The End of the Weekend at the End of the Summer

On Amy Hempel’s Brilliance and Parables and What I Did During My Summer Vacation

At the pool my daughter held her nose and dove to the bottom to snatch the purple ring and the blue and the green before surfacing, gasping, smiling. She kicked her legs and raised her arm and sank back into the water. When she finally grabbed the wall, she yelled my best name, “Dad!”

“Did you see me get them all in one try?” she asked.

I nodded. I thumbs-upped.

“This is the best day ever,” she shouted and dove back under.

Please, keep watching, she thought, kicking her way over the alternating aqua and dark blue tiles. Please, never stop.

Have you watched any of the Olympics? My wife and I watched the ARTISTIC SWIMMING finals last night, which inspired the story above, which was also inspired by the following Amy Hempel story, and also, the story above really happened a couple hours ago.

Anyone who has studied minimalism under Chuck Palahniuk has read him praise Amy Hempel’s sentences and anyone who has read me knows I’ve read everything he’s written.

Try This: One Sentence

I flew back from Brussels yesterday, after a week vacation there and in Amsterdam with my wife and kids. Clean air, chocolate, beer, mussels, stroopwafels, canals, trams, museums, all day together. On the seven hour plane ride there, I read a lot of short stories:

• Ernest Hemingway’s My Old Man

• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Babylon Revisited

• James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues

• Grace Paley’s Friends

I had to pause after Baldwin’s story; for three decades now, tales of an older brother failing his younger brother have made me cry.

We got off the train in Brussels. We were staying in an Airbnb near the center, three blocks from Manneken Pis, and it looked like a 1) 20 min walk or 2) 5 min bus and then 10 min walk, so I said, let’s just walk! My wife said, “You sure? There’s probably cobblestones.” I said, “I’ll carry the suitcases.” She shrugged and handed me her suitcase. We took off, following the Google maps suggested route, crossing under a bridge, walking along the tracks, through an older neighborhood, seemed nice enough, plenty of shade, and then a police car pulled up to us, the officer behind the wheel sticks his head out the window and asked, “Francois?” I said, “No, English,” and he said, “Be careful with those kids and that luggage and your wallets and your health. This is a very dangerous neighborhood. How much farther do you got to walk?” And I said, “Four? Five more blocks?” And he said, “Walk fast,” and my wife gave me a look and asked the cop, “Should we walk on the parallel street?” And the cop said, “With the restaurants and construction? Oh yeah, that way is much safer.” And then the cop drove away and before we could head towards the construction and restaurants street, the lady in the car behind the cop car, she rolls down her window and tells us a story about being thrown to the ground and kicked before being robbed a few blocks down in the direction we were walking… “We’re heading towards the next street over,” I said. “Bon bon,” she nodded. We rerouted and walked a little further out of our way, rattling our luggage over picturesque cobblestones until we arrived safely at our Airbnb. We weren’t robbed! We weren’t beaten! But, for the rest of our stay in Brussels, my son asked non-stop what bad guys looked like while his brother shouted, “Like this!” and did his best bad guy impression.

Somehow, the rattling of the suitcase put the Nine Inch Nails song, I Do Not Want This, in my head as we walked; the part at the end where he screams, “I want to do something that matters!!!” so on the plane ride home, I listened to The Downward Spiral and wrote this poem between the first and second track of that album.

In A Cabin And There’s No Out

I am the fly above your lunch

Evading the fart that

Lingers amid the seats up front.

I am the man asleep against your arm

Leaning into your elbow and pushing

You away from the screen

That contains a multitude of movies

But none you want to see.

I am the child crying for ice cream

Ten kilometers above the Pyrenees.

I am the blanket stepped on and kicked

Under the seat. I am the fear that

Monday when you return you will

Discover this past week was not

Enough to relieve and refresh and reset

Your attitude towards work.

If the story at the top is me attempting to write a story like Amy Hempel’s The Weekend (below), then that poem is me attempting to write in the style of Trent Reznor’s Mr. Self Destruct.

On the flight home, I read two Aimee Bender stories and the first two chapters in this book on Jesus’ parables from a Jewish perspective.

Parable being a story that provokes you to better understand yourself and your relation to others and whose form is, “let me tell you how this thing is surprisingly like this other thing.” I reflected on brothers in the Bible, on what I may have lost and not noticed and how I should go out now and find it and rejoice and invite all my neighbors over to celebrate. Then I watched Episode 6 of Netflix/Warner Bros.’ The Sandman, The Sound of Her Wings, which I have both desired and feared watching again ever since my younger brother’s son died this past Christmas.

In Amsterdam, we went to a couple museums with handheld audio devices you touched to a number by the exhibit and then held to your ear to listen and learn. My boys loved it. Before bed, they took turns shouting, “Best Day Ever!” The next day, they wanted to return (to the Houseboat Museum and Museum of the Canals). They loved them even more than the Museum of Modern Art, where they so charmed the ticket-seller that they each got a coupon for a free poster (valued at 20 euros!!) I encouraged them to pick one of the Keith Haring or Basquiet prints, but they chose a poster of a soccer player dripping in gold. Just like when we were in Brussels and I encouraged them to taste mussels, they refused my counsel and persisted in the gastronomic ignorance endemic to kindergarteners. Whatever. Kids shall kid. My favorite museum in Amsterdam was the STRAAT (Street Art).

I’m writing this post on my phone as I lay in my bed beside my wife while she watches Olympics highlights and when I get up to fill her water bottle because she is thirsty I go to put my phone in my pocket and discover that I put my pajama bottoms on backwards and that’s like a parable for my deepest fear as a parent that something horrible will happen to my kids while I am distracted playing on my phone.

In Brussels, my son asked if bandits ate mussels. He also asked if bandits were boys or girls. He asked if bandits attacked in the day or in the night. He asked if bandits were old or young? He asked if bandits wore hats. My wife, who would know, because she once had a knife pulled on her in the daytime when she lived in Brussels decades ago during her childhood undergraduate study abroad, she said, “Bandits can be all of the above.”

Before vacation, I read the first couple of chapters of James by Percival Everett and The United States of Huck, the introduction to Huckleberry Finn written by George Saunders (most of which can be found here - Sadly, the scan cuts off unexpectedly right before the end). Saunders explains how Twain’s book was better than Twain himself; Etgar Keret recently posted something similar:

So you think you can tell?

Keret writes:

“When I teach creative writing, I always tell my students that a good story, by definition, has to be smarter than the person who wrote it. Because if it’s less smart, that means the writer wasn’t writing a story but assembling a piece of Ikea furniture. Most of the masterpieces I’ve encountered were smarter than their creators, and often more decent and purely good than them, too. We have plenty of songs, stories and films made by patently insufferable people, yet they make us feel and understand ourselves better…”

My wife has been reading my daughter the Harry Potter series at night; they’re almost finished with The Prisoner of Azkaban. J.K. Rowling’s Olympic commentary really can’t be defended, can it?

All these artists who can’t match the transcendence of their creations, it’s sadly not that surprising, but it still hurts. They’re like the parent who misses your first flip into the deep end of the pool because he was preoccupied with some stranger’s poetry on his phone, or like the older brother who flies to Europe for a vacation but not to Texas for a funeral.

Have you ever read Amy Hempel’s In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried? If not, go read it as soon as you can! It’ll make you laugh, and if it doesn’t make you cry the first time, it’ll get you when you read it again. I’ve been meaning to reread it again, but I’m not yet ready.

Instead, let me tell you why I love Weekend so.

There’s all these characters, but she shares zero physical description until the end (weekend whiskers!) where its singularity increases its impact.

“Be specific!” craft-of-writing instructors say; Hempel is (rightly) praised for choosing the perfect specifics to detail (and which to not mention).

What I hope is, when I write my fiction, I’m like all these flawed authors whose work I admire, and that what I choose to detail, reveals to the reader something bigger and better than myself.

Anyhow, I’ve been on vacation, both literally and parablically, but I’m back now. Thanks for reading! And I hope to share more frequently and soon :)