Bad Dads In Armor

This past April, I started reacquainting myself with George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, spurred by the start of Season Six of HBO's "Game of Thrones."  When not actually watching the show, I spent my time searching  Reddit and Imgur for Game of Thrones memes, reading new theories about Jon Snow's parentage on Quora, and listening to the audiobooks on my iPhone. My family got used to the sight of me walking around our apartment with headphones on. If they asked me a question, I'd roll my eyes or grunt in annoyance. Being summoned back to the real world was such a drag.  

Normally, I would say that a man in his forties spending this much time on sword and sorcery fantasy stories is a man trying to escape something—such as the pressures of fatherhood.

I did not try to get my sons to watch "Game of Thrones" with me. Despite all the sword fights, magic and adventure--exactly the type of thing that a guy raised on comic books would want to share with his two pre-teen boys--"Game of Thrones" is wildly inappropriate for children. Like a lot of HBO's previous hit shows--The Sopranos, the Wire, Deadwood--GOT is gruesomely violent, overtly sexual and emotionally brutalizing. A lot of characters die, and those who don't are just as likely to end up burned, raped or crippled. I'm happy to say that my sons are not yet desensitized enough to enjoy this type of thing. 

What's more, neither seems terribly interested in the fantasy genre. The elder, who is 13, is really only concerned with social media, Drake, and his hair. The younger one, almost 10, likes to play Minecraft and memorize the Billboard charts from the Eighties through the Oughts. Different strokes, etc.

Even if you have never watched "Game of Thrones," you've probably heard that the writers regularly kill off the main characters, often at moments when the audience least expects it. This is in keeping with the source material. George R.R. Martin has made a point of subverting the narrative expectations set by fantasy classics like The Lord Of The Rings, particularly the idea that the hero will survive to the end of the story. 

My children, on the other hand, hate surprises, especially nasty ones. Years ago, I read my son, as a bedtime story, a chapter from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. This particular chapter features a plot twist right out of the Martin playbook: a character who we've come to know and started to like, Cedric Diggory, is suddenly killed. When I read this scene, my son got quiet for a few moments, then started wailing so loudly his mother rushed into the room. It took another hour for her to get him to sleep and afterwards she yelled at me so loudly she almost woke him up again.  

It's just as well my kids don't discover "Game of Thrones" now anyway. The most powerful force in Westeros, far more destructive than dragons, ice demons and sorcery, is family. Both the show and the books are full of awful patriarchs: Tywin Lannister, whose dedication to maintaining his family's power and reputation warps his children in terrible ways; Stannis Baratheon, who burns his own daughter alive in order to help him win a battle (and it doesn't work, which only compounds his bad judgment); Craster, the "wilding" who weds his own daughters and gives his baby sons to the demonic White Walkers; and even Ned Stark, the protagonist of the first season, whose stubborn sense of honor costs him his head, and arguably the lives of his wife and several of his sons.

My children already get plenty of examples of incompetent fathering from my day-to-day interactions with them--I see no need to provide more.  They have their whole lives to discover the shitty parenting so ably celebrated in the world's art and literature--from Hamlet's mom to Homer Simpson.  For the moment, then, "Game of Thrones" will remain a private pleasure, no-kids-allowed, like alcohol, expensive restaurants and curse words.

The Right Side of the Tracks

The northern entrance to Riverbank State Park sits at the end of West 145th street, and leads to a bridge that spans the West Side Highway, the Riverside Park bike path and two sets of train tracks. Riverbank itself sits atop the North River Wastewater Plant, which processes 125 million gallons of Manhattan sewage every day. At the end of the bridge is a set of stairs that takes you down from the Park complex to the level of the river.  A few hundred feet from these stairs, on a small grassy verge by the fenced-off train tracks, I found my son and his friends.

This grassy space has become a favorite spot for my son to indulge his hobby of "railfanning." I had no idea what railfanning meant the first time I heard the term. It sounded dangerous, the kind of teenage kick that leads to the emergency room and a broken arm or fractured collar bone. Presumably, to railfan involved moving fast, taking risks and, if you weren't careful, eating it in front of your friends.

In fact, railfanning involves long stretches of doing nothing. The speed and movement is provided by massively heavy train engines, not the people watching them. Maybe the railfans jump up and down now and then, but mainly they expend their energy by pointing their cell phone cameras and commenting on what they see.

A railfan (or is it railfanner?) is a train enthusiast--the type of person who, in Britain, is called a train spotter (or, more derisively, an "anorak.") My son is an avid railfan, and as my wife and I feel a certain amount of worry at the thought of him lingering next to train tracks on his own, we have had to become reluctant railfans ourselves. We take turns hanging out on the grass verge, looking at the sky or checking our phones, wondering when the train is finally going to speed by.

This particular spot is pleasant enough. The bike path is well-maintained, the Hudson River is visible across some playing fields and a stretch of park, and the whole area gets a lot of light on sunny days. But it is close to a building containing the largest lake of shit on the Upper West Side. The air has an acrid, acid smell that isn't strong enough to send you running, but slowly seeps into your lungs and leaves an unpleasant salty taste in the back of your throat. My son and his friends don't seem to notice it, but it does loom large in my mind. Unlike them, I'm not excited at the prospect of the 4:10 from New Haven thundering past us 15 minutes from now. I'm just bored, ashamed that I'm bored, and slightly bewildered by the whole thing.

Before having kids, I pictured fatherhood as a sort of movie montage of shared moments. I pictured my kids and I listening to the Clash together, laughing at old episodes of Monty Python, or staying up late reading from The Lord of the Rings. In other words, all the things that interested me as a child. (You'll notice there's no throwing the ball in the front yard stuff, which should give you an idea of the type of kid I was.)

Parts of this wistful fantasy did come true--my sons will occasionally close Spotify to listen to "Give Em Enough Rope" on the stereo--but far more common is something I didn't anticipate: that in order to look after my kids, I would have to take an active interest in those things that fascinated them. They don't care what I like. They want me to like what they like. 

Sometimes this means taking the light rail from Trenton to Camden, NJ, or spending three hours on the A train to go out to Far Rockaway and back in the middle of winter. Sometimes it means taking the subway out to Broadway Junction, in Queens, and walking from the A train platform to the L train then over to the Z stop, watching the trains come in but never actually getting on them. 

This can be a drag,  but sometimes, when I find myself bored or resentful, I have a premonition. One day, I think, my kids won't want to hang out with me at all. One day, I'll envy the amount of time we're spending sharing this hobby, even if I didn't choose it. 

So I find myself by the side of the railroad tracks, next to a sewage plant, waiting for a commuter train. When I hear it coming, like as not, I'll pull out my iPhone and take a video of the engine as it speeds past. In case, for some reason, my son is looking the other way.