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

Pitcher This: An Academic Dad's Award-Winning Attempt to Be in Two Places at Once

Recently, a few weeks after successfully negotiating the tenure-gauntlet— having managed to maneuver my way through it for six years—I found myself leaning against the island in the middle of our kitchen exhausted. It was late afternoon and I had commuted home from the college where I teach, one that’s fifty miles north of the small town where we live. For several nights, I had stayed up long past when I should and hours after grading and prepping for classes in order to work on what I hoped would be the first of many pieces of creative writing I would produce now that I could, now that I was not feeling the publish-or-perish pressure. To be sure, this earned exhaustion and this kind of writing was my reward to myself for having, finally, been granted tenure and for having made other sacrifices that made this creative work possible and, in my mind, permissible , at least from a professional standpoint. Personally, I wasn’t sure how to feel about this newfound freedom or the urge to redirect my energies toward pursuits I had been putting o¤ since long before having kids, going to graduate school, or getting married. Standing there with both hands on the counter, I looked and felt like I had just finished a marathon—and as anyone who has finished such a race knows, that’s not a look of exhilaration, inspiration, or even relief. It’s simply a look of exhaustion, plain and simple. But then, things began to change, if only slightly. I heard somebody at the back door, and then I heard what sounded like rustling bags and heavy breathing. Two seconds later, my seven-year-old son, Caleb, came bounding up the six steps and scrambling excitedly into the kitchen. Smiling, he slipped out of his backpack in one fluid, practiced motion, dropped the bag to the floor, and pulled out of it a hard yellow folder taped with some odd blue kind of electrical tape. “Here,” he said, Pitcher This An Academic Dad’s Award-Winning Attempt to Be in Two Places at Once co lin ir vin e 207 03 Part 3_Manu 7/1/2010 5:30 PM Page 207 handing it to my wife while still grinning at me. As she does when opening presents, she carefully peeled back the tape. “What is this?” she asked him, smiling. “What did you do?” Her tone gave her away, and I could tell she knew more than she was letting on, which was much more than I knew. She slid from out of the folder a certificate, four tickets to a Minnesota Twins baseball game, and a packet of some kind. She held up the oªcial-looking, embossed document and, in a formal voice, read, “Congratulations , Caleb Irvine. Second Grade Runner-up. Father-of-the-Year Essay Contest.” Cal turned to me, his expression showing how he thrilled he was to have won this award and how pleased he was to report that it was for an essay about his dad. And as for me, I was beyond proud (I don’t know what I was more excited about—the fact that my buddy had won an essay contest or the fact that it was for a paper about why he was glad to have me as his dad). There was, however, a catch, as there almost always is, it seems. Because Cal’s essay had been selected as one of sixty out of nearly twenty-three thousand entries, I was, in turn, invited to participate in the Father-of-the-Year Contest. This would, I soon discovered when reading through the packet of materials that accompanied Cal’s award, entail answering online questions about fatherhood, and then—should I be deemed fatherly enough— participating in an interview. After the interview stage, a select group of five finalists would be invited first to the state capitol for an afternoon with the governor and then to the Metrodome a week later for an evening at the Minnesota Twins baseball game, where the five fathers and their kids would be part of a Father’s Day ceremony and where the winner would get to throw out the first pitch. Burdened by the piles of ungraded essay exams and boxes of freshman comp portfolios that had accumulated during the final few weeks of the tenure-review process, I did not have time to participate in this contest, or...