Bent Out of Shape

How marriage, parenthood, and the everyday demons that haunt us animate our days

As some of you know, I am slated to become a grandfather in 2025. To mark the occasion, I have begun writing letters to my prospective granddaughter, which I hope will ultimately become part of a larger project that tries to capture what it’s like to be alive in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. I hope it will be of some value to you now and her later. —Jim

December 30, 2024

Dear Baby,

Over the weekend, your grandmother and I had an argument. It was conducted via text message, a medium I regard as an annoying distraction at best and an exasperating frustration at worst. It involved your aunt, who’s home from her post-college life teaching kindergartners to autistic children in Minneapolis. It turned out she had old friends from California and Illinois who were in Washington, and the opportunity to reunite for a day trip somewhere in between—the plan was Baltimore—was impossible to resist. “I assume I should not offer to lend her the car,” your grandmother wrote, knowing how I’d feel but dangling the prospect nonetheless.

She knew how I’d feel because she knew I’d developed a chronic case of autophobia. Last month when she was home for Thanksgiving, your aunt got into a fender-bender in which the insurance company determined she was zero percent at fault: a high school boy with a learner’s permit ran a red light straight into her. She was fine. But there was still all the requisite paperwork, a long-term rental, and the loss of our car for three weeks, which we got back the day before she returned for Christmas. Your aunt had also been involved in another minor fender-bender last summer in which my car was somehow declared totaled, and she happened to be returning from a family reunion on an interstate in Massachusetts a few days earlier with your parents and uncles when our other car died of old age in a rainstorm, requiring us to buy two cars in the space of a week. Despite all this, I’m happy to report that your aunt remains a far more intrepid motorist than I am, willing to plunge into urban wilds, including your father’s habitat of Brooklyn, in ways I am not.

There was one other incident weighing on me. Two weeks ago I was driving to work when a large dog ran right into my car on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, resulting in the poor creature’s instant death (I’ll spare you the very gory details). The impact was shocking and there was no obvious place to pull over. I continued driving in a panicked daze until my usual exit, got out of the car, and saw it was damaged. Still operating on a kind of autopilot, I drove the rest of the way to work. I looked up what to do, and read that I should contact the local animal control office. But I wasn’t sure exactly what town I was in when the incident happened. Although my reasoning was a little murky even to me, I returned to the scene as a police car arrived, where I explained what happened to the policewoman, who told me that the fault for the incident was with the owner. But of course I was deeply haunted and continue to be. I’m almost glad to pay the thousands of dollars in damage as a kind of penance—I’m also too scared of what might happen if I submitted another claim to the insurance company—but as of this writing, the bodywork is not yet complete.

So I really, really didn’t want to lend your aunt one of our two cars. I pointed out the high cost in terms of gas and tolls, the wear and tear on the car, and the nightmarish traffic scenario of the New Jersey Turnpike on the Sunday night of a holiday weekend. Which is how an old man thinks. But not your grandmother. You will come to understand that she is one of the most instinctively (and, to my mind, implacably) generous people you will ever know. At one point in my exasperation—what had become a contentious text exchange was silently taking place at Starbucks, where I was hoping to get down to work—I was about to write “And when do we get to keep our kids up all night rather than the other way around?”

But I didn’t write, much less send, that text. Because I realized it was the last thing I wanted. Maybe texting isn’t such a bad medium after all.

I also realized—actually, I realized pretty much from the start but fought what I knew in my heart—that my opposition to your aunt taking the car was basically irrational. And so I came home, noted that I heard she wanted to make this trip, and said I thought it was a terrible idea. And that she could have the car. Not knowing about the argument, she accepted the offer cheerfully. I did manage to suggest a rendezvous north of Baltimore that I was told worked out well. And she returned only a few hours after I hoped she would, just before I went to bed, where I would have a dream about my redoubtable brother-in-law helping me retrieve my car, which was submerged in water.

Anyway, I had made a promise to myself that if the whole thing turned out fine, I would record this account for you to give you this quotidian slice of how marriage, parenthood, and the everyday demons that haunt us animate our days. Someday soon you’ll be keeping your parents up at night. God willing, you’ll be so afflicted as well.