Steve Lewis has lived on or around Springtown Road in New Paltz, NY,
since 1973. He and his wife Patti are married 41 years and have seven children
and fifteen grandchildren (who call him Chief). He is a Mentor at Empire
State College, a member of the Writing Institute faculty at Sarah Lawrence
College, El Jefe of the Millrock Writers Salon and a longtime freelance writer
whose publication credits include The New York Times, The
New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, LA
Times, West (LA Times Sunday Magazine),
AARP, Ladies Home Journal,
Beliefnet.com, Confrontation, Commonweal
and a long, long, long (biblically long) list of parenting magazines. His
more recent books are Zen and the Art of Fatherhood, The
ABCs of Real Family Values, The Complete Guide for the Anxious
Groom: How to Avoid Everything That Could Go Wrong on Her Big Day
and Fear and Loathing of Boca Raton: A Hippies Guide to the Second
Sixties.
***** A Month on a Barrier Island, a new collection of my poems,
with photographs by Tom Nolan, has just been published by Millrock
Writers *****
|
Parenting is a dreamy road trip full of contradiction and paradox, meandering
summer lanes behind the leather wrapped steering wheel of a green Alfa-Romeo
that become--in a wet sneeze--windy mountain passes slick with ice in a beige
Astrovan full of screaming kids; then hellish burdens suddenly transformed
into cherubic glider wings. Every time you think you know where you are,
you're not there anymore.
For me, becoming a father--
 and
being a daddy and grandfather--has sometimes felt like getting lost in the
New York borough of Queens. You know you're in New York City, but frankly
it doesn't look like it's supposed to look--and at least half the people
on the street don't speak the same language or dialect as you--and admitting
that you're lost to the scowling presence on your right is more than your
pride can bear--and, anyway, you're not really lost, you know you're in Queens,
so you just keep driving. And along the way you learn a few things. As Tobias
Wolff's clueless stepfather says in This Boy's Life, "I know a thing or two
about a thing or two ...."
Over the past 41 years family matters have grown exponentially more
complicated and busier with the birth of each of our seven children (and
now fifteen grandchildren--with no doubt more on the way). Yet in the end--as
in the end of another noisy and tumultuous day in which I again try to ponder
the imponderables of this life--I find that my inner world has paradoxically
become simpler and quieter, quiet enough to share experiences reflections
with other parents and grandparents who are as lost and found in this whole
process as I am.
|
Updated from the introduction to "Zen and the Art of Fatherhood" |
Photo Gallery of Family and Friends |
