Two Seemingly Unrelated Stories About Fathers (Not My Own), Which Actually Have Nothing At All To Do With Fatherhood

My grandfather was a doctor. And for at least a few hours, he was convinced that I would follow in his footsteps.

I was seventeen years old, and aside from a brief flirtation with veterinary medicine, utterly uninterested in any career that involved scalpels and touching guts. I had discovered the joys of writing snarky op-ed pieces for the high school newspaper, performing in Woody Allen plays for the drama department, and smoking clove cigarettes with my girlfriend in her bedroom as we listened to Smiths' records and complained about how much the suburbs "sucked balls." To think realistically about becoming a doctor would require paying attention in my remedial biology class, and actually taking notes when my teacher explained the difference between mitral and tricuspid valves in the human heart, and worst of all, applying to at least a few colleges with a reputation for academia and not just schools where I was likely to meet girls who wanted to smoke clove cigarettes and listen to Smiths' albums.

I might've been left alone to choose my own uninspired destiny, had I just managed to keep my big mouth shut. I'm telling you, the next time somebody announces to me that they have blood in their stool, I'm not saying a word.

KEEP ON READIN'! IT'LL BE OUR LITTLE SECRET.

My grandfather may have been many things, but he wasn't an alarmist. He loved telling stories about the Great Depression and how he survived it. On the infamous "Black Tuesday" of 1929, one of the partners in his medical firm lost everything, and he committed suicide by throwing himself from the top story of their building in Manhattan. My grandfather delighted in describing every horrifying detail; how he just happened to glance out the window of his office at that precise moment and watched his partner's body float past, like a marionette whose wires had been snipped by a sadistic puppeteer.

My grandfather, now alone in his medical practice and presumably penniless, did not join the national panic. He didn't do anything. He just ignored his dwindling stocks and saving accounts and waited. “No good can come from expecting the worst,” he told his wife. "We're just going to wait and see." In the end, it paid off. It took two decades and one world war, but the stock market finally righted itself and he became a rich man (for the second time). At least amongst his immediate family, it appeared that he was a financial genius. His philosophy became our philosophy: Don’t make any hasty decisions, we told ourselves during any crisis, monetary or otherwise. Don't draw too much attention to yourself. Just wait and see what happens.

From the outside, it might've seemed like we were being rational and patient. But as somebody who has been in the middle of it, let me assure you, it wasn't nearly as cunning as it looked. We were just drawing on our innate animal instinct for predator evasion. We believed that if we remained perfectly still, bad things couldn't find us. It's something that most people unlearn when they're five or six, or at least old enough to understand that hiding under a blanket won't protect you from monsters.

To be fair, a little caution now and then can be a smart move. There must be something to it, because my grandfather died a much richer man than I'll ever be. But there were times when his "wait and see" philosophy clearly wasn't the best course of action. Like, for instance, when he realized there was blood in his stool.

"Grandpa is pooping blood?" I asked. It probably wasn't the most appropriate thing to discuss during dinner, especially when my grandparents were sitting right across the table from me, but I wasn't the one who brought it up in the first place.

"He's not pooping blood," my father corrected. "There's just some blood in his stool."

I didn't understand the difference. To me, anything coming out of my anus that belonged in my veins was cause for alarm. "Shouldn't he go to the hospital?" I asked. "It could be serious."

Nobody said a word. My mother and my father and my brother just stared at their plates. They didn't want to come out and tell me I was wrong. But, well, the person with the supposed malady had several medical degrees in New York State, and I was a kid who still regularly masturbated into all the fresh linens in the guest bathroom. It was painfully obvious who had the intellectual high ground.

I just shrugged, refusing to feel like the fool. "Whatever," I said, making defiant eye contact with my grandfather. "If I had blood in my turds, I'd be getting my poop-chute x-rayed right now rather than packing my large intestines with pork chops. But you do what you want, gramps."

The next day, he checked himself into the nearest hospital. And not unsurprisingly, it was something serious. Well, not life-threatening serious. Just a few polyps on his colon. It was nothing that'd kill him, but if left untreated, the polyps could've become cancerous.

He told the nurses that his grandson was the one who successfully diagnosed him, and they all agreed that I had the deductive skills of a future medical practitioner.

"That kid has intuitive smarts," he told everyone who would listen. "He knew there was something wrong with me before anyone else picked up on it. If it was up to them, they would've waited until I was passed out in a pool of my own viscous fluid."

When it became clear that my grandfather wasn't going to die just yet, my family turned their attention to me. They huddled around me, whispering encouraging words about my inevitable future as a medicine man. "Your grandfather thinks you're meant for great things," they said. "You have the soul of a surgeon. You read his symptoms like an art critic studying Monet. You can see things that the rest of us can't."

And for a moment, I almost believed them. I laid awake at night and imagined myself a modern day Doctor Zhivago, but without the Russian accent or addiction to bad poetry. I could save the world with a syringe, and become one of those guys who women aren't ashamed to introduce to their mothers. "He's a doctor" sounds a lot better than "he's a struggling writer who doesn't make enough money to pay his own electric bill, but he sure can be charming if he thinks he's going to get a free meal out of it."

It took days before the spell wore off and I realized that I hadn't made quite such a spectacular prognosis. I'd told a man in his 80s to go to the hospital after discovering blood in his stool. This is not something that a child prodigy in the medical arts would say. This is something that a person not suffering from mental retardation would say. To call my recommendation obvious would be an insult to the definition of "obvious".

"But your grandpa is a doctor," various members of my family would tell me. "He didn't recognize the symptoms and you did. That has to tell you something."

It does tell me something, I'd admit. It tells me that my grandfather is a lousy doctor. Which, to anybody who'd been paying attention, wasn't major news. This was a man who had once advised my grandmother, his wife, against having surgery to remove the cancer in her gallbladder. On what grounds? On the grounds of "I don't want to talk about it!!" I'm sure he was just afraid of losing her and thought that even acknowledging the cancer's existence would mean admitting she could die. While that's an achingly romantic gesture in a partner, it might be considered a character flaw in your personal physician. You don't want your doctor to be huddled in the corner, cradling his legs and rocking himself and silently muttering, "Don'tleavemedon'tleavemedon'tleavemeohgodohgodohgodohgod."

I was never one of my grandfather's patients, which may have saved my life. I've never had a medical scare, but I can only imagine how he would've broken the news to me. "You see that spot on your x-ray? Yeah, I don't like the looks of that at all. So why don't we just stop looking at it and focus on happy thoughts."

In the weeks after he left the hospital, he continued to insist that I was put on this earth to become a doctor. And I continued to insist that I'd be the type of doctor who accidentally invents a stronger strain of drug-resistant tuberculosis. I'd be the Dr. Kevorkian who didn't intend to kill all those people. My bedside manner would be somewhere between "Whoops, my bad" and "You can't prove anything!" If I saved anybody, it would be solely because of my ability to recognize the obvious. A typical checkup with one of my patients would likely go something like this:

PATIENT: My genitals are emitting an electrical charge. And I have a lump in my armpit the size of a conjoined twin.

DR. SPITZNAGEL: Really? That's weird. You should probably have that looked at.

PATIENT: Wow, that never occurred to me. Thank you, Doctor Spitznagel. You saved my life.

Two years later, my grandfather died of a stroke. And I never predicted it. I was as surprised as anyone. Of course, I had already left home, and was safely nestled in a college dorm room in southern Wisconsin, enjoying the anonymity (and skunk weed) that comes with a liberal arts education. But even if my grandfather had managed to track me down, I'm not sure what I would've told him.

"You're feeling numbness in your left side and you've suddenly lost the ability to speak? Well gee, gramps, I don't know, that could be anything. Actually, just thinking about it has given me psychosomatic pains. Could we stop talking about it and maybe watch some TV? I'm sure it'll go away."

My prognosis would've killed him, but I still think he would've been proud of my hesitation. Just like I'm sure he was proud of the family's stoic poise at his funeral. We tried (though we didn't always succeed) to mourn him as he wished, by mourning nothing, smiling at the anxious crowd (so quick to panic, those mindless idiots), muttering to each other, "Let's not jump to any conclusions. Yes, he does appear to be dead, but we don't know anything for certain yet. Let's just wait a little longer and see what happens. Just calm down, people. Calm down... calm down... calm down..."

* * *

"Don't you think she looks like Kira?" My brother said, motioning towards his wife.

"I'm sorry?" I asked. "Kira who?"

"You know, Kira," he repeated, as if overstating the obvious. "The hot blonde Gelfling from The Dark Crystal."



I know that my brother meant this as a compliment. But it still took me a few minutes to digest this information.

I assume you're all familiar with The Dark Crystal, and you already know about Jen and Kira, the Gelfling couple of Jim Henson's sci-fi fantasy epic from the early 80s. I have vague memories of seeing the film in theaters, but apparently it left a lasting impression on my brother. He loved it so much that when our family moved to the Chicago suburbs, my brother, just eleven years old, took a bus into the city - an hour-and-a-half journey - to see The Dark Crystal for a second time. And even most disturbingly, he also took a bus, sans parental guidance, to see a second screening of Gandhi.

Yes, that's right. My younger brother left the house, probably telling our mother that he was off to meet some friends in the park, and then got on a bus bound for downtown Chicago, with the sole intent of seeing a three-plus hour biopic about the leader of a nonviolent resistance movement in India. I don't know if that's ever going to make sense to me. I had a lot of unusual interests as a prepubescent, but pee-drinking pacifism wasn't one of them. I'm not going to be the one to say that he was a very confused child, but this is a guy whose music collection as a teenager consisted almost solely of John Williams' soundtracks and Peter Cetera albums. So... you know... I think you can arrive at your own conclusions, right?

"I do not look like a fucking muppet," my sister-in-law wailed in protest, glaring at the photos on my brother's computer screen.

"What is so wrong with that?" He asked. "Kira is hot."

I had to agree with my brother on that point. Kira was smokin' hot, or at least as hot as muppets go. Which - coming from a child of the Sesame Street generation - is really saying something. I wouldn't come out and admit that Bert and Ernie made me doubt my own heterosexuality, or that Janice, the lead guitarist in the Electric Mayhem, inspired my very first erection. Those are all true statements, of course, but they're not something a sane person confesses to complete strangers.

But come on, even if you aren't a red-blooded, non-gay male who came of age on or around 1982, you have to admit that Kira, fictional or not, is kinda desirable. She's the kind of woman you look at and say, "Don't take this the wrong way, but you remind me of something that Frank Oz would've constructed out of reticulated polyfoam. I'd totally like to dreamfast with you and protect you from the Skeksis." How is that not sexy? Are you made of stone? C'mon!!

"Will you stop talking about this?" My sister-in-law howled.

"What's wrong?" My brother asked, seemingly perplexed. "I mean it as a compliment."

I honestly believe that's true. I've never known a man who loved a woman as much as my brother loves his wife. But sometimes true love doesn't always translate in ways that makes sense to the rest of us. Love isn't always about trite and predictable romantic cliches. In a weird, assbackwards kinda way, when a guy says to a woman, "You remind me of Kira from Dark Crystal," what he's really saying is, "I love you so much, I'm even turned on by the creepy muppet version of you." I ask you, what's so bad about that?

My sister-in-law stormed out of the room. And my brother and I, with little else to do with our evening, went 'Net-crawling for Gelfling porn.

As it turns out, Gelflings are in the minority of bizarro porn niches. There's an abundance of Hobbit porn and even Smurf porn (I'll never understand that), but erotica involving the elf-like beings from the fictional planet of Thra? There's not much out there. There's not even a respectable showing of fan fiction, which is embarrassing on a lot of different fronts. Are my brother and I really the only teenage males in the western hemisphere who repeatedly had "private time" with our Beta copies of Dark Crystal while their parents were at work?

The only thing we found that could even pass for Gelfling smut were a few videos on YouTube, but they were more surreal than sexy. Our favorite (for all the wrong reasons) was a montage of Dark Crystal footage with a puzzling soundtrack. If watching amorous Gelflings while listening to Belinda Carlisle's "Circle in the Sand" doesn't leave you feeling sexually confused, I don't think we have much in common.

The more time you spend on Google, the more you're going to discover just how deviant your sexual deviances really are. I don't know if I needed to learn that the brunette Gelfling in Dark Crystal was a guy. I could've easily gone my entire life without knowing that. Should I have reason to cross paths with Jim Henson in the afterlife, I don't think I'll be able to suppress my hostility.

"Seriously, you had to name him Jen?" I'd yell at him. "A lithe pixie with long hair, and he's a fucking dude? Couldn't you have at least made him and Kira a really hot lesbian couple? That's all we want from our science fiction - a little muppet girl-on-girl action."

My brother and I stared at the computer, wondering how we had allowed ourselves to be so misled. "I feel dirty," he said, his voice devoid of any emotion.



It was 3am by the time we finally gave up, and though I probably never would have admitted it to him, I was kinda relieved. I'd never noticed it until my brother pointed it out, but he's right, his wife does look eerily like a Gelfling. Maybe it's just her Finnish genes. Do all Fins have large ears and button noses and yarn-like hair? I don't know. But I do know that if my brother and I had happened upon some genuine Gelfling porn, it would've been like watching my sister-in-law perform in a very unsettling fetish porn video. And that's not something you can come back from. That's something that's going to ruin every family dinner for the rest of your life.

I have no problem looking at my sister-in-law and seeing a muppet. But if it's all the same, I'd prefer if she kept the robe on.