels and their adventures, Lee has also come to grips with the downside of middle age and the embarassment of "senior moments," while Sam has inevitably begun to assert himself and shape his own life. Interspersed with Sam's own observations and journal entries, Truckin' with Sam is an honest, moving, and often hilarious account of one father's determination to bond with his son, a spontaneous travelogue that will appeal to old dads, new dads, and women who want to know more about how dads (and sons) think and behave.
Preface: "What's All This Blood, Dad? I Don't Understand!"
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Africa—July 2009

Part I. The Open Road
Portal—2004
The Evolution of Truckin'
Chasing Madness
Trapped at the Border
Listening to the Road 
Wet Run
The Jack London of Rock and Roll
Hello?
Artful Charlie
The Dyl
Anticipation
Tuna Fish Trouble
Sam's Dangerous Disease
Another Border Crossing
Buttering Toast
Father Knows Best?
The Rope Test
The "Make My Day" Syndrome
The Red Bike
Hakuna Matata

Part II . Religious Experiences
Laowai—March 2008
Creation Elation
Moshe Dann
Radio Shack
Rose
Aunt Hattie
Getting Lost and Losing It
The Big Picture
Antelope Galloping
Paul and Barbara
Bears on the Brain
Winning (and Losing) the Race
The Summit
Old Men
The Gödel Connection

Afterword by Sam Gutkind
Uhuru
Truckin': A Final Word, by Lee Gutkind

Sujets

• Vie de famille
• Parentalité et Éducation des Enfants
• Travel writing
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438432618
• Langue: English

Extrait

Portions of the chapters on Africa were originally published in the Travel Section of the Washington Post, September 20, 2009.
Portions of this book are adapted from my earlier book Forever Fat: Essays by the Godfather (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). Grateful acknowledgment is made.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2010 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Kelli W. LeRoux
Marketing by Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Gutkind, Lee.
     Truckin’ with Sam : a father and son, the Mick and the Dyl, rockin’ and rollin’, on the road / Lee Gutkind with Sam Gutkind.
                p.   cm.
     ISBN 978-1-4384-3259-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Alaska Highway—Description and travel. 2. Alaska—Description and travel. 3. British Columbia—Description and travel. 4. Yukon—Description and travel. 5. Gutkind, Lee—Travel—Alaska Highway. 6. Gutkind, Sam—Travel—Alaska Highway. 7. Fathers and sons—United States—Biography. 8. Fathers and sons—Alaska Highway. 9. Pickup trucks—Alaska Highway. I. Gutkind, Sam. II. Title. III. Title: Trucking with Sam.
     F1060.92.G88 2010
     917.9804'52092--dc22
                                                                                                                                            2009051679
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

We wish to dedicate this book
to Gary Paulsen,
the author and adventurer,
who inspired our truckin’ odyssey.

Preface
“What’s All This Blood, Dad? I Don’t Understand!”
I T MAY SEEM ODD —counterintuitive, even—to preface a book about father-son bonding with a story about discovering my mother’s menstrual blood. My editor, in fact, initially advised against it. But sometimes insights come in the most unlooked-for places. So, here goes:
I am seven years old and living in a tiny walk-up apartment with my parents in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I see in the toilet one morning what seems, to me, to be a bucket of blood. I panic.
My father left for work an hour ago, but my mother has been in the bathroom most recently, so I run out into the kitchen, where I think she is making breakfast, screaming, “Ma! Ma!” The radio is on, with one of her favorite programs, “Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club,” but she’s not there. So that increases my panic level to full-blast. She said she would be in the kitchen. And at this time of day she is always in the kitchen, and so I expect her to be in the kitchen, and she is not in the kitchen. So now she is missing. And I am thinking, “Is my mother lying somewhere a bloody mess? Is she dead?”
She’s not in her bedroom, nor in my bedroom, nor in our little living room. No blood spots anywhere I look, either. I check the closets. I peek under the beds. I look in the drawers and the cupboards, just to be thorough. No Ma. No blood.
So I run downstairs and out onto the porch. And thank God, there’s Ma, talking to Mrs. Doris Lindenbaum, her best friend, at the time. My mother’s best friends come and go in cycles. They are in and out—and in—as is Doris Lindenbaum now, the best friend of the moment.
And of all of the women I remember as friends of my Ma, Doris Lindenbaum is my favorite because she has a kaleidoscope of blue lines on her legs, which are called, says my mother, “varicose.” When my mother has poker games at our house, usually the first Thursday of the month, I sneak into the kitchen and, when no one is looking, crawl down under the table, cluttered with chips and cards and coffee and Coke, and I study the lines of varicose that Doris owns.
My mother’s other best friends have varicose, too, but Doris beats out everybody. Doris is tops. There’s a map of the world on Doris’ legs—snaking every which way—from ankle to knee, to that place way up under the tunnel of her dress where those dark, alluring mysteries lurk. At some point a few years later, I will learn from an older boy to refer to this secret under-the-dress spot as “Joy City.” But even when I am only seven, I know deep in my heart that there is something warm and wonderful going on up there, under that dress, that will someday yield unforgettable pleasure.
So I see Doris Lindenbaum on the porch that day. It is early. But I don’t have the patience to wait to say to Mrs. Lindenbaum, “Excuse me,” or “How are you doing, Mrs. Lindenbaum? How is good old Marc?” Marc is her son who is in my grade at school. An odd sickly kid; gets beaten up all the time. Or, “What are you doing here so early in the morning, Mrs. Lindenbaum? Will you join us for breakfast?”
And neither do I have the patience or the good sense to say to my Ma, “Can I talk with you privately, Ma?” or “Ma, can you spare a moment? I’m a little upset and I need to ask you about a few matters pertaining to a bucket of blood I found this morning in the toilet.” You know, something preliminary.
All I know is that my mother may be bleeding, losing all that blood, and if she’s bleeding, she may be dying, and if she’s dying, I am going to be a boy without a mom, which is going to make me upset and change my life.
I have a dad. But I don’t want to be with my dad if my Ma isn’t there to protect me, because my dad, he’s alright sometimes, but he tends to get violent when things don’t go well, and even when things do go well, I am, in addition to being the only child, his designated family punching bag, whenever he gets those urges. And my dad, he gets a lot of urges. Upsets real easy.
Unless, of course—and this is something that occurs to me as I momentarily hesitate on the porch where my Ma and Mrs. Lindenbaum are talking very quietly—women pee blood. I have never seen a woman pee before, I suddenly realize. I have never seen a woman’s penis before, either. I haven’t the slightest idea if women own penises, and if they do, if those penises are like my penis or Marc Lindenbaum’s penis or gigantic like my father’s penis, which, compared to my little weenie, is thick as a tree trunk. Or what if they poop blood, those women? An additional possibility.
I know that women are different than men. Men pee yellow. I pee yellow. My father pees yellow. Everybody I have ever known, all the boys and men, pee yellow—yellow or whitish-yellow. The bus driver who takes me to synagogue Sunday school tells his favorite joke about the book he is reading, “Yellow Streams” by the famous author I. P. Daily. I assume that I. P. Daily is a man. And I get the joke, which is kind of funny the first few times you hear it. But then there’s this blood in the toilet. What’s with that? Yet my mother looks perfectly healthy right now. Do women pee red, I wonder, as I stand out there on the porch with Mrs. Lindenbaum, and I am yelling, “Ma! Ma?”
Then this next thing runs through my head, out of the blue: Women have those big soft balls on their chests that we boys in school call bazoongies. When I have seen them, my mother’s bazoongies are usually covered in elastic, and they’ve got points that make them look like torpedoes. They are very interesting, those torpo-zoongies. “Why don’t men have bazoongies?” I ask my father.
My father sells orthopedic shoes for a living, so he is considerably more comfortable discussing bunions and metatarsals than torpo-zoongies. I am the only kid in school who knows more about longitudinal arches and ingrown toenails than Christopher Columbus discovering the world is round and the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock. I am intimate with the workings of the fluoroscope, which provides an x-ray of your foot to make certain your new shoes fit. In my closet, I have Buster Brown scuff toes for school, Poll Parrot wing tips for dress-up, U.S. Keds for softball, rubbers for rain, and four-buckle arctic boots for snow. “It is not respectful to use that word,” my father says.
“Bazoongies?” I say, after a while. “Torpo-zoongies?”
My father is very uncomfortable with anything, he says, is not “on the straight and narrow.” His definition of the “straight and narrow” is rigid—to the point of abolishing all curves—maybe especially on women. And he is not known for his sense of humor. Fathers must maintain a position of maturity and dignity, he insists. “You mean ‘breasts,’” he says.
“Why do women have breasts and men not?”
“Men do have breasts—small breasts,” my father says. “And nipples.”
“Nipples?”
“Nipples are at the very tip of the breasts, like a little button.”
“But what’s these big breasts? Those pointed pillows?”
“Breasts,” my father says—and here he pauses for dramatic emphasis. There seem to be stars in his eyes. “Breasts are beautiful things.”
This is exactly what my father says when he tells me about the word “fuck.” This is three or four years later, and I ask him what the word, “Fuck” means.
“Fuck,” he says, pausing and looking away from me, “Fuck is a beautiful thing.”
“Fuck is beautiful? Then why I am put in detention because I and my friends have ‘fuck’-yelling contests to see who yells the word ‘fuck’ the loudest in public? Why do people get mad when you call them a ‘fucker’?”
“That’s a different story,” my father says.
“‘Fuck’ is different than ‘fucker’?”
“Someday you will understand,” he says.
This stays with me my whole life. Something I never forget, like the anticipation of visiting Joy City. Fuck is a beautiful thing. Fuck is different than fucker. The act itself is good and the perpetrator of the act is bad. Fatherly wisdom at its finest—sort of. And in retrospect, as I look back on my life, I