I’ve been accused of eliciting tears with some of my stories. I wrote this piece eight years ago, and I think it’s one of those stories. I didn’t share it before because It’s sad, and it might sound self-pitying. It also might result in my receiving a lot of “Dude, are you okay?” messages, not to mention recommendations for therapists. I assure you, I’m okay.

I offer this account, first to break a cycle of second-guessing myself and fearing everything I write will somehow backfire on me. Second, I aim not to dwell on the negatives of my life, but to add some depth to my overall story. I think, publicly, I’m a positive person. I accomplish things. I help people. A lot of people say I’m supremely confident. Well, I’m not. Not always. There are internal negatives there. And I think it’s important to know that we all have them. Finally, hope this story will help remind the reader that no human being is meant to be a tool. No matter how useful we are, we should be considered as people first.

And now, about this beagle…

I guess I was twelve, maybe thirteen. We had two dogs—Benji and Lady—who were born in the Spring when I was nine. Lady would stay with us until I was in college, but Benji, well, he was an unaltered male. He wandered. Sometime around the Summer of ’78 he left us for good. Before he did, though, he brought home a girl from his travels. The girl was a beagle. She was a very nice dog, friendly and well-behaved. Personally, I wanted to just let her stay with us.

We had a problem, though. Lady was used to having Benji’s full attention. She didn’t want him to have a wife or a girlfriend or whatever the beagle was. But, as happens with dogs, someone’s the Alpha, and that someone made the decisions. That someone was Benji. He was married now, or engaged, or shacked up, or whatever, and his sister needed to make the best of it.

I just read Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I’m a science fiction fan and a recovering children’s librarian. This book was already a classic of young adult literature by the time I was of age to read such things. A good friend of mine told me over thirty years ago that it was the best book ever written, and I just had to read it.

So I finally did.

Trigger Warning: Blasphemy.

It bored me. Worse than that, it irritated me.

I will not go into the details of why it bored an irritated me. It’s a respected book which has literally changed lives. My failure to appreciate it is my own failing, not Ms. L’Engle’s.

We all have faults. I reserve the right to have angst about mine, and to take that angst out and fuss with it when I should be doing more productive things.

In the course of fussing, I asked an old friend if she had read the book. This is one of the three or four friends (in S.F. fandom no less!) with whom I still discuss books. She introduced me to Robert Heinlein’s work, back when we were both larval. I thought she would offer a reasoned argument to instill an appreciation for this noted work. I don’t want to be a blasphemer, after all. Blasphemers are broken on the wheel, burned at the stake, or at the very least not invited to respectable dinner parties.

“…Take these pinions, fly behind me: I’ll go ahead, you
Follow my lead. That way
You’ll be safe.
…While he talked, he was fitting
The boy’s gear, showing him how to move
Like a mother bird with her fledglings. Then he fixed his own harness
To his shoulders, nervously poised himself for this strange
New journey; paused on the brink of take-off, and embraced his
Son, couldn’t fight back his tears.
They’d found a hilltop – above the plain, but no mountain –
And from this they took off
On their hapless flight. Daedalus flexed his wings, glanced back at
His son’s, held a steady course. The new
Element bred delight. Fear forgotten, Icarus flew more
Boldly, with daring skill.
Then the boy, made over-reckless by youthful daring, abandoned
His father, soared aloft,
Too close to the sun: the wax melted, the ligatures
Flew apart, his flailing arms had no hold
On the thin air. From the dizzy heaven, he gazed down seaward
In terror. Fright made the scene go black
Before his eyes. No wax, wings gone, a thrash of naked
Arms, a shuddering plunge
Down through the void, a scream – “Father, Father, I’m falling –”
Cut off as he hit the waves.
His unhappy father, a father no longer, cried “Icarus!
Icarus, where are you? In what part of the sky
Do you fly now?” – then saw wings littering the water.
Earth holds his bones; the Icarian Sea his name.

From Ovid, The Art of Love: Book 2, translated by Peter Green

Anyone judging by our popular culture would have trouble distinguishing between an American father and any of the many residents of a clown car, unless maybe that father happens to be a murderous ogre.

On one hand, we have Dad jokes and Dad bods.

On the other, the Latin root-word “Pater” is largely familiar to us for lending the much-despised “Patriarchy” its first syllable.

Viewed through that lens, fathers are either a bit ridiculous, or more than a bit menacing.

But then…

I came across this passage in my reading this morning. The ancient Roman poet Ovid tells the story of Daedalus and Icarus, oddly enough in an erotic poem attempting to illustrate how a male lover might attempt to pin down the wings of Eros, god of love. It’s an odd placement, in one way. Or is it a cautionary tale? A man who ensnares a woman, as Ovid proposes here, risks becoming a father.

If he becomes a father, he risks ever so much more.

Daedalus, it now occurs to me, is quite the figure of a father. At first glance, perhaps, foolish, even ridiculous. Who makes wings out of bird feathers and wax, and proposes to fly with them? Who gives them to a boy, and expects him to follow instructions while using them?

But Daedalus was desperate. He and Icarus lived as slaves under King Minos, who used the father’s genius to his own ends. Daedalus had betrayed Minos, resulting in the death of the King’s beastly son, the Minotaur. Perhaps Minos would not kill his genius slave, but would Daedalus’s son be safe? It seems like a no-brainer that the best revenge for the death of one son would be the death of another.

Daedalus had to get his son away from the isle of Crete. Since Minos controlled shipping and a giant bronze robot guarded the shores, the only way out was up. If he wanted his son to grow to manhood, Daedalus had to give him wings, risk him flying too close to the sun, let him soar. Driven, desperate, ingenious, loving. And this classical example of a concerned father fell prey to every father’s nightmare. The boy flew too close to the blazing chariot of Helios, the Sun, his wings melted, he plunged to his death.

Like Daedalus then, fathers now want to protect their children at all costs. We don’t want them to come to violence. We don’t want them to suffer disease, addiction or poverty. We don’t want them to fly too close to the sun.

And yet we must give them wings. And we must fly on and let them take to the sky.

Oh, we look back a lot. And we cry out a lot, demanding to know where they are. And the nightmare flies beside us all the way, right to the end. We lose sleep, and hair, but probably not weight. We’re ready at any moment to swerve, to fly back, to build any ridiculous device we have to in order for them to escape.

But we let them soar. We have to.

I guess I’ve seen and done a lot in 43 years of work. I’ve done interesting work and known remarkable people. I’m never at a loss when someone says, “Tell me an interesting fact about yourself.”

A dozen books published, three times that many conventions planned, countless articles, stories, novels, scripts, software packages written, fifty plays written, directed or acted, and half again that many radio plays. I’ve found mentors and coached promising young people. I’ve developed a reputation as a guy who will find the answers.

But, when I look back… I feel no nostalgia. Not for my time on the job, not for rehearsing all those shows and running myself ragged at those cons… maybe a little for the people I’ve met along the way, the ones who are no longer here, or who are just distant. I’m almost always happy to see old friends when they emerge. I will tell stories about funny things that happened.

Well, friends, I’ve been a bit quiet about the world scene. About politics. I went through a few years of losing friends around the madness of the Covid pandemic, and that made me gun shy. It seemed every time I opened my mouth to comment on an issue that mattered, I lost a friend.

But there’s a little cartoon voice in my head saying, “If they don’t respect your opinions when you talk about the issues, they never respected you at all. And, if they don’t respect you, they were never your friends to begin with.”

Yep. Kindergarten-level stuff, right. Turns out we all tend to forget what we learned in kindergarten.

So, blocks and unfriendings be damned, I’m here tonight to say that I am supporting Governor Larry Hogan in his campaign for U.S. Senate, and I think you should too. I think this especially if you’re concerned that the Republican Party will take control of the Senate. I think that takeover is inevitable in this election. When it happens, our state must be represented, not by a partisan operative, but by a strong, ethical and courageous leader who has a history of putting his constituents ahead of political expedience.

My apologies to the handful of you that already read this under a different title. The fact is that most of my traffic comes from the social media site that’s recently added a new algorithm to “curate” content. A fair number of pieces of content that I’m very proud of have been getting buried. So I’m experimenting with titles and posting styles.

I started The Rational Rebel a couple of years ago to share thoughts related specifically to my home in Howard County, Maryland. These may not be of interest to all my regular readers, either because of the specificity or because of my political philosophy; but I’ve decided I will start sharing them here so you’re aware they exist. This essay was inspired by a recent trip Renee and I made to Niagara Falls, a return, after 35 years, to the site of our honeymoon.