Papa, PhD: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy

Sheathing the Sword

That “Jabaly temper.” When I was a boy, reference to that overseas distant mountain anger was a source of cold whispers. If someone like my father or his sister Adele blew their stack, or stomped out of the room, we would all think, “Oh boy, that Jabaly temper.” My grandmother Nazera, father’s mother, was the Jabaly, from the Arabic word for mountain, jebal—she was a mountain woman with all the toughness that phrase implies, from the town of Zahle, on the edge of the Mount Lebanon massif. And although Nazera married one of the mildest men I have ever known—Aref Senior, the handsome, powder-white-faced Syrian who rarely uttered a word—the “Jabaly temper” filtered itself into two of the six Orfalea children, including my father, Aref Junior, who otherwise was a man of generosity, warmth, and love. I had then and have now nothing but love remembering my father, but on more than one occasion, he scared me. The worst was sparked by an argument over the Vietnam War—which my father ultimately opposed— that escalated sophomorically when I mocked my mother’s attitude toward marijuana. My father jumped up at the dinner table. He never let anyone speak callously against Mother—at least anyone other than himself—and the chase was on. I actually lifted a chair to hold him o¤ like a lion tamer. At one point he had me pinned against the breakfast room’s green-washed cabinets, his fist raised. But he delivered no punch, and we both went o¤ into our shock, me fleeing the house insisting he was crazy, taking refuge at Aunt Jeannette’s home three miles away in the Valley. She helped me settle down, fed me a Coke. After a while, she gently convinced me to return home; I snuck in the back door, went to my room, closed the door, and crawled into the covers, ready to sleep at 8:00 p.m. Soon there was a quiet knock at the door. He came in and sat down in the coming darkness at the end of the bed, near my foot. For a while, nothing Sheathing the Sword g r eg o r y o r falea 66 01 Part 1_Manu 7/1/2010 5:29 PM Page 66 was said. Then he spoke in a raw voice. “Gregory, if I ever do anything like that again, you take your sister and brother and Mom and leave me, because I don’t deserve you.” I was amazed; I threw my covers o¤ and hugged him. My mother, Rose—a woman with deep emotions but nevertheless great inner balance—seemed to promise the family she had married into a snu¤ing of the “Jabaly temper” in my generation. It’s probably unfair to place the largest inheritance of familial temper on my poor sister, who su¤ered over a decade from schizophrenia, but with her violent end and my father’s, I imagined the “Jabaly temper” had bloomed into its worst flower in America. I secretly prayed: Maybe now it is over; that temper born in the mountain in Lebanon 120 years ago has finally petered out. But then I slapped my eldest son. Three times. For saying “fuck” right to my face when he was ten years old. A word I didn’t even know at his age. The third time he didn’t say it; my slap was too swift. That “Jabaly temper.” Feeling it surge up in myself, I felt ashamed, even horrified. I stopped, apologized, but wondered what would become of it. My wife thought it too late: The dark genie was out of the bottle in yet another generation. By most yardsticks, our first son was a hard boy to raise. Archly his own person, Matthew could not be told anything about anything. He once slept out in the neighborhood park in protest over—what? It was never certain. Matthew became our family’s rebel-without-a-cause. I remember throwing a chair in frustration over his refusal to do something, and his later throwing a small can of paint, which nicked his chest of drawers. By sophomore year of high school, he just stopped studying, and then chose to go o¤ to a boarding school, a temporary solution to our habit of locking horns. Like me, he had had childhood asthma; he was also somewhat injury-prone. His left leg had a perilously short iliotibial band; it had to...