I just finished reading David Giffels’s All the Way Home, which I’ll soon be reviewing for a different publication. It’s a memoir of a man who, with his pregnant wife and infant child, buys a falling-down mansion and begins trying to make it a home, with minimal help from contractors and maximal stress on his relationship with his wife and son. The house is his white whale, as he notes — to the extent that at one point it actually tries to swallow his leg — and the book is very consciously about Giffels process of trying to sort out his place in the world as a man, among other things (other things: crazy old ladies and how they may have gotten that way, the sadness and anger and confusion of miscarriages, how to fail at getting squirrels out of the attic with a Stratocaster, ghosts). He becomes obsessed with the restoration — an inherited condition for him, apparently — partly out of a desire to fulfill his obligations to his family, partly out of a need to sometimes avoid being an active participant in his family, and figures out how the former somehow leads to the latter while the latter prevents the former from happening. And it’s funny, did I mention that?
It is really quite good, and if I had a mind to I could quote randomly from almost every second page or so with Giffels’ worthwhile observations about the virtues and difficulties of trying to be a grown-up man. But one passage towards the end is like windex on a plaster-dusted mirror for any guy who’s ever struggled to explain why the answer to the question “do you want to talk about how your feeling?” is “no”:
I had been afraid of [my son] at first, and afraid to admit this, so our arrival at the place we were now had been tentative and stretched out through impossibly long nights alone, nights that, if nothing else, had allowed me the space to try to understand who I was to him and who he was to me, all the while unraveling something that was parallel to this, usually something concerning plaster and lath or wires and switches, things that keep the fingers busy. Whatever it is about human males that elevates us from the beasts, whatever it is that gives us the capability of insight and emotional depth, that thing that elevates us also makes our lives really, really messy. It’s not that men are not capable of internally working out their emotions. It’s that we are.
It’s the external working out of emotions of which we’re not as capable. Which, depending on who else has a stake in your emotional health, gets complicated.
[NOW: why a picture of a hammer smashing down on an egg? Well, I like it, that's why. And that's how a man makes omelets. Not this man, but one who uses his hammer for everything. Which the author of this book does.]
photo credit: PhotoGraham
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