A .pdf of the essay is available here, (right click to save.)

Or you can read it here.

Sadly, this wasn’t the first time I’d caught them together. For the past month, it had been happening two or three nights a week, including weekends. Sometimes I was even in the house! Had they any shame? Nope, came the answer, clear as the blinking alarm clock next to the bed, they did not. I had delayed the inevitable long enough. So with pure intentions, but mixed feelings, I kissed my son’s forehead and left to go sleep in his room.

As I curled around the cat-sized warm spot he had left behind in his small bed, I felt the plastic knights lurking in the sheets running sorties against my kneecaps. It was not going to be a great night’s sleep.
And so my mind turned. And turned. This was just perfect. You fall in love with your dream girl, move to San Francisco, marry her, have a child together, and then, at the age of three, the boy—sleepwalking through his Oedipal debut—displaces you from your rightful position in bed. It was tragedy. It was farce. It was fatherhood. And there would be no intermission.

As I lay there another fearsome truth revealed itself: the love my wife and I shared with one another had created something that literally got between us. It was like having a fire hydrant bolted in the middle of your bed. Resistance would be futile. And feudal.

This shift in family dynamics is disorienting to even the most stable of male psyches. What father hasn’t walked up at the end of a long day to his house/grass hut/igloo and been greeted at the front door by a little feller whose first response is:

“Where’s Mom?”

The mature thing to do would be to register a jolt of sympathy for the fact that the other male in my household was struggling—just like me!—with a strong urge to be with Mom. And there was a tiny jolt allocated on his behalf. On the other hand, only a fool fails to recognize true competition.

I tossed in my son’s bed. What else was in my blind spot? The mind reeled: “First a blind spot, then a bald spot. Then you’re dead.” It sounded like a fortune cookie written by Samuel Beckett.

How do men get themselves into this situation? Very slowly. For starters no alien takes over our bodies for nine months, our feet don’t swell, we never stand naked in front of a floor length mirror howling, “I. LOOK. HUGE!” in order to signify to our (admittedly) slow, (admittedly) reptilian brains that something is coming. Men are selfish, and selfishness is best preserved in a cocoon of ignorance. Preferably one made of beer and pork ribs. So we hang onto the coat-tails of someone else’s biology, winking and cooing supportively, without the foggiest idea of what is about to happen.

Only later do we realize that, in addition to all the other things that fatherhood requires—patience, sacrifice, the ability to change diapers with one hand while eating a piece of pizza—we must add the notion of second place. Silver Medals all around.

I asked a female friend about this. I wanted a woman’s perspective. If I’d asked my wife she would have told me everything was going to be alright. She would straddle the fault line with more finesse than a Swiss diplomat. My friend wouldn’t be so gentle. She had children. She could provide feminine insight that transcended my own beer-n-pork rib cocoon.

“Oh yeah,” she said when I brought up the subject of silver medals, “that’s a totally real thing.”

Oh boy.

“And I have to tell you, I loved it.”

Oh no.

“The snuggling and the nuzzling. To be honest there’s a part of me that really enjoyed my son’s attention. It’s not sexual, it’s not even sensual. It’s animal.” Her eyes drifted a bit, as if recalling a particularly far away cosmic mother/son snuggle that a father wouldn’t understand. “And . . . there’s a little part of me that also enjoyed the hunger in my husband’s eyes. Both for my attention, but also for my son’s.”

Oh dear God.

“You know, before my son was born I would have nightmares about my husband drowning and I would dive in to save him. But about a week after our son was born I started to have nightmares about my son instead. Funny, huh?”

Hilarious.

It’s four a.m. now. If I hurry up I can get just enough sleep to make the day bearable. Hurry up and sleep—the motto of new parent’s everywhere.

I reach for the shrinking ball of warmth, now the size of a quarter. The paranoid part of my mind is tired. In fact, it’s selfishly asleep. Which is good, because the words that come are my father’s words, who offered them whenever I did something that amused him, or bewitched him, or caused him, I see now, to contemplate his perch in the cosmos and the ineffable mystery of why fathers even have sons in the first place. He would quote a bit of old poetry:

“The child is father to the man…”

Which, when you are the child, sounds like a ridiculous adult riddle unworthy of unraveling. But when you are the man, it doesn’t need to be unraveled, because the answer is lying right in front of you, next to the women you love. The dead-of-night idea comes slowly, but it comes: this curious earthly rotation we all take turns on is made real—is made indelible—by the appearance of the next generation.

This same epiphany must have dawned on my father, and his father, and your father, on and on, back through the family tree of sleepless nights.

I wish I could remember the rest of the poem, but it is getting very late now. Finally time to rest. Reason and memory both fading. Led into the darkness by the last of the plastic knights.

*A pdf version of this essay is available here

RODES FISHBURNE’s first novel, Going to See the Elephant, will be published by Bantam Dell in December 2008. For more information, or to sign up for his mailing list, visit: www.RodesFishburne.com

My first novel, GOING TO SEE THE ELEPHANT, will be published by Bantam Dell, a division of Random House in late 2008.

To find out more details about the book, including official publication date, how to request me for a reading, and how to get a signed copy, sign up for my quarterly email update by clicking here.

To read more about my background, click on the “About Me” tab above.

To read other essays or articles check out the “Featured Stories” on the right hand column or the archives.

You can reach me at: rodesmail@gmail.com

Very few other people in the world have the patience, discipline, and flat out strangeness to sit alone for hours at a time in order to live in their heads.

Do you realize there’s an entire category of people in the world who have never lived in their heads? Even for a moment? These are called politicians and they are doing the best they can.

By the way, there’s a great song by Lyle Lovett called, “I Live in My Own Mind” which sounds like his ode to weird writer’s everywhere… here’s a video of him singing that song.

Could it be an accident that some of the best sandwiches I’ve ever tasted have been accompanied by really great pickles?

It could not.

Could there be a hidden corollary between quality of food served and quality of pickle served?

There could.

Not only that, but based on years of rigorous research, I can reveal that the logic embedded in the Pickle Principle can be used to make decisions about other things, such as “Investing,” “Religion,” “Love,” as well as really important subjects like “Gambling.”

But first, a word about bad pickles…Bad pickles, like bad actors, bad breath, and bad women come in all shapes and sizes. Here are the most frequent offenders.

THE FLOPPY SLICED PICKLE. This pickle can often be found at family reunion buffet tables, or accompanying your typical bowling alley burger. If you spot this pickle on the premises, order the popcorn and call it a night.

THE ANOREXIC PICKLE SPEAR. A favorite of deli’s trying to masquerade their stingy approach to buying quality ingredients. If you spot this pickle, consider yourself warned.

For those of you with a degree in Higher Maths, the Pickle Principle formula looks like this

Now, onto three places in San Francisco that adhere, and prosper, from the Pickle Principle.

Moishe’s Pippic. An all around great deli with a big time “San Francisco Secret” special only available on Fridays: a tremendous beef brisket sandwich. Need I add that a great pickle is part of the experience?

425 Hayes Street
Neighborhood: Hayes Valley
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 431-2440

The Submarine Center. Possibly the best toasted sandwich in the lower 48.

Is it also the greatest pickle?

There is none finer.

820 Ulloa Street
Neighborhood: West Portal
San Francisco, CA 94127
(415) 564-1455

Lucca Delicatessen. A true neighborhood deli, in operation since 1929, that still serves little old ladies their fresh Prosciutto di San Daniele, as well as a very solid turkey or roast beef sandwich. Very fresh ingredients including, of course, the pickle.

2120 Chestnut Street
Neighborhood: Marina
San Francisco, CA 94123
(415) 921-7873
luccadeli.com/

If you’ve seen the “Pickle Principle” in action drop me a line at rodesmail@gmail.com