further thoughts on weekends and Father's Day

Another single-dad blogger noted the difficulty of making the transition from full-time dad to soloist for the summer. Such transitions can be full of nuanced emotions — from happy to have some "adult" time to melancholy and downright sad to see the empty bed in the kid's room — and if you're on a schedule like mine, the mini-roller coaster can hit every other week.

It goes without saying that you're always "on duty" when you're a parent. When you're a single parent, that constant sense of duty can be even deeper and thicker. This makes the times when you don't have that responsibility feel like even more of a let-down. The silence of not having the kid there is even louder. The emptiness seems even stranger. The (not) funny part is that it doesn't matter how much I try to pack into those weekends (or weeks for part of the summer); I still end up missing the kid and thinking ahead to what we need to do (or want to do) after she gets back.

This week, I felt melancholy rather than ecstatic when I went to get her. It was Father's Day, and I'd harbored a vague hope that there would be a card or something waiting for me. After all, I'd made a point of helping the kid get a card when Mother's Day was approaching. It didn't seem like too much to expect reciprocation, but I suppose it was. As a friend put it later in the day, there's a reason we aren't still married. And I suppose after all is said and done, if you watch the attention the "holidays" get, Mother's Day is practically sacrosanct, while Father's Day is an excuse for sales on power tools and barbecue.

In any case, Father's Day last year came with the first lost tooth. It came with a picture drawn for me that morning. It came with waffles. It came with the kid really starting to swim. It came with a trip to my Dad's for grilling out. Somehow, it all seemed more auspicious. We certainly had fun this year — playing and grilling at the pool with friends and family — but on balance it felt a little more melancholy.

I'm not really sure what grand point I'm trying to get to here. It could a rant about the way fathers are often seen as secondary parents, while mothers are revered. It could be a rant about the dynamics of divorce and custody. It could be another deep exploration of the ups and downs we go through as single parents — even when the rest of life seems pretty fortunate and good. Or it could be another entry in a blog that is partly an exploration of all of those things. It could also be just another acknowledgement that even great times come with mixed emotions.

Melancholy aside... Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there!

pool days

For fun, though, and for the potential nostalgia of friends from those years, here's the inventory of places I remember:

• Toad Hall — This is where it all started when I moved to the city. A great bar with a great set of regulars, and one of the most competitive pool crowds anywhere.
  
• Construction Zone (closed) — A hellish bar, but I'd end up there either before or after a stint at Toad. Most of the bars like it went away with the encroachment of mini boutiques on West Broadway.
  
• Bleecker Street Bar — Fights over pool. Fights over darts. And an infamous pool team run by the man who almost bankrolled my magazine project.
  
• Barrow Street Tavern — A weird bar with two bad tables downstairs. The felt was in bad shape, and the angles forced the regular use of short cues. Still, it was around the corner from my first apartment in the city, and that counted for a lot.
  
• The Stoned Crow — Betty probably still presides over the pool table. I had many, many long nights of running the table with Greg, Seth, GB, and many others. Proximity was also a great value here.
  
• Bull's Head Tavern — The last bar that hosted one of my teams. I still regret not asking out the little blonde named Sabina who worked there... maybe not, but she was cute and flirted with me to no end.
  
• Raccoon Lodge — Uptown and down, but mostly down. They'd cut your tie off if you didn't take it off.
  
• Brooklyn Inn — Simply the best bar anywhere. At least it was then, and friends say it still is.
  
• Corner Billiards (closed) — It's turned into Amsterdam downtown. No idea if that's an improvement or not.
  
• Fat Cat Billiards — A dingy little hole off Christopher Street, but they were generous about time and prices. It's also the first place I learned to play straight pool.
  
• Julian's (closed) — The saddest story in the world. They used to have Bud in the Pepsi machine, and you could play all night long for a pittance. It was like walking out of The Hustler. Now, it's an NYU dorm.
  
• Chelsea Billiards (closed) — For a while, this was the best pool room in the city.
  
• 119 — This little dive beneath Irving Plaza became my regular post-work hangout when I was working around Union Square. It was also the scene of my going-away party before I left the city. Many, many good memories... except that I hated the red felt on the pool table.
  
• No Idea — And I have no idea why I remember this joint but not others.
  
• The Edge — Who could forget the bar just down the street from the Hell's Angels house?
  
• The Blue and Gold (closed) — One of the dying breed of East Village Eastern European dive bars.
  
• ArtBar — I remember the name, but not the place.
  
• Bar None — Same here.
  
• Frank's — I think I have the name wrong, but I spent a good many evenings at this joint down near the end of Court Street. It had great beer, two decent pool tables, and a crowd of low-key players.
  
• The Alibi — Pioneering bar in Fort Greene. No idea if it's still there.
  
• The Ace Bar — A hangout before you were supposed to go past Avenue A.
  

And a thousand other bars I'd wander into with friends, each one distinct in its own way, and each living on in random memories.

saturday nights

In New York and then in grad school, you'd rarely find me at home on any given evening, and particularly not on the weekends. The only exceptions to this rule were nights when I hosted friends for dinner or when I was so fried from work or life that I needed downtime. Otherwise, I was out.

Starting in 1994, this meant playing pool. I kicked around bars and pool halls from New York to Fayetteville and beyond. I drank a lot. I had loose-knit groups of friends, many of whom I have lost (for better or for worse) to those smoke-filled nights. I smoked my Gauloises--first the caporals made from the stinky black tobacco, and then after they gave me a cough I couldn't shake, the legeres. There were even a few periods when I was so tight on cash that I slipped back to the old Tom Waits character-standard, Old Golds. And always it was back to the bar or the pool hall Sometimes I'd play for money; sometimes I'd play for table time; sometimes for drinks; mostly my friends and I would play to hold a table until someone could unseat us. There were many late nights and early mornings, and in the years I worked second shift in the graphics department at J.P. Morgan, getting off at midnight with a decent chunk of cash in the bank, I saw more early morning meals at downtown diners than your average college student. In that life, you learned to spot cokeheads quickly and hustlers too, and made enough mistakes to say you should've known better. For the first couple of years of grad school in Fayetteville, things were much the same--late nights of too many cigarettes and too much beer and whiskey, and nine-ball games that continued after the bars had closed. The venues were smaller, and there were fewer of them so new challenges got stale quickly. And of course, any pool crowd has a certain percentage of characters straight out of central casting. The only difference was that I made a little more time for my curricular responsibilities, and punctuated the pool nights with nights out with the other writers--some of which had their own ill-fated results. And through all of it, I rarely knew what it was like to spend a whole evening at home.

Fast forward a few years. Slip past a whole panoply of life's roller coasters. And you land here--a Saturday night with a little girl asleep in her pink room, the iTunes on party shuffle, a couple of Yuenglings to take the edge off a long day. It's a good thing, too, because I needed to slow down and catch up with my own life. (There's also a physiological component since my shoulder and back issues necessarily mean I can't spend much time over a pool table.) The things that had been in boxes for years are beginning to feel organized; my portfolio is getting some much-needed attention; the laundry and dishes are regularly clean and put away; goals and hopes and expectations are beginning to make sense rather than appear as products (or victims) of inertia.

Do I miss those days? Those days before I had these constraints and responsibilities? No. Not really. I like being a dad. I like being at home. This life feels richer, more full of potential. And besides I know where to find a pool table when I have the time to play, after I've taken care of everything and everyone else.