On the Great Pattern: Children are put to bed and woken up by their parents

We know, from our childhoods, the Great Pattern: Children are put to bed and woken up by their parents.

Yet, we also know, from our childhoods, the lacuna in the Great Pattern: the adults nap while the children are awake.

In Chekhov’s The Steppe, a boy, Yegorushka, is travelling in a cart across the Russian steppe with his Uncle, Kuzmichov, a merchant, and his Uncle’s partner, a priest, Father Khristofor. Yegorushka is going to school, and enters the story in tears, as he is going to be parted from his mother. But the ride in the brischka – “one of those antediluvian carriages in which only merchants’ clerks, cattle dealers and impecunious priests travel in Russia these days” – soon folds in Yegorushka’s attention. A ride like this is an event for the boy, in a way that it is not for the men or the driver, for whom the routine is under the sign of functionality. The ride is a “between”, a means: while for the boy it is a sort of living thing, its own thing.

They come, in the afternoon, to a place where there are a few trees, a spring, and a pond. They have the coachman, Deniska – who is really a teen – stop, spread out rugs, eat, and tell stories. And then, magically, it is time to nap.

“Silence fell. All that could be heard was the snorting and champing of the horses and the snores of the sleepers. Some way off a solitary lapwing wailed and there was an occasional squeak from the three snipe that had flown up to see if the uninvited guests had left. The stream softly lisped and gurgled, but none of these sounds broke the silence or stirred the lifeless air – on the contrary, they made nature still drowsier.”

Here we are briefly plunged in the lacuna. Here Yegorushka is the one awake, the one on guard, so to speak, the one who is solitary.

The Steppe is not structured so as to clobber the reader with symbols. It is structured around a certain animism that takes in humans, horses, water and the “ride”. The nap of the adults is, as well, a living thing quite apart from the contingent property of the adult travelers.

Myself, when I was a child in a house full of children and two adults – the house I grew up in in Metro Atlanta – I was quite familiar with adult nap time. I can look back on the my old man in the living room – which is sometimes where, say on a summer Saturday afternoon, he might have stretched himself on the rug – and recognize a few facts. Facts that I see now, as a man myself, one older than my Dad taking a few zzzs as the sunlight and the little circle of a road around which which our house and lawn clustered with other little suburban houses and laws did its thing. Heat, a blue sky with white billowing clouds crossing it, the cars in the driveways, and the contrast with the temperature control in this room, in all the rooms, and the heat which we kids knew from our feet, even, when we would go out barefoot and hop on the asphalt of the road and which made one of the ecological differences between the metro Atlanta of the Jim Crow/Dixie times of porches and heat and the Dekalb County of draped windows and the A/C humming away, with the unit usually in the back yard in that epoch of the South joining modern times.

I can’t remember what the rug looked like in toto, but I do remember its feel, a bit itchy, on my face as I lay down on it too. My Mom, Dad, and us kids – although what we were really there to do is not nap as much as bug my parents. Eventually, we would tire of this and do something else. There was pingpong to play in the basement, or darts, or there was swimming to do at the neighborhood pool (hence the bare feet on the hot pavement, or flip flops or sneakers without the socks), and like Yegorushka we had a vaguely animistic feeling about the whole surround. The street was alive, the cars were alive, the games were alive, in some way.

My parents are both dead now. And I, as a father, can appreciate much more than I did back then that life was exhausting. Five kids, with five incessant needs – for food, clothes, shelter, birthday and Christmas presents, school supplies, and all the intangibles: love and affection, attention, the need to talk, laugh, argue, push, pull, throw, compete… And the two adults having a nap time in a living room that symbolized, in the America of 1969, that life was getting better. All that structure! On affordable mortgage payments!

Of course, now that structure would be regarded, in America, as intolerably small. Houses have grown much bigger, the price of houses has gone through the roof of said houses, the cars cost as much, now, as the houses did back then, and the ability to raise five kids on a median income is a rare magic trick. The house where I grew up in the neighborhood where I grew up all downscaled drastically. The last time I drove by it, the house, which had evidently been rented by a meth dealer, was a blackened ruin. There were no ghosts napping in the living room, as the living room didn’t exist anymore, save as a charcoaled stub. And my boyhood animism is, if not gone, a very attenuated thing – although sometimes, sometimes walking down the street with my boy, sometimes I feel it out there, around me, saving me from a numbness that I fear could get me in its grasp, could take the ridiculousness out of me.

And what is more ridiculous than a ridiculous man without ridiculousness? It is a common type, and the curse of our times.