June 2009

The Ties That Bind

BY THE REV. SCOTT GERARD PRINSTER, MADISON, WISCONSIN

Tying my necktie almost always leads to thoughts of my father. Now that I wear a tie a few times a week for work, he’s on my mind regularly. Neckties have become a reminder of how persistent the connection is between the two of us, and of the forces that guide boys to become men.

It was not my father who taught me how to tie a necktie, but the resident assistant across the hall from me in our dormitory at Purdue University. I was working in the dorm dining room and had become a manager-in-training, which meant that I would be wearing a necktie under the maroon manager’s jacket when I supervised the student crew. On the few occasions when I wore a tie in high school, my father had tied it for me, and once at a speech contest I even had to ask a female classmate to help me. Somehow, I arrived at college without knowing how to tie one myself.

The training for dining-room managers, which bore some resemblance to fraternity hazing, began with the realization that I couldn’t figure out this basic test of manhood on my own. As with so many other pieces of manly knowledge, I was convinced that other sopho¬mores had already completed this rite of passage and were flaunting their own neckties just to remind me how far behind I was. Our RA, however, was a genuinely nice guy and didn’t seem at all surprised that I hadn’t yet mastered the skill. When I knocked on Joe’s door with tie draped across my shoulders, he and a friend broke off their conversation to walk me through the process. “The secret,” he said, “is to start by tying a triangle; the smaller and tighter it is, the neater the knot will be.” I practiced the triangle and the final knot with him a few times, and then a few more times in the privacy of my own room. In the twenty years since that lesson, tying a necktie has been a regular activity that now requires no real effort.

It’s probably already clear that a necktie was more to me than a simple piece of clothing. In my sophomore year I also came out as a gay man, and the fall semester was a completely hellish prologue to the act of coming out itself. I alternated between immersing myself in my studies and withdrawing into self-loathing. My life careened through those months before lurching off its neatly planned path entirely. I couldn’t bring myself to speak to my parents about this truth that I could no longer ignore, suppress, or destroy. They only knew that I was exhausted and unhappy on the occasions I visited home. Learning how to tie a necktie from my RA was just further evidence that I shouldn’t turn to my father for help. Being in college meant that I was on my own, and that I should have known by then what it means to be a man. My father was a redneck, Republican, deer-hunting, beer-drinking, country-music-listening bear of a man, and my being gay was just one more thing that separated us. Other men in my life, like Joe across the hall and friends in the gay community, would have to serve as guides and teachers in his place.

My studies sometimes distracted me from the process of coming out, and from the unhappiness that I couldn’t force myself to be someone other than who I was. As a physics major, I studied the basic principles that drive the world—mass, distance, force, velocity. I learned that electricity and magnetism are just two expressions of one phenomenon, the same one that also produces light. I learned that gravity is a force that attracts all bodies toward one another and grows weaker with increasing distance, but is never reduced to nothing. As my brain tried to make sense of the physical world, my heart likewise struggled with the lessons of the inner life.

In The Myth of Maturity, Terri Apter explores the isolation and frustration that many young adults face, especially as they navigate the threshold of college life. Partly because the rites of passage into adulthood are becoming less clear-cut, Apter believes, young adults are increasingly puzzled and overwhelmed at what they think is expected of them. While fifty years ago adulthood generally meant completing relatively straightforward rites of passage—graduation, employment, marriage, children—today these tasks may be stretched out over as many as twenty years.

Convinced that adulthood means knowing the rules, and painfully aware of their perceived shortcomings, young adults suffer silently or in outbursts of frustration and anger. Their clueless and unhelpful parents remember their own young adulthood and its relatively unambiguous thresholds, all crossed before age twenty-five, and assume that it is best for their young adult sons and daughters to work it out themselves. By the time my father was the age I am now, his son was nearly off to college. I can scarcely imagine raising a teenager of my own, and yet my father managed to do it, despite my characterization of him as a redneck, conservative beer-drinker. Having served as the UU minister at the University of Wisconsin campus where young men were navigating that daunting journey into adulthood, I now have much more compassion for my father and the difficulty of his task.

When I went off to college three hundred miles away from home, I assumed that I was leaving behind the pull of small-town life, my blue-collar family, and all of the qualities in my father I had identified as faults. However, for people, the gravity between two distant bodies is not diminished by the miles between them; the force returns as strong as before. Now that I cross into middle adulthood, I am surprised to realize the similarities between my father and me. I’ve inherited his temper—and his back hair, of all things. All the buttons but one on my car radio are set to country music stations, and I play fiddle and go two-stepping every Monday evening. I drink more beer than I probably should, and one day I did a double take in front of the mirror noticing how much I now look like him. I haven’t become a Republican, and in fact am too liberal even for many Democrats, but this is also because of my father’s influence—while he used to have to shoplift so that we would have meat on the table, I have spent my adulthood rarely wanting for anything, and could develop a political identity based on security and comfort. Again and again, I have to acknowledge how deeply I am rooted in my father’s presence and influence.

I’ve also come to see that manhood is a changing state rather than a fixed set of qualities. In older adulthood, the man my father has become is almost nothing like the caricature I once created. Last week he left a phone message telling me that he was drinking green tea from the coffee company I had introduced him to. Green tea? Maturity has made us increasingly alike, and I’m grateful that my father is now both a man I like and one I don’t mind being like.

Religious liberals often rankle at the idea that our destiny is set by a power greater than ourselves, that we might not completely control the direction of our lives. But there is much about us that we cannot reason away or change by force of will. The puzzle of our identities is more complex than we want to admit.

My mind comes full circle to this truth as I tie my necktie for our worship service. If I give too much attention to the task, my fingers hesitate and fumble until I withdraw my focus and let them do it from memory. A tight and tidy triangle, then a finished knot, and I am ready to greet the congregation, among them young men hungering for confidence and clarity as I once did. A tight and tidy triangle, composed of my father and me, in relationship with the other men who stood by me as mentors and companions. An enduring knot that binds us to our origins and to the men who have made us who we are.

This piece originally appeared in Wrestling with Adulthood: Unitarian Universalist Men Talk About Growing Up. Published by Skinner house in 2008, this book is available from the UUA bookstore (or 800-215-9076) or through the CLF Library (or 617-948-6150).

For the month of June, Quest readers receive a 20% discount on this featured book. Visit the UUA bookstore and enter discount code CLF0609 at checkout or call 800-215-9076 and give the code to your customer service representative.